The Historians

This entry draws on sources ranging from sixteenth-century Nahua-Franciscan collaboration through twentieth-century anthropology and archaeobotany to contemporary policy history. The documentary tradition is as geographically dispersed as the cuisine itself, with critical anchors in Oaxaca, the Valley of Mexico, Guerrero, and Nuevo León. Graded AMBER: founder attribution and institutional dates require verification before publication.

Every serious cook who wants to understand Mexican food eventually encounters a short list of names — not chefs, but scholars, fieldworkers, and writers whose patient labour produced the documentary foundation on which any honest account of this cuisine must rest. They are not ornamentation. They are the structural load-bearing wall