Tamales con Rajas

Mexican Steamed Cornmeal with Chili Strips

Preparation info
  • Serves

    12

    as an informal hors d’oeuvre or snack
    • Difficulty

      Medium

Appears in
The Cook’s Canon: 101 Recipes Everyone Should Know

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2003

  • About

Consider the strangeness of the Mexican diet before the Cortés landfall in 1519. Meals were almost exclusively vegetarian. There were none of the domestic animals usual in Old World agriculture: no cattle, no horses, no sheep, no goats. As a consequence, Mexicans cooked without animal fat or dairy products. The cheese so omnipresent in Mexican food of today was unknown. No wonder the Aztecs ate worms and grasshoppers and pond slime. The wonder is that they evolved the dishes that became the