When Cosme Aguilar was a boy growing up in the mountainous, warm Mexican city of Cintalapa, Chiapas — before he immigrated to the United States and opened a Mexican restaurant that would earn a Michelin star — he used to help his family make barbacoa on Sundays.
He remembers the visceral aspects of it: the flies. The blood. The butchering and cleaning. How each of his five siblings participated and all worked together. The next morning, under his mother’s careful tending, the barbacoa would transform inside the clay oven on the patio, from a pile of sinew into a rich, smoky meat that fell off the bone.
Why am I still allowing this? Why do I still answer the white editors who come to me this time of year, like they always do? To agree to this exchange, to say “yes” to my sense that I'm only considered valuable during Cinco de Mayo or Hispanic Heritage Month feels gross. Me da asco. And yet here I am. Because hopefully, writing this will pay for the other writing I truly want to do. And because I need to write what feels scary and hard.
The reality, on a given night at our house, is that I will have to shoo my toddler out of the kitchen at least three times because she will have grabbed the paring knife, begged me for yet another string cheese, or dumped a bucket of toys next to the oven just when I need to put the sheet pan in. Usually, at the exact moment in a recipe when it’s time to vigorously stir a sauce, this wonderful little sprite announces that she needs to use the bathroom. One evening when I was at the stove, I heard the eldest shout, “You’re not supposed to pee on the rug!”
It’s Friday night on a busy street corner in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, and Denise Vallejo showers a handful of cilantro over a flour tortilla piled high with grilled seitan and her signature melty cassava-flour-and-cashew cheese. Her “Chicali” taco, a vegan version of the carne asada tacos sold across Mexicali, a city in northern Mexico where Vallejo’s family is from, costs $7, on the higher side for the neighborhood. But people line up regardless. They’re drawn to her food and her philosophy: that Mexican cooking can be vegan, and that rooting out animal-based ingredients is actually better for Latinx bodies.
Eating a corn tortilla made from freshly ground dough can be a sublime experience, each bite hinting at flavors of toasted corn and earthy minerals. At New York City restaurant Cosme, the cook who makes them at many dinner services — and who makes them the fastest — is Guadalupe Peláez, a short, powerful Oaxacan woman who can churn out up to 3,000 in a busy night.
Every Mexican cook I know, including my mother, has a recipe for albondigas—meatballs that are usually, depending on the cook, either served as a soup or something closer to a meat main dish drenched in a thick sauce. None I’d ever come across resembled those of Doña Maria Ramona Quixano y Contreras, who in 1808 wrote a Spanish-language cookbook of stews, fruit pastes, and desserts in Silao, Guanajuato.
To slice the juicy, crisp-edged al pastor meat off the roasting spit, Rolando Marcelino Martinez uses a 14-inch knife that he brought with him from Mexico. He sharpens it every day before customers arrive at Tacos Los Guichos, a bustling taquería housed in a trailer near the 110 freeway at West Slauson Avenue.
In May of this year, Claudette Zepeda found herself near the crest of the Popocatépetl volcano in the Mexican state of Puebla, drinking homemade pulque with a tlachiquero (traditional pulque-maker) and eating a meal that his mother had cooked on the comal. Trout lay inside charred cornhusks, rubbed with onion and garlic and the family’s homemade mole paste. A bit of extra mole lay on the side, to sop up with homemade corn tortillas.
It sounds simple to make pot of beans, but when I was writing my Mexican cookbook last year, the options felt overwhelming. How could I coax out that perfect, starchy bean broth that comes from bubbling for hours in a Mexican pot? Should the beans soak overnight or not? When it came time to research, the first place I turned was Josefina.
If you eat a meal at La Morada in the Bronx and ask for Doña Natalia, a robust, friendly woman will walk out of the kitchen, sit down at your table and share her story, assuming you speak Spanish.
In my California-born and bred Mexican-American family, the sentiment that speaking Spanish is un-American has stuck around for generations. In my family, we pronounce our last name the Anglo way, TELL-ez, instead of the Spanish way, TAY-es. It’s partially why I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish. My mom, who is bilingual, didn’t want my brothers or me to have an accent. And my dad couldn’t have taught me – he spoke only English in his house growing up.
Just six days after my cookbook, Eat Mexico, hit shelves, I packed up my four-month-old baby, a breast pump and portable crib, a stroller, and my husband, and set off on a month-long book tour along the West Coast. Only the night before, I had celebrated the book's launch at a party in Brooklyn. It felt like a wedding—friends and strangers congratulated me, enthused about the book, and raved about the food.
I make my living writing and showing people the beauty of Mexican food, but once people learn I’m Mexican-American, they inevitably think I grew up with my mom and grandma making tortillas in the back room. That was not my story.
For the past 18 years, the chef Alejandro Ruíz has built Casa Oaxaca into one of the most popular restaurants in Oaxaca City, drawing in customers with his chic interpretations of traditional classics. Now he’s hoping to do the same in Mexico’s capital, where Oaxacan food — despite its reputation as a culturally rich, complex cuisine — is still rare as an upscale dining option.
Tender rice noodles in a slightly pungent yet delicate fish broth, dotted with chunks of green banana stem, may not be everyone’s idea of breakfast food, but mohinga, a classic morning-time food in central and southern Myanmar, is a great way to start the day. It comes in many versions. In Yangon, formerly Rangoon, the broth is made aromatic with lemon grass, ginger and garlic. On the west coast, in Rakhine State, it’s topped with flaked cooked fish and a dollop of chile paste.
Dried chiles are easy enough to use in Mexican cooking—the difficult part is recognizing what makes each individual chile unique.
Mexico City is my second home. I lived there for four years up until January, and I fell in love with its wild, chaotic energy. I fell even harder for the food — so much so that I went to Mexican cooking school and started my own culinary tourism business there.
When I was a kid growing up in the Inland Empire, my idea of Mexican comfort food was a flour tortilla plucked from a plastic bag, lined with one square of American cheese and zapped until bubbly in the microwave.
