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Traditional
Mexican
Cuisine
n marco buenrostro
Farming has been a way of life in what is now Mexico for at
least ten thousand years. Unlike other cultures that developed
single-crop agriculture, here techniques that were based on
multiple crops were devised and disseminated. This is the case
of the milpa, from the Nahuatl mili, culture, and pan, place. This
cultural project of domestication, adaptation, dissemination,
and traditional improvement started in antiquity and
continues to our times.
Rosalba Morales,
traditional cook from
Michoacán.
Groups of hunter-gatherers developed the first techniques that went into
cooking: selection of ingredients, dehydration, roasting, grinding, and
others. Successive advances enabled the invention of local techniques such
as steaming, the use of earth ovens, the drying and smoking of chiles, and
drying and salting of meat and fish. Around 1536 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca observed how the cultures in the north had steamers to cook food in
gourds. The so-called mezcal cultures developed techniques to obtain food
from the sotol plant (Dasilirión Berlandieri), in ways similar to what we now
use for barbecue: steaming food in a ground oven. Other techniques were
grilling and frying.
Francisco Hernández, who was in Mexico between 1574 and 1577, wrote
that maguey (agave) was a source of pulque, sugar, and vinegar. In Alonso
de Molina’s Vocabulario, written in 1571, three names are given for the
molinillo, the implement used to whip the chocolate drink into a frothy
beverage. Recent archaeological studies have determined that the Capacha
culure, from the southern part of today’s state of Jalisco, used special
containers for distillation.
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