INTRODUCTION
The object of this book is to share my love for Mexican cooking through a series of recipes adapted so that they can be easily reproduced at home. Embedded in this objective is also the desire to dismantle some of the stereotypes around Mexican food that still pervade today. For example, not all Mexican food is spicy, nor is everything wrapped in a tortilla, and not every mole uses chocolate as an ingredient. Mexico is a country with a complex history and a sophisticated culture, and its cuisine reflects this. Although, on second thoughts, maybe there is some truth in the spicy stereotype...
In 2010, UNESCO declared traditional Mexican cooking an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the first time a cooking tradition has been included on this list. A true crucible, influences from all over the world can be traced through Mexican food: Spanish, North African, Middle Eastern, French, Italian, American, even English. We have our own 'Cornish pasties', called pastes, prepared in the Mexican state of Hidalgo since the early 19th century. At the same time, native Mexican ingredients have influenced many world cuisines (what would the Italian gastronomy be without tomatoes?).
Underneath this lies a truly ancient way of preparing food unique to Mexico, which also involves the growing and gathering of food. Researching, preserving and continuing this ancient way, still alive in parts of Mexico, is one of my main interests; one that has connected me with my own country, my city, its traditions, and my own family.
I was born in Tlatelolco, a historic neighbourhood in the centre of Mexico City. I do not come from privilege; my parents and grandparents were working class people. My maternal grandfather had a large farm in the state of Tlaxcala, near Mexico City, which we used to visit often. His wife, my grandmother, lived in a different place, Azcapotzalco, now part of the city but then a town of its own. In her garage she ran a little restaurant where her huaraches became famous in the neighbourhood. Through this enterprise she was able not only to bring up her seven children and two more she adopted, but she also bought a piece of land and built her own house. Each member of my family (and millions of other hardworking Mexicans) shares a similar story of resilience.
I consider cooking as an art form. Fleeting and ephemeral, like the performance of a play in a theatre; once it is done, it is gone, but the memory can linger. As a child, I was interested in the visual arts, but for reasons too long to explain here, I ended up studying to be a chef (and I am very happy I did). Perhaps this wish to become an artist is what drove me to seek out work with the best chefs that I could find, once I had finished my degree and was a young trainee chef in Mexico City.
From before the Spaniards arrived, Mexico City (my city) was at the centre of a very wide area with many different ecosystems and regions connected. In Tlatelolco, a market city part of the alliance of urban centres around the five lakes in the Valley of Mexico, you could buy fresh fish from the sea and produce from the Yucatán peninsula, many hundred miles away. Like then, Mexico City today is a vibrant and dynamic city where you can taste food from all over the country and even the world, either at small street stalls or in high-end restaurants. The food of Mexico City influences my cooking at my own restaurant in London today.
CAVITA, LONDON
I have been very fortunate to learn from some of the best chefs in the world. In Mexico City I worked with the brilliant Eduardo García from Máximo Bistrot, and then internationally renowned Enrique Olvera from Pujol restaurant, now the ninth best restaurant in the world. In 2011, I worked under the legendary Ferran Adrià as Chef de Partie at El Bulli in Spain. I have also cooked with traditional cooks in small villages across Mexico, and with a very talented chef from Norway in New York City.
After many twists and turns, I was given the chance to open my own restaurant in London. Cavita is where I share my passion for Mexican food with diners. What I do in my restaurant is inevitably the result of all these experiences, but this book is about the basics of Mexican food culture, its vibrant flavours, colours and textures. The recipes here show what Mexicans eat daily, in the streets, in their homes, and when they celebrate with family and friends. I feel a responsibility to preserve my own country's food traditions. I am very grateful to have the opportunity to educate others on Mexican food and its history, while contributing to the history with my own creativity, outside of my own country. I am indebted to all the people who have kept the techniques, ingredients, recipes, utensils and traditions that make up Mexican cuisine; thanks to them, we can all enjoy this multicultural, rich country and its delicious flavours.
