Appears in
Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets

By Darra Goldstein

Published 2015

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Mexico to this day show traces of three distinct traditions in its sweets. Pre-Hispanic sweets included fruits, saps, and honey, although chocolate, now so much part of the Western sweet kitchen, was then prepared as a cold, bitter, spiced drink. In the colonial period, the largely Islamic-derived sweet kitchen of late medieval Spain was further developed and adapted to the products of the New World. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants introduced other sweet traditions and new technologies that allowed for the flourishing of new kinds of sweets.