Aztec Food

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

Aztec food unlike maya food and inca food, is a subject for which relatively rich written source material exists. Admittedly, all of it has to be read with an eye open for prejudices of one kind or another on the part of the authors, faults of memory, flights of imagination, and vagueness or error in nomenclature. However, the chronicle of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortés (the Spanish invader) but wrote his account much later in Guatemala, and the illustrated work in Spanish and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) of Father Sahagún, written in the 1530s, are full of fascinating detail for food historians.