Soups and Soup–Stews

In my experience of Mexican cuisine, I’ve never seen any place that rivals the wide-ranging Veracruzan repertory of soups. Pre-Hispanic Mexico had a wealth of soupy dishes that resembled sauces or stews and were eaten as important meals in their own right. Many of these soup-stews were based on fish or seafood. Many involved vegetables and/or corn masa—sometimes as a thickener, sometimes in the form of indented dumplings hardly larger than gnocchi. Some were fiery with chiles or fragrant with herbs. Veracruz never lost this extraordinary heritage. To the Spanish, the idea of soup-stews would not have been entirely strange, and the Spanish influence may have been one reason that they persisted in Veracruz.