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Mexico and Latin America
Appears in
By Mark Bittman
Published 2005
In their authentic forms, perhaps the world’s last great unexploited group of cuisines, ironic because they are geographically the closest to us. But—and I’m not talking only about Mexico here—these are among the world’s original “fusion” cuisines, existing indigenous American cuisines that were affected greatly by trade with the Europeans, the importation of slaves from Africa, the immigration of the Chinese, and so on.
Though Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and Chile all have interesting culinary features, and the cuisines of the Caribbean offer some great recipes, it is Mexican food that is the most interesting and complicated in this hemisphere. (“American” cuisine is the most difficult to define; if you allow that it contains most of the world’s food, it’s sensational; if you limit it to traditional WASP cooking, it’s about the least interesting on the planet.)