International Food - Mexican

The Cooking of Mexico

In the nearly 500 years since the Spanish conquest of Mexico and South America, a series of richly diverse cuisines has developed in the region. In Mexico, where there was high Indian Civilization, modern cooking is still firmly based on its Aztec- Mayan foundations, while revealing clearly the impact of Spain, which introduced its own foods and cooking methods. To a lesser extent, Mexico was influenced by the sophisticated dishes that were brought in from France and Austria during its brief experience as a French puppet state ruled by the ill-starred Maximilian and Carlotta. The dishes of Peru, heart of great Inca Empire, which took in most of what is now is Ecuador, as well as the better part of Chile and Bolivia and a small part of Argentina, still bear the unmistakable stamp of their ancient past overlaid by Spanish imports. Brazil is kaleidoscopic. There was no great society here, so the indigenous people contributed little more than raw materials. Today, the cooking of Brazil is a mixture of Portuguese, African slave and primitive Indian influences, and it is both unique and good. The cuisines of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, with no great indigenous traditions of their own, have evolved as the many Europeans strains in the population- Spanish, English, German, Italians and others- reacted to the native ingredients. Many a fine dish started as an improvisation using a local food instead of an unobtainable European one. Many a home dishes suffered a sea change in the long migration. English bread sauce, surely one of the most innocent inventions of the kitchen, becomes quiet complicated in Chile when as salsa de pan it takes the place of béchamel as the basis of what would have been the cream dishes. Adaptations and inventions, the clash as well wedding of cultures, have produced a repertoire as varied as the geography of the mountain-dominated continent.

The rapidity with which New World accepted Old World foods was rivaled by the speed of the reverse process. The Spaniards, obsessed by gold, did not at first realize that the real treasure of the Americas was - sweet corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chilies, chocolate, tobacco, avocados, peanuts, cassava ( tapioca, manioc or yuca), beans, vanilla, sweet potatoes, pineapples and papayas. But these foods quickly spread to other parts of the world, and today it is impossible to imagine life without most of them. Modern transport and food-handling means, moreover, that a great many of the foods necessary for cooking the Latin American way are readily available in the cities throughout the Europe.

Latin American cooking is not just another kind of European cooking. To be sure, there are Spanish and Portuguese influences in it, and the big hotels that cater for foreigners serve standard international food just as they do in New York or London, but under this superficial layer is food that differs sharply from anything found in Europe or the United States. It is partly African, brought by slaves from West Africa. It is partly tropical, using hot-country produce not available in Europe. Most of all it is Indian, inherited from the civilized Indians of the New World- the Aztecs, the Incas and others – who were conquered by the Spaniards but whose descendents still cling tenaciously too many parts of their ancient culture, and particularly to their indigenous foods.

The Indian influence is naturally strongest in countries where most of the population has Indian blood. For this reason Mexican cooking is more Indian than Spanish, and in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, which were parts of highly civilized Inca Empire, a large percentage of people still eat Inca food almost unmodified. But the Indian influence shows up strongly all over South and Central America. Even in Buenos Aires, whose population is entirely European, characteristically Indian dishes have a traditional place in the cuisine.









When the Spaniards and the Portuguese began exploring this part of the New World at the end of the 15th century, they found large areas thinly inhabited by savage Indians who lived chiefly by hunting and fishing and by gathering wild vegetable foods. Most of Brazil, the Argentine and Uruguay was in the primitive “food-gathering” state, but along other coasts and Caribbean islands the Indians were more numerous and supported themselves by accrued sort of agriculture. The Spaniards particularly noticed a tall and beautiful plant that the people of Cuba grew in small fields and called by a name that sounded like “my-ees”. It grew 10 or more feet high and bore great cylindrical ears with closely set, shiny yellow kernels. This wonderful plant was maize, or the Indian corn, the staff of the life of New World. It not only took the place of the Old World’s wheat, but also produced greater yields and would flourish in many places where wheat will not survive.

Corn by itself is not a complete and health-giving diet. It has less protein than wheat and lacks certain vitamins and other desirable nutrients, but Indian seems to have had a folk wisdom that anticipated by thousands of years our modern scientific knowledge of dietary needs. As well as corn they grew beans: the ordinary kidney beans that most of the world eats now. Beans are rich in protein, and when they were planted in the same field as corn, the bacteria on their roots collected nitrogen and helped to preserve the fertility of soil, which is quickly depleted by the corn planted alone. The corn-bean combination, supplemented with other vitamin-rich vegetables, was the staple food of the Indian civilization, and millions of people in Latin America still live on it today.
When the Spaniards and the Portuguese settled among the Indians of the Latin America in the 16th century, they brought with them the foods and the cooking of the Mediterranean world: their edible plants, domestic animals- especially pigs- together with onions, garlic cinnamon, rice and many other things. The reception of theirs imports varied a good deal. Some conservative Indian communities accepted only a few, others were more open minded or were compelled as slave laborers to grow European crops for their conquerors and prepare European dishes for them.