Aztecs and the Roots of Mexican Cooking

Lecture 16

B

efore venturing into the modern era, you will learn about Mexico
at the time of the Aztecs, immediately before the encounter with
Europeans after 1492. The Aztecs were not, of course, the fi rst great
New World civilization; there were many earlier peoples living in what is
today Mexico—including the Olmec, Toltec, Maya, and Teotihuacán—
before the Aztecs arrived. However, this lecture will focus on the Aztecs
because they absorbed and ruled over most of these peoples or their
descendants. As a result, they adopted many cultural and culinary traits from
these peoples.

Agriculture before the Aztecs
 Before the development of agriculture, the early peoples of Mexico
lived mostly by hunting, fi shing, and gathering as elsewhere. In
contrast to the general pattern on the Eurasian continent, most of
the large animals were extinct before 7000 B.C. The native peoples
came to rely increasingly on plants like mesquite, nopal cactus,
maguey, and wild teosinte—the ancestor of corn—which fi rst
began to be domesticated about 4000 B.C., though recent evidence
suggests it was long before this.

 They supplemented this with hunting smaller animals and fi shing,

but they didn’t have any large domesticated cattle. They ate mostly

small mammals, lizards, insects, and grubs. This seems to have

provided them with a decent diet, because there were several

regions of fairly dense population.

 As these peoples became more sedentary and dependent

on agriculture, they came to depend more heavily on a few

domesticated species, including maize (which is a plant selectively

bred for large and numerous grains), squash, beans, tomatoes,

chilis, amaranth, cactus, and many fruits—especially the avocado

and guava. These are the staples of early Mexican diet, as they will