Horchata de Chufa

Tiger nuts, small tubers rather than a true nut, arrived on the Iberian peninsula during Muslim rule beginning in the eighth century and found particularly favourable growing conditions in the soil around Valencia ¹. Written references to "llet de xufes," tiger nut milk, appear locally by the thirteenth century, making it one of the clearer lines back from a modern Spanish drink name to a documented medieval one ². Valencia has never stopped growing the crop the drink depends on: chufa now carries its own protected designation of origin, and the region's orchards still supply the tubers that go into both the drink sold from horchaterías and the version made at home ¹.

Local tradition also credits the drink's name to an encounter between King James I of Aragon and a young Valencian woman who served it to him, with the king supposedly exclaiming that what he was drinking was not milk but gold. It is told as a piece of civic folklore rather than a documented event, and no source treats it as history rather than legend ¹.

This is the drink the far more widely known Mexican horchata is named after and adapted from, not the other way around: when the drink crossed the Atlantic with Spanish colonists, tiger nuts did not grow readily across most of Mexico, so cooks substituted rice for a similar pale, milky result ². The two now share only a name and a general idea of what the drink should look like; a Valencian ordering horchata and a Mexican ordering horchata are asking for two different plants.