How Tortillas are Made.
I was recently looking through some of my old copies when I came across a morsel contributed by Lady Rebekah Phillips Dixon. In describing some Indians of Arizona she spoke of them making tortillas, but could not describe how they were made, as there was an obstruction to her view. I have very often watched the Indians preparing them.
They first get a large bread-pan (and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is scrupulously clean or not), and dump in a quantity of flour without measuring it, and which, by-the-way, has generally been done up in the corner of an old shawl, and hidden in the brushy part of the wick-i-up, or stowed under the bed. From the corner of the shawl she has on, or perhaps the hem of her skirt, the squaw extracts a can from which she takes, also without measurement, a bit of yeast. From still another portion of the shawl she gets a little salt and mixes the whole together with water.
The dough thus made is divided into balls, a trifle smaller than a biscuit, and laid out in a row until she resurrects from a neighboring cactus, or from under a saddle, or, still more likely, out of the bed, a very greasy frying-pan which, often without washing, is transferred to the fire to heat. The squaw seats herself in front of it, and taking one of the small lumps of dough she very swiftly tosses it from one palm to the other until it is very thin, when it is transferred to the frying-pan, where it remains until slightly browned, when it is tossed up very dexterously about two feet and comes down again in the pan—turned. When it is done it is laid on the coals, where it completes its baking. The tortillas are about a quarter of an inch thick, and to my taste about as near to sole-leather as anything not leather can be.
Florence E. Cowan.
Kingman, Arizona.