Latin American cuisine

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Latin American cuisine is a phrase that refers to typical foods, beverages, and cooking styles common to many of the countries and cultures in Latin America.

Some items typical of Latin American cuisine include maize-based dishes (tortillas, tamales, pupusas) and various salsas and other condiments (guacamole, pico de gallo, mole).

Beverages includes mate, horchata, atole and aguas frescas.

Desserts include dulce de leche, arroz con leche and flan.

1 Tortillas
2 Native American
3 South American
4 Mexican
5 See also

[edit] Tortillas

Traditional tortilla making. The mother is grinding the maize with a stone mano and metate as the elder daughter pats the dough into tortillas. (El Salvador, c. 1900)

The Spanish language term tortilla [torˈtiʝa] can be used to mean several different dishes, depending on the area. In Mexican and Mesoamerican terms, a tortilla is a kind of unleavened bread, generally made from maize (corn) and with the introduction of wheat by the Europeans, also with wheat flour. This is the most common usage of the term in English.

In Spain, tortilla stands for omelette, and is thus made up of battered eggs, with other ingredients added at will. The terms Spanish tortilla, tortilla española or tortilla de patatas all refer to a common recipe in Spain, an omelette with stir-fried potatoes and chopped onion, often served as a staple food in Spanish bars and cafés.

As an easy solution to both the problems of handling food in microgravity and preventing bread crumbs from escaping into delicate instruments, tortillas (of the American flavor) have been used on many NASA Shuttle missions since 1985. [1]

[edit] Native American

Information about Native American cuisine comes from a great variety of sources. Modern day native peoples retain a rich body of traditional foods, some of which have become iconic of present-day Native American social gatherings (for example, frybread). Foods like cornbread are known to have been adopted into the cuisine of the United States from Native American groups. In other cases, documents from the early periods of contact with European, African, and Asian peoples allow the recovery of food practices which passed out of popularity in the historic period (for example, Black Drink). Archaeological techniques, particularly in the subdisciplines of zooarchaeology and paleoethnobotany, have allowed for the understanding of other culinary practices or preferred foods which did not survive into the written historic record.

[edit] South American

The richest products of South America come from the middle of the continent, the Amazonia. In countries like Peru there is a strong influence of the Inca. Potatoes are frequently grown as a result of this, and also plants such as quinoa. On the Southern tip of South America lies the Pacific Ocean, which provides a large array of seafood. Many plains also are on this continent, which are rich for growing food in abundance. In the Patagonia south of Chile and Argentina, many people produce lamb and venison. King crab is typically caught at the southern end of the continent. Antarctic krill has just recently been discovered and is now considered a fine dish. Tuna and tropical fish are caught all around the continent, but Easter Island is one place where they are found in abundance. Lobster is also caught in great quantities from Juan Fernández. In Brazil the most traditional dish is the feijoada.

[edit] Mexican

Mexican cuisine is known for its intense and varied flavors, colorful decoration, and the variety of spices that it has. Mexican gastronomy, in terms of diversity of appealing tastes and textures, is one of the richest in the world in proteins, vitamins, and minerals, though some people characterize it as greasy and excessively spicy.

When Spanish conquistadores arrived in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (on the ruins of which Mexico City was built), they found that the common people's diet consisted largely of corn-based dishes with chilis and herbs, usually complemented with beans and squash. Later on, the conquistadores added to their original diet of rice, beef, pork, chicken, wine, garlic, and onions that they brought with them from Spain to the indigenous foods of pre-Columbian Mexico (including chocolate, maize, tomato, vanilla, avocado, papaya, pineapple, chile pepper, beans, squash, sweet potato, peanut and turkey). The totopo (a deep-fried chip of corn tortilla) may have been created as part of this cuisine.

Most of today's Mexican cuisine is based on pre-hispanic traditions, including the Aztecs and Maya, combined with culinary trends introduced by Spanish colonists. Quesadillas, for example, are a flour or corn tortilla with cheese (often a Mexican-style soft farmer's cheese such as Queso Fresco), beef, chicken, pork, etc. The indigenous part of this and many other traditional foods is the chile pepper. Foods like these tend to be very colorful because of the rich variety of vegetables (among them red peppers, green peppers, chiles, broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes) and meats in Mexican food. There is also a sprinkling of Caribbean influence in Mexican cuisine, particularly in some regional dishes from the states of Veracruz and Yucatan. The French occupation of Mexico also yielded some influences as well: the bolillo (pronounced bo-lee-yo, with the "o" as in "hot"), a Mexican take on the French roll, certainly seems to reflect this.

Mexican food varies by region, because of local climate and geography and ethnic differences among the indigenous inhabitants and because these different populations were influenced by the Spaniards in varying degrees. The north of Mexico is known for its beef production and meat dishes; southeastern Mexico, on the other hand, is known for its spicy vegetable and chicken-based dishes. Veracruz-style is a common method of preparing seafood.

There are also more exotic dishes, cooked in the Aztec or Maya style, with ingredients ranging from iguana to rattlesnake, deer, spider monkey, and even some kinds of insects. This is usually known as comida prehispánica (or prehispanic food), and although not very common, is relatively well known.

Mexican cuisine has combined with the cuisine of the southwest United States to form Tex-Mex cuisine.

One type of food that is commonly mistaken for Mexican food is New Mexican cuisine, which can be found in, of course, New Mexico, USA.