Category: Mexican Markets

In late October just a few years ago, Mexico Cooks! went to the Mercado de Jamaica specifically to find flowers and decorative items to build a home altar for the Day of the Dead.  We found exactly what we wanted, but that became our secondary objective once we passed into the produce section of the market.

Many of Mexico City's markets use this sort of printed sign to advertise the price of what's for sale–in this case, vine-ripened Roma tomatoes–and every sign has a bit of advice to offer about your potential purchase.  I've loved these signs since long before living in Mexico's capital.  On this market jaunt, the lightbulb went on: all of you would love these typical and sometimes funny signs, too.  This one urges, "Don't think about it too much…take home a little kilo!".

For already-cut-up calabaza de castilla (a huge, hard-shell Mexican squash): 'money well spent'.

For limón criollo (Mexican Key limes): I'll be right with you!

Limas–and there really is no translation for this uniquely Mexican fruit.  They are neither limes nor lemons, nor are they oranges.  But as the sign says: it's scrumptious!

Chile jalapeño: pretty and cheap, at four pesos the quarter kilo. 

White potatoes for 10 pesos the kilo: smile.

Beautiful crisp cucumbers: ask for more.

At six pesos the kilo: 'Don't look any further!'

These are tunas–fruit of the nopal cactus–that the sign says are "chingonas".  Chingonas is Mexican slang for bad ass!

This merchant is offering his chiles jalapeños at 14 pesos the kilo: 'Like you saw on TV'.

This sign is my current favorite. "Ni hablar mujer" means 'Lady, don't even talk about it!'.  The phrase is also part of a Pedro Infante song.

Next year, plan to come along with us to this marvelous market.  Ahorita la atiendo!

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.

I wrote and first published this article in 2010, in response to inquiries from readers who were confused about other authors' articles about "What is authentic Mexican food?"  The subject has come up again and again, most recently in comments and queries from readers and food professionals about Mexican and other cuisines. I still stand behind what I wrote nearly 10 years ago. 

"Real" Mexican chile relleno (stuffed, battered, and fried chile poblano), caldillo de jitomate (thin tomato broth), and frijoles negros (black beans).  Notice that the chile is not suffocated with globs of melted cheese.  

More and more people who want to experience "real" Mexican food are asking about the availability of authentic Mexican meals outside Mexico. Bloggers and posters on food-oriented websites have vociferously definite opinions on what constitutes authenticity. Writers' claims range from the uninformed (the fajitas at such-and-such a restaurant are totally authentic, just like in Mexico) to the ridiculous (Mexican cooks in Mexico can't get good ingredients, so Mexican meals prepared in the United States are superior to those in Mexico).

Much of what I read about authentic Mexican cooking reminds me of that old story of the blind men and the elephant. "Oh," says the first blind man, running his hands up and down the elephant's leg, "an elephant is exactly like a tree."  "Aha," says the second, stroking the elephant's trunk, "the elephant is precisely like a hose."  And so forth. I contend that if you haven't experienced what most writers persist in calling "authentic Mexican", then there's no way to compare any restaurant in the United States with anything that is prepared or served in Mexico. You're simply spinning your wheels.

It's my considered opinion that there is no such thing as one definition of authentic Mexican. Wait, before you start hopping up and down to refute that, consider that in my opinion, "authentic" is generally what you were raised to appreciate. Your mother's pot roast is authentic, but so is my mother's. Your aunt's tuna salad is the real deal, but so is my aunt's, and they're not the least bit similar.  And Señora Martínez in Mexico makes yet another version of tuna salad, very different from any I've eaten in the USA.

Carne de puerco en salsa verde (pork meat in green sauce), a traditional recipe as served at the restaurant Fonda Margarita in Mexico City.

Carne de puerco en salsa verde from the Mexico Cooks! home kitchen.  The preparation looks similar to that at Fonda Margarita, but I tweak a thing or two that make the recipe my personal tradition, different from the restaurant's.

As you can see, the descriptor I use for many dishes is 'traditional'. We can even argue about that adjective, but it serves to describe the traditional dish of–oh, say carne de puerco en chile verde–as served in the northern part of Mexico, in Mexico City, in the Central Highlands, or in the Yucatán. There may be big variations among the preparations of this dish, but each preparation is traditional and each is considered authentic in its region.

I think that in order to understand the cuisines of Mexico, we have to give up arguing about authenticity and concentrate on the reality of certain dishes.

A nearly 200-year-old tradition in Mexico that shows up every September: chiles en nogada (stuffed chiles poblano in a creamy sauce made with fresh (i.e., recently harvested) walnuts.  It's the Mexican flag on your plate: green chile poblano, creamy white walnut sauce, and red pomegranate arils.  But hoo boy–there are arguments to the death about the "authentic" way to prepare these chiles: battered or not battered?  Put up your dukes!  (I fall on the not-battered side, in case you wondered.  God help me, I am not welcome in Puebla, where it's battered or forget it.)

Traditional Mexican cooking is not a hit-or-miss let's-make-something-for-dinner proposition based on "let's see what we have in the despensa (pantry)." Traditional Mexican cooking is as complicated and precise as traditional French cooking, with just as many hide-bound conventions as French cuisine imposes. You can't just throw some chiles and a bar of chocolate into a sauce and call it mole. You can't simply decide to call something "authentic" Mexican x, y, or z when it's not. There are specific recipes to follow, specific flavors and textures to expect, and specific results to attain. Yes, some liberties are taken, particularly in Mexico's new alta cocina mexicana (Mexican haute cuisine) and fusion restaurants, but even those liberties are based, we hope, on specific traditional recipes.  As Alicia Gironella d'Angeli (a true grande dame of Mexico's kitchen) often said to me, "Cristina, you cannot de-construct a dish until you have learned to construct it."  Amen.

In recent readings of food-oriented websites, I've noticed questions about what ingredients are available in Mexico. The posts have gone on to ask whether or not those ingredients are up to snuff when compared to what's available in what the writer believes to be more sophisticated food sources such as the United States.

Deep red, vine-ripened plum tomatoes, available all year long in central Mexico. The sign reads, "Don't think about it much–take home a little kilo!"  At the current price of 29 pesos per kilo, these Mexico-grown tomatoes, brought to market red-ripe, cost approximately $1.45 USD for 2.2 pounds.  What's the current price in the USA, or in Canada?

Surprise, surprise: most readily available fresh foods in Mexico's markets are even better than similar ingredients you find outside Mexico. Foreign chefs who tour with me to visit Mexico's stunning produce, fish, and meat markets are inevitably astonished to see that what is grown for the ordinary home-cook end user in Mexico is fresher, riper, more flavorful, more attractive, and much less costly than similar ingredients available in the United States.

Chicken, ready for the pot.  The chickens raised in Mexico for our food are generally fed ground marigold petals mixed into their feed–that's why the flesh is so pink, the skin so yellow, and why the egg yolks are like big orange suns.

It's the same with most meats: pork and chicken are head and shoulders above what you find in North of the Border supermarkets. Fish and seafood are direct-from-the-sea fresh and distributed by air within just an hour or two from any of Mexico's long coastlines.

Look at the quality of Mexico's fresh, locally grown, seasonal strawberries–and the season starts right now, at the end of January.  Deep red to its center, a strawberry like this is hard to find in other countries.

Nevertheless, Mexican restaurants in the United States make do with the less-than-superior ingredients found outside Mexico. In fact, some downright delicious traditional Mexican meals can be had in some north of the border Mexican restaurants. Those restaurants are hard to find, though, because in the States, most of what has come to be known as Mexican cooking is actually Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex cooking. There's nothing wrong with Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex cooking, nothing at all. It's just not traditional Mexican cooking.  Tex-Mex is great food from a particular region of the United States. Some of it is adapted from Mexican cooking and some is the invention of early Texas settlers. Some innovations are adapted from both of those points of origin.  Fajitas, ubiquitous on Mexican restaurant menus all over the United States, are a typical Tex-Mex invention.  Now available in some of Mexico's restaurants, fajitas are offered to the tourist trade as prototypically authentic. 

Pozole blanco (white pozole) with delicious clear broth that starts with a a long-simmered whole pig's head, nixtamalized native white cacahuatzintle corn, and lots of tender, flavorful pork meat.  Add to the pot some herbs and spices.  Then add hunks of avocado at the table–along with a squeeze or two of limón criollo (you know it as Key lime), some crushed, dried Mexican oregano, crushed, dried chile de árbol, and, if you like, a tablespoon or two of mezcal.  Traditional and heavenly!

You need to know that the best of Mexico's cuisines is not found in restaurants. It comes straight from somebody's mama's kitchen. Clearly not all Mexicans are good cooks, just as not all Chinese are good cooks, not all Italians are good cooks, and so forth. But the most traditional, the most (if you will) authentic Mexican meals are home prepared.

Diana Kennedy, UNAM 2011.  Mrs. Kennedy was at the Mexican National Autonomous University to present her book, Oaxaca Al Gusto.

That reality is what made Diana Kennedy who she is today: she took the time to travel Mexico, searching for the best of the best of the traditional preparations. For the most part, she didn't find them in fancy restaurants, homey comedores (small commercial dining rooms) or fondas (tiny working-class restaurants). She found them as she stood facing the stove in a home kitchen, watching doña Fulana prepare desayuno (breakfast), comida (the midday main meal of the day), or cena (supper) for her family.  Ms. Kennedy, an English woman, took the time to educate her palate, understand the ingredients, taste what was offered to her, and learn, learn, learn from home cooks before she started putting traditional recipes, techniques, and stories on paper. If we take the time to prepare recipes from any of Ms. Kennedy's many cookbooks, we too can take advantage of her wealth of experience and can come to understand what traditional Mexican cooking can be.  Her books will bring Mexico's kitchens to you when you are not able to go to Mexico.  But please: do follow the recipes, or your dish will come out different from what it is supposed to be.

My dear friend Abigail Mendoza, cocinera tradicional (traditional home cook) from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, prepares a vat of mole negro (black mole, the king of moles) for a large party she invited me to attend at her home.

In order to understand the cuisines of Mexico, we need to experience their riches. Until that time, we can argue till the cows come home and you'll still be just another blind guy patting the beast's side and exclaiming how the elephant is mighty like a wall.

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.

A drawing from the 16th century Florentine Codex showing the pre-Hispanic making of tortillas.  The utensils the woman uses for the preparation of tortillas de maíz (corn tortillas) are the same utensils that are used today–3000 years from the time tortilla-making was begun.  That's not a typo: 3000 years.  Tamales came first, about 4000 years ago, and after them came tortillas, their younger relations.  The olla (clay pot in the foreground) was used for nixtamaliz-ing corn (processing dried corn kernels in a hot water and calcium hydroxide bath).  The woman is using a metate (volcanic rock grinding stone) and its metlapil (like a rock rolling pin) to grind the nixtamalize-d corn (and some of its water) into dough.  To the right in the drawing is a comal (clay griddle), used to cook the tortillas over an open wood fire; the three circular items around the comal are, as far as I know, supposed to represent the rocks that support the comal above the flames.  Drawn above the comal is a molcajete (volcanic rock round grinding bowl, like a mortar) and its mano (the pestle used to do the grinding).  ALL of these utensils continue to be used in today's traditional Mexican kitchen.

This 1924 painting by Diego Rivera represents the same activities drawn in the Florentine Codex–plus the indigenous man tending a corn plant–that show us the preparation of a tortilla from its beginnings as a plant through the grinding of the dried, nixtamalize-d corn, to the woman wearing a head covering patting the testal (the round ball of masa (corn dough) from which a tortilla is formed, to the woman toasting tortillas on a comal.  

The clay comal that I bought from its maker and use in my modern kitchen.  Its diameter is fourteen inches, plus the slightly elevated sides.  Compare it with the comal shown in the painting above.  

A Mexican kitchen circa 1830s, painted by the French artist Theubet de Beauchamps.  Note that the woman grinding corn on the metate is kneeling on a woven palm mat known as a petate.  A small-ish petate was used as a kneeling mat, a larger one was used as a sleeping mat in lieu of aa different kind of bed.  At the end of life, a person with very few financial resources would be rolled up and buried in his or her sleeping petate.  In the center of the painting, behind the tall clay jug, you can see the fire built in a fogón (the circle of rocks) and the comal where the tortillas are toasting.

I took this photo approximately 10 years ago.  The style of clothing has changed, but the rest remains the same. 

This Mexican kitchen photo dates to circa 1850.  The artist is unknown, although prints of the painting are widely available today (even at Walmart, to give you an idea of how well-known and commonplace it is).  This is a typical kitchen of the period, one that would have been in the home of a fairly well-off family. I would wager a guess that both of these women are indigenous servants, not members of the home's family. These kitchens are still in use today, in some homes; friends of mine here in Morelia have a close-to-identical 19th century kitchen in their home. 

The arches at ground level are for storing firewood; the square holes beneath the stove's surface are for burning the wood to cook the food.  The clay pots, all of which have rounded bottoms, fit into the holes on the surface of the stove; today, stoves in modern homes have gas or electric burners.  The woman standing at the stove and wrapped in a rebozo (long rectangular shawl used for warmth and a multitude of other things) is wielding a ventilador–the typical hand-woven palm fan used to blow air into the fire.

The shelf above the woman kneeling on the floor can be lowered and raised by a primitive pulley; that shelf is used to store staples like dried ears of corn, wheat flour, sugar, salt, chunks of cal (calcium hydroxide), chunks of tequesquite (a naturally-occurring leavening agent), and some other things that one would want small rodents to access.  The large clay vessel on the floor to the left of the painting holds potable water; the small clay jar next to it is used to take water
out of the large jar.  The woman grinding corn at the metate is kneeling on a petate, which is hidden by her voluminous skirts.  At the time this painting was made, there was usually no ventilation (flues, chimneys, etc.–and usually no windows) for removing wood smoke from a kitchen.  These middle-19th century kitchens in well-off homes had actual STOVES, a new-fangled convenience compared to cooking directly over a wood fire on the ground.  In poor homes and/or in rural areas, open-fire cooking was done both outside in a patio and inside on the kitchen's dirt floor.  Obviously huge amounts of smoke billowed everywhere, including into the cocinera's (cook's) eyes and lungs.  These circumstances are still very common today in rural zones.

A Mexican kitchen dating to the end of the 19th century.  The household collection of hand-hammered copper cazuelas (cooking pans) hangs on the wall above the table, and there's one on the floor, center stage.  The two women on the right are handling a live turkey–native to Mexico–and the kitchen cat is peering around the corner of the stove.  This kitchen is remarkable for its ventilation and light.

Two cocineras tradicionales (traditional cooks) from the state of Michoacán, where I live, are cooking on a wood-burning stove built of adobe (mud and straw) with an outer coating of yeso (plaster), in this case a thick layer of plaster, and painted with the oxidized brick color that was as far as I have seen the most common color used for this type stove.  Alberto Ríos Szalay took this photo within the last ten years. 

This kitchen still exists in Casa Zuno, which was built starting in 1923 in Guadalajara, Jalisco.  This elaborate and elegant home belonged to José Guadalupe Zuno Hernández, who was governor of the state of Jalisco at the time the house was built.  He and his wife donated the house to the University of Guadalajara.  From 1993 until today, it has been the seat of the Historic Archives of the city and state.  Above the stove are typical pottery decorations that are common in a kitchen of the era.  All photos by Mexico Cooks! unless otherwise credited. 

The kitchen at Casa Azul, the Frida Kahlo museum in Mexico City.  The home was built in 1904 and opened as a museum in 1958, retaining the family furnishings and decorations.  Above the stove (blue painted with yellow diamond shapes), you can see tiny pots forming the names "Frida" (to the left) and "Diego" (to the right).  Above the window are doves stretching a large ribbon between their beaks.

Here's an early 20th century addition to one Mexican kitchen: a wood-burning beehive oven tucked into the corner.  Most kitchen work in this era continued to be done on the floor, rather than at a table or a counter.  Most ovens were built outside the kitchen, in the patio, to avoid the intense heat they generated.

Above is the room dedicated to the traditional Michoacán kitchen at the Museo de Artes y Oficios (Museum of Arts and Trades) in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán.  The stove is free-standing in the middle of the room, rather than having been built against a wall.  Above the shelves at the end of the room, you can see a banner made of little pots (and again held by doves).

The kitchen in the family home of the painter Rodolfo Morales (RIP).  Morales lived in this house in Ocotlán, Oaxaca, from his birth in 1925 until his death in 2001.  It's one of my favorite Mexican kitchens–filled to bursting with pots ranging from the tiniest to the largest.  Click on the photo to enlarge it; you can see that the stove burners have been converted from wood to gas.  

Finally, here is an outdoor kitchen in a rural area of Michoacán.  Built to use for cooking in the heat of spring (the hottest time of year in this part of Michoacán is from late March until late May), you can click on this photo (or on any of the photos on Mexico Cooks!)
to get a better look at their detail.  At the left of this photo, you will see the steam in the air from a pot of cooking beans.  When I took this picture, about 13 years ago, I knew this was soon to be a vestige of an earlier time, a beautiful remnant of Mexico's past and present.  

I hope you have enjoyed this time travel, from the beginning of the recorded history of Mexico's traditional kitchen right up until today.  If you'd like to tour with me, take a look at the link below and let's make a plan.  

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.