My Mexican Kitchen

Introduction

I wrote my first cookbook thirteen years ago, and although I’ve cooked every day since it was published, I haven’t felt like I had anything worthy of writing down again until now. My last book was a memoir of my life told through food. I was married to a Frenchman at the time and the recipes were a beautiful mix of new favorites influenced by my frequent stays in France, family recipes I learned from my aunt Elsa, friends’ recipes, and more, all woven together with personal stories.

I so clearly remember telling my editor that, while I planned to include some Mexican dishes, I didn’t want the book to be all Mexican food. I saw my cooking as a reflection of me and, although my Mexican heritage is an essential part of my identity, I didn’t want to be defined solely by it.

Here we are, a decade later, and I split my time between Mexico City and Los Angeles, have a Mexican husband and son, and, after a life-changing trip through Mexico for my show on CNN, Searching for Mexico, I can’t imagine writing a book about anything but Mexican food and how it relates to culture, traditions, and history—both of Mexico and my own.

I’m a thirteenth-generation American. My ancestors came into the port of Veracruz from Spain and settled on a ranch just north of the Rio Grande, in what was then Mexico but, after the Treaty of Hidalgo in the mid-nineteenth century, became Texas. 

I grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, on breakfast tacos, Aunt Elsa’s tamales, and my dad’s famous menudo—Mexican food and Tex-Mex food are definitely in my DNA. But, as I learned when I left south Texas, the version of Mexican cuisine I grew up with—flour tortillas, Frito pie, and smoky esquites from just across the border in Nuevo León—is not everyone’s. I’ve always told people that Mexican food is so much more than tacos and tequila, but until I started traveling throughout the country, and especially after I married my husband, Pepe, and moved to Mexico City, I had no idea how multifaceted and diverse it really was.

When CNN approached me about Searching for Mexico, I couldn’t say no. Four months traveling around this food mecca and eating all day? Don’t threaten me with a good time! I expected to taste some great dishes and meet some wonderful people, but I never could have imagined just how impactful the experience would be. In those four months, we traveled coast to coast, north to south, eating some of the best food in the world and hearing the stories behind it. I’d been to several of Mexico’s thirty-two states before, but for the show, we went to so many places I never would have found on my own. Like the home kitchen of three wonderfully sassy Muxes (the nonbinary Zapotec community in Oaxaca who identify as a third gender), chef Alberto Kuku’s backyard píib (a traditional underground oven used throughout the Yucatán Peninsula) at his home in Xocén, and Lake Chapala in Jalisco, where I fished and cooked with the Coca people, one of the oldest indigenous groups in all of Mexico. I visited farmers, archaeologists, cowboys, chefs, and home cooks. I saw firsthand just how regional the food in this country is—cooking styles and recipes varied from state to state, town to town, and even household to household—and I was continually struck by the importance placed on ingredients.

If French food is rooted in technique, Mexican food is rooted in ingredients and history. It’s a fascinating combination of ancient culinary traditions centered around plants endemic to Mesoamerica—like chocolate, vanilla, tomatoes, and beans—mixed with new ingredients and techniques introduced over centuries of colonization and immigration. I learned that Jewish immigrants escaping the Spanish Inquisition likely invented the flour tortilla, using flour brought from Spain to make an unleavened bread, and that tacos al pastor, which are cooked on the same type of spit used for shawarma, were developed by Turkish and Lebanese immigrants who came over in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Standing at the port of Veracruz where my family, along with so many others, first entered the country unlocked something in me. It opened my eyes and showed me how vast, beautiful, and everchanging Mexican cuisine really is: based on essential ingredients, shared traditions, and exciting new influences.

When I got back to the United States, I couldn’t stop cooking. I was re-creating dishes I’d learned on the road and developing new ones using Mexican ingredients I now had a whole new appreciation for. The trip was a real full-circle moment. It reminded me that Mexican culture is, and will always be, deeply rooted in my identity and my food.

This cookbook is a celebration of that, as well as the endlessly knowledgeable cooks and teachers who have generously taught me over the years. It’s the food I grew up eating, the recipes and stories shared by all the people I met on my travels, and the dishes I was inspired to create when I got home. They’re full of history, love, flavor, and spice. I hope they change your life the same way they’ve changed mine.

Xo, 

Eva