How are you feeling today?
Feeling a little hungry, perhaps?
Have you had anything to eat today?
If you haven't gone to eat by now, then perhaps you have some time to read about the foods and dishes that originate from what the rest of the world calls Mexico.
If you live in Los Angeles especially, you’re probably used to seeing all kinds of Mexican foods. Tacos, burritos, chicken or chile or mole or sweet flavored tamales, nachos, guacamole, all kinds of salsa, carne asada; the list goes on. But if you’re really Mexican, you’re already telling yourself, “There’s a lot more Mexican food than that!”
And if you’re really really Mexican, you’re probably smiling to yourself, knowing full well the list is much longer, and that the original list I presented was mostly Tex-Mex style foods and not honest Mexican food.
And if you’re really really REALLY Mexican, then there are some foods that only you and a handful of people know about, and you’d probably like to keep it that way around some of your not-as-exotic friends, wouldn’t you? But that's alright because it'll all be discussed here, starting with a brief history of Mexico's gastronomic culture.
Mexican Food: A Brief History
The truth is that Mexico’s culinary diversity is a subject of great gastronomic and historic study. This is because Mexico has had close to 4,000 years of developed civilizations and many more generations of artistic creativity and experimentation with foods, with the majority of Mexican cuisine already having been solidified before the Spanish and consequential Old World influence that arrived in the late 15th century. In fact, a lot can be known about a Mexican dish by its ingredients, particularly its history, exactly because of this Old World influence. Before the Columbian exchange, for example, pigs, cattle, and chicken was not present anywhere in the Americas (with an exception of a mystery chicken in South America that was dated from the thirteenth century). So if any Mexican dish features beef, steak, any kind of pork, or chicken, it most likely wasn’t the traditional choice of meat, but something that was substituted after the Spanish arrival.
However, because of the Spanish arrival and later Old World influence, Mexican cuisine has developed to host hundreds of different varieties of foods, all unique in their own flavor and style.
So if you thought the typical tamale, taco, nacho, burrito, and carne asada with beans and rice plate with typical foods, be prepared to have your mind blown.
Mexican Food, A Precedent: Nixtamalization,The Comal, The Molcajete, and The Hands
Burned fingers and sore muscles, the preparation of a lot of ingredients in Mexican food is a sheer physical effort. It's taken a while to really arrive to the process of nixtamalization that we see today. The process involves using several kinds of different chemicals to better prepare the usage of maize for foods, of which many different peoples all over ancient America used their own methods based on the chemicals that they would use. But the physical nature of the preparation of corn is one that involves lots of grinding of corn and lots of preparation over a Mexican stove, or comal/comalli. Sometimes, the corn is also grinded in a traditional Mexican cooking tool called the molcajete, where different salsas are also prepared. And speaking of corn foods, we have the tamale.
Tamales
There are a countless different number of tamales -- and prepared differently too.
A tamale is essentially specifically prepared corn stuffed with different foods inside. Because of this, you can honestly make a tamale out of anything. The most common kinds of tamales are de rajas, de dulce, de pollo, Puerco, or res, and de mole. But the kinds only go on from there. There are many different kinds of mole, chiles to get rajas from, different kinds of sweet tamales to choose, and many, many more animals to choose from than just chicken. Some of the lesser known animals to make tamales out of are octopus, squid, iguana, and even armadillos.
And if you're anything like me, who love armadillos as much as a dog or cat, you'll be especially thrown away by how strange the choice of some Mexican meats can be (although, if you're going to eat an animal in general, why be upset about the choice of animal?) Not to mention the choices of meat for some of Mexico's dishes have been much more unsettling...
The variety of tacos is incredible.
Usually just beef, chicken, or different kinds of pork; tacos at taco trucks take advantage of many different kinds of animal parts, anything from the cheek and tounge to the head, organs, and eyes. However, as mentioned before, these animals didn’t exist in pre-Columbian times. Traditional tacos consist of a many surprising types of foods, from turkey meat to butterflies and ash. But of course, anyone who knows their ancient Mexican history knows of a particular meat that would leave most people in disgust. I'll leave that mystery meat up to your imagination, until further discussion in the next article...
But don't be so distraught -- you won't have to look very hard to realize that some of the best Mexican dishes are completely vegan, and still manage to maintain the flavor of a culture that's seen millennia of some of the finest food around.
