What You Must Know to Cook With Us

To understand Mexican culture you must see at first hand how the Catholic faith melded with a system of pagan beliefs to make a uniquely, truly Mexican religion. The same melding holds true for our distinctive cuisine. It is mestizo—“hybridized,” “of mixed blood,” a concept central to our identity—and it took time to develop.

Picture for yourself a moment just before the tragic subjugation of Mexico by Spain began in earnest with the conquest of Tenochtitlán, modern Mexico City, in 1519-20. Before the outbreak of overt war, while the Spanish were in Tenochtitlán supposedly to conduct peaceful negotiations, they beheld the emperor at table. Cortez and his followers were astonished, as they were no doubt meant to be. What they saw was immortalized in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain.