Five Ingredients

Mexican cooking is actually quite varied and inventive if you consider regional variation, all the fruit and vegetables available, and feasting dishes such as mole. However, everyday Mexican cooking relies almost solely on the following components:

·      corn

·      cheese

·      beans

·      meat (undefined)

·      salsa (mainly tomatoes, chili peppers, onion and cilantro)

Honourable mentions go to:

·      salt, lime, and chili pepper

·      avocado

Take corn, maïs, the most important Mesoamerican food source. Corn tortillas serve as plate, fork, spoon and napkin. They can be soft or hard, toasted, dried and rehydrated in soup, sized big or small, deep-fried or baked, used flat, folded or rolled, made skinny or fat, coloured white, yellow or blue. There, you already have the architecture of 2 full pages of a menu. Ground corn makes atole, a breakfast drink. Corn in the style of hominy is the main ingredient in pozole stew. Corn mush is filled with meat and wrapped in banana leaves to make tamales. Corn on the cob is BBQ’d on the side of the street, eaten with salt/lime/chili pepper or dipped in mayonnaise and parmesan cheese. Roasted corn is taken off the cob, mixed with the same and called esquites.

Cheese, queso, can be the main filling to many forms of tortilla, or merely a decoration. In contrast to corn, there are really not many varieties of cheese used in mainstay Mexican cooking. But the few that exist are used in almost every meal.

Beans, frijoles, are also a standard affair. Usually black, and either soupy or dense and refried, they can accompany cheese as a filler, sit in their own spot on the plate, or be added on top of pretty much anything.

Meat is hard to escape at any meal. Chicken is the standby, but processed ham is a favourite. Bacon, sliced beef, shwarma-style mixed meat and hotdogs are on offer. By far the tastiest method of serving meat is in tacos, but that does not stop them from sneaking ham into most everything.

Salsa, salsita…what a wonderful invention! The delicious combination of an infinite variety of tomatoes and chilies with onion, cilantro, salt and lime make the world a tastier place. From mild to inferno, from chunky to pureed, red, purple or green, salsas add the necessary interest to a snack or a meal.

Salt, lime and chili pepper powder can be (and are) added to anything you can think of. They flavour all the meals mentioned above. They are sprinkled on every fruit. They serve as salad dressing. They are shaken and squeezed over potato chips. They are added to beer along with tomato juice, creating an all-Mexican drink called the michelada.

Avocado gets its own paragraph just for existing in such abundance here. Beautiful, creamy and mild, it can accompany pretty much anything, stand on its own, or create the basis for guacamole, one of the finest foods in the world. Complemented, of course, by some form of tortilla, perhaps filled with cheese, meat or beans, and served with a little salsa on the side. 

PROVECHO!