THE ORIGINS OF MEXICAN COOKING
Thousands of years ago, somewhere in the hills and plains of Mesoamerica in the centre of Mexico, someone (most probably a woman) had the brilliant idea of using the upright corn/maize plant as a pole to support the climbing bean plant. The corn plant grew stronger and bigger because the bean plant fixes nitrogen in the soil, so she kept sowing them together year after year (first the corn, then a few weeks later, the beans). Then the same ingenious woman, or perhaps her daughters, started to sow plants that creep across the ground, like courgettes/ zucchini, between the corn/bean combo, preserving the humidity of the soil and inhibiting weeds, once again benefiting the other two crops.
In North America, some tribes used to call this system of growing three crops together, the Three Sisters, who grow strong when they are together. In Mexico, where the system was first developed, it is called the milpa system. Milpa is a Nahuatl word that simply means 'kitchen garden' or 'vegetable patch'. (Nahuatl is one of the main native languages of Central Mexico, and the one the Aztecs spoke; today there are about 1½ million speakers of Nahuatl.) This productive way of cultivating small patches of land spread to northeast North America all the way down to Central America, and today is still used in rural areas from Central Mexico down to Guatemala and Honduras.
Those three crops are also grown alongside with a wide variety of herbs and vegetables, some for medicine, others for food, like potatoes, chilli/ chile peppers, tomatoes and amaranth. Professor H. Garrison Wilkes, a food historian and researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, considers the milpa as 'one of the most successful human inventions ever created'.
In Mexico there was a second very successful invention: the nixtamalization of corn (see page 26). Again, nixtamal is a composite Nahuatl word. 'Nix' means 'ashes', and 'tamalli' refers to cooked corn dough. The earliest evidence we have of this process dates from 1200-1500 BC. Archaeologists tell us that people used to heat water for cooking by placing hot stones inside the pots, which can explain the presence of lime in the pots used to cook corn.
I like the idea that, perhaps, it was all a kitchen accident: some ashes (containing lime) ended up in the pot where the dry corn kernels were cooking, and then the woman realized that the ash had made the corn softer, easier to crush, and that the dough resulting from it could be moulded into flat circles without crumbling. The dough was malleable yet strong, a bit like clay. When cooked, she found these first tortillas were not only delicious, but also pliable and strong enough to hold other foods.
What she probably didn't know at that moment is that the lime had also enhanced the nutritional value of the corn, releasing substances like amino acids and proteins, making them available to humans. It is not too much to say that this other 'successful human invention' helped the peoples of Mesoamerica to create the great urban civilizations that came later.
Corn was first domesticated in Mexico, but as you probably know already, the list of crops that our ancestors developed across this continent is quite long: tomatoes, cacao, vanilla, some types of beans, squash, sunflowers, papayas, peppers, avocado, pineapple, peanuts, and from South America we have potatoes (a great contribution from the Incas to the world) and quinoa.
TRADITIONAL COOKING METHODS & TOOLS
NIXTAMAL
Corn/maize is the foundation of all Mexican cooking. It is like bread for Europeans: the one thing you eat every day with almost every meal (unless you are on a low-carb diet). As with bread, nixtamalized corn dough can be transformed into many different shapes, and it can be savoury or sweet.
The most delicious homemade tortillas are the ones made following the same principles used for millennia in Mexico. As the saying goes, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. People still make tortillas in this way in small villages, and now this method of making tortillas is coming back to urban centres.
It all starts the day before, boiling the dry corn kernels with a pinch or two of lime, and then leaving them to soak. Variations on the boiling and soaking times give different results, so for example, in Oaxaca, to make those large tortillas called tlayudas (see page 97), women shorten the boiling and soaking times, so the kernels are more al dente, and this results in a dough that can be made into thinner and larger tortillas.
After the boiling and soaking, the kernels need to...
