Cuisine

Mexican

Cocina mexicana

Nixtamal is the technique that turns hard maize into masa you can press, toast on a comal, and treat as daily bread. Chilli is not one heat level; it is a set of dried and fresh pods with different fruit, smoke and bitterness. Salsas are ground, not merely chopped. Tacos al pastor are a Mexico City invention: pork on a trompo, pineapple, onion, coriander, a thin salsa. Carnitas are pork cooked in its own fat until it shreds and crisps. Pozole is a hominy stew, not a soup you thicken with cream.

Mesoamerican cooking — maize, beans, chilli, squash, tomato, cacao — predates the colony and still organises the table. Iberian livestock, frying fats and wheat arrived after contact and were absorbed into existing techniques. Al pastor is twentieth-century urban food with a Lebanese shawarma ancestor and a thoroughly Mexican marinade. Mole poblano is a Puebla sauce of chilli, spice and a little chocolate, cooked long enough to lose its raw edges. Yucatecan cooking, with achiote and sour orange, is a related regional kitchen, not a flavour variant of central Mexico. Street craft is the equal of restaurant craft here.

The comal toasts tortillas, blisters chilli and chars onion. A good tortilla should smell of nixtamal, not of a cardboard package. Birria tacos are a Jalisco braise that restaurants turned into a dunking spectacle; the broth still matters more than the cheese pull. Agua de jamaica is hibiscus steeped, sweetened and cooled. Naming Puebla, Jalisco or Yucatán is more accurate than calling every plate 'authentic Mexican'.