My first memory of this dish is very warm: I was maybe seven or eight and I would spend the night at my aunt’s place. I remember her making it for me while I sat at the kitchen table and watched her go through the process in a matter of fact way: Heat the beans,…
Salsa macha — “Sauce for the brave, los machos, real men…?” It doesn’t go down so well for an origin story, does it? Gratefully, there’s another one. Salsa macha, as ‘ground sauce’, from the word ‘machacar’ — to grind — usually in a molcajete. From unknown origin in the south of Mexico, specifically in the neighbouring…
My parents divorced 20 years ago and to this day whenever I speak to my dad he asks me for my mother’s recipe for pastel Azteca (Aztec cake). My mother, on the other hand, barely remembers ever making it, or even eating one for that matter. What’s more, unfortunately she threw away her old recipe…
Rodrigo Cervantes’s Mexico City notebook There’s a vast social, racial and economic divide in Mexico’s society: permeated by violence, corruption and the ever present colonised complex that has shaped us as a country. In a state of tumult and volatility such as this, we crave consistencies. In my case, and in the case of millions…