Resumo de History Of Mexican Cuisine

As a lifelong devotee of that culinary art form called ?Tex-Mex,? I?ve
often wondered how it can be that the deeper one gets into Mexico, the
more ?un-Mexican? the food tastes. Once, in Mazatlan, we actually
encountered tamales stuffed, not with shredded pork or other civilized
condiment, but with pineapple! Along the banks of the Rio Grande, a
cocinero with such twisted taste would be hissed, booed and given until
sunup to get out of town.

But tastes do differ, and therein lies the true heritage of
Mexican cuisine, and its favored offspring, Tex-Mex, which was born
along the U.S.-Mexican border in the early years of the 20th century.
Today, each menu, from Acapulco and Merida to Brownsville and San
Antonio, carries the ethnicity peculiar to its own neighborhood. In
general, however, any dish drawn from the overall Mexican cookbook can
be said to have been bred and born in Spain. Annie DuBois, the ?Salsa
Queen? of the online site, ?Mexican Food and Gifts to Go,? knows all
about it.

In 1521, the conquistador Hernan Cortez and his merry band of
thieves came to the New World in search of gold and anything else of
value not too massive to stuff into a galleon. Fortunately for the
Spaniards, the Aztec King, Montezuma, had been told by one of his
shamans that one day his kingdom would be overthrown by men with black
beards, riding on giant deer. Cortez and his brigands had the requisite
facial hair and rode horses, animals no Aztec ever had seen before. So,
in a bid to get his potential nemesis to go home, Montezuma threw
Cortez and his men a world-class party, loading them down with gifts of
gold. But the party backfired. Cortez reasoned that if the king had
that much gold to throw around on simple entertainment, he must have a
lot more stashed away at home. The Spaniards, who would have eaten gold
had they been able to digest it, were determined to have it all, which
they did, wiping out the Aztec empire in the process.

But gold was not the only discovery made in the course of that
conquest. The Spaniards also found an unexpected treasure trove of
food. They had brought with them pork, lamb, beef, citrus fruit,
garlic, dairy products, vinegar, wheat and wine ? staples never before
seen in the New World. When they got there, they found a culinary
Golconda never before seen in the Old World. No one back in Iberia ever
had heard of peanuts, vanilla, squash, avocados, beans, coconuts, corn,
tomatoes or ? horror of deprivations ? chocolate. In the course of
years to come, Spain colonized Mexico and, subsequently, parts of South
and Central America, folding old and new comestibles into their own
unique menu in the first blending of what eventually became Mexican
cuisine.

The culinary blending of viands from Spain with those of Mexico
may have been the first, but it was not to be the last. Three centuries
later, in the United States, the cowboy chuck wagon added its own touch
(to this day aficionados nearly come to blows over whether or not beans
belong in a chili pot). Native American tribes along the southwestern
frontier added a touch of their cookery, creating a whole new genre and
even now, new Mexican recipes are being created by immigrant cuisines
from South and Latin America, Africa and even China. DuBois offers a
veritable on-line cookbook with some of the best of them, most of which
probably should carry a surgeon general?s warning that this provender,
if regularly ingested, can be highly addictive.

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