Mexico : The Cookbook
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December 1st, 2014
Competition is now closed to win a copy of Mexico: The Cookbook by Margarita Carrillo Arronte - a stunning bible of Mexican home cooking with over 700 beautifully photographed recipes. We want to know what's your favourite Mexican dish and why. Post your answers as comments at the bottom of this article to be in with a chance of winning.
Competition closed on Friday 5th December 2014 at 5pm.
Mexico: The Cookbook features more than 700 delicious and authentic recipes that can be easily recreated at home. From tamales, fajitas, and moles to cactus salad, blue crab soup, and melon seed juice, the recipes are a celebration of the fresh flavours and ingredients from a country whose cuisine is revered around the world.
Modern Mexican cuisine is a fusion of Indigenous American and European food. It is underpinned by the Mayan and Aztec corn-based diet: tortillas, tamales, atole, cuitlacoche (corn fungus) and elote (corn on the cob), merged with Spanish meat and wheat brought over in the 1500s.
Today the main differences are regional rather than ethnic. Oaxaca, in the ‘deep South’, is to Mexico what Sichuan is to China. The food is spicy and complex: dark mole pastes, loaded with chilli and spiked with cocoa. Yucatán, on the Eastern peninsula, is historically and geographically a more isolated part of Mexico.
Oaxaca, in the ‘deep South’, is to Mexico what Sichuan is to China.
This is reflected in lighter flavours, and unique regional dishes: tortillas with pumpkin sauce and epazote (papaduzules), or achiote pork baked in banana leaves. The Western Gulf is renowned for spicy, seafood soups (chilpachiole), and the north of the country is united by wild frontier cooking – grilled meat, with char and embers flavouring beef steaks and chorizo.