Corn cooked with ash
Maize was first grown in southern Mexico around 9,000 years ago, bred from a wild grass called teosinte whose ears were barely longer than a thumb. Mexican cooks learned to soak and cook dried maize in water mixed with ash or lime, a process called nixtamalisation. It loosens the tough skins, makes a dough that holds together, and releases a vitamin the body cannot otherwise get from maize. When maize spread to Europe without the method, people who ate little else fell ill with a disease called pellagra.
That dough, masa, makes the TORTILLA, flat and cooked on a griddle, and the TAMALE, steamed in a corn husk, which was eaten by the Maya and the Aztecs long before the Spanish arrived. Our Aztecs page covers the empire.
Words from the Aztec language
Several foods reached the world with their Nahuatl names, the language of the Aztecs. AVOCADO comes from ahuacatl, and GUACAMOLE from the word for avocado sauce. MOLE comes from molli, meaning sauce. The most famous, mole poblano from Puebla, can contain more than twenty ingredients, including several kinds of dried chilli, spices, nuts and a little chocolate, and it is often served on turkey at weddings and festivals.
SALSA just means sauce in Spanish. The JALAPENO is named after the city of Xalapa, and a chipotle is a jalapeño dried and smoked. CILANTRO, the leaves of the coriander plant, tastes like soap to some people, because of a gene that affects how they smell part of its flavour.
A man called Nacho and dishes from the border
NACHOS were invented in 1943 in Piedras Negras, a Mexican town just across the river from Texas, when a group of American women from a nearby army base arrived at a restaurant after the kitchen had closed. The head waiter, Ignacio Anaya, known as Nacho, cut up tortillas, fried them, topped them with melted cheese and sliced jalapeños, and named the dish after himself. Piedras Negras now holds a nacho festival every October.
The FAJITA began with ranch workers in Texas cooking cheap skirt steak over fires, and spread through restaurants in the 1970s and 1980s. BURRITO means little donkey, and the dish comes from northern Mexico. REFRIED beans are not fried twice: in Spanish, refritos means well fried. Tacos al pastor, pork cooked on an upright spit with pineapple, were inspired by Lebanese immigrants who brought their spit-roasted shawarma to Mexico in the 1900s.
The rest of the table
In 2010 traditional Mexican cooking became one of the first cuisines to be recognised on the United Nations list of the world's cultural heritage, alongside French food. Its dishes range from the simple TACO to the ENCHILADA, a tortilla rolled round a filling and covered in chilli sauce, and the crisp TOSTADA. A QUESADILLA folds a tortilla around QUESO, the Spanish word for cheese, and CARNITAS, meaning little meats, is pork cooked slowly in its own fat. CHURROS, CHORIZO and the EMPANADA came with the Spanish and changed in Mexican hands, and BEANS have been grown in Mexico for thousands of years.