🇬🇹 The cattle breeds of Guatemala

Cattle keep a small place in Guatemala's food, a cuisine rooted in Maya cooking with corn, chillies and beans at its heart. Spanish colonists brought the first cattle and dairy in colonial times. Beef turns up in festive tamales, while milk sweetens rice pudding and a salty Zacapa cheese tops snacks.

• Columbus brought cattle to the Americas on his second voyage, along with horses, pigs and sheep.
• Dairy was one of the Old World foods the Spanish carried across.
• Tamales colorados can be filled with chicken, beef or pork.
• A hard, salty white cheese from the Zacapa region tops chuchitos.
• Maya farmers grew maize, beans, squash and chillies from about 2000 BC.

Cattle in Guatemala

Guatemala's cooking grows from Maya roots, built on corn, chillies and beans, and cattle were unknown there before the Spanish came. Columbus carried cattle across on his second voyage, together with horses, pigs, chickens and sheep, and the colonists also brought dairy, along with frying and oven baking. From the meeting of Maya ingredients and Old World ways came the country's traditional stews, called recados. Before that, the Maya table had relied on game such as deer, turkey, rabbit and duck. In everyday dishes the cow appears at the edges: as beef tucked into tamales, as broth stirred into dough, and as milk and cheese in sweets and snacks. Cattle thus play a small part in the national food, well behind the maize fields, pigs and chickens.

Milk, butter and beef

Milk came with the Spanish, and it lives on in sweets: arroz con leche, a rice pudding, and repollitos filled with dulce de leche. Cheese shows up as a hard, salty white variety from the Zacapa region, sprinkled over chuchitos, the small firm tamales. Beef, where it appears, is one of three meats in tamales colorados, the red tamales packed with tomato recado, capers, olives and roasted pepper. Chuchito dough may also be mixed with meat broth. Most other meat dishes centre on pork or chicken rather than beef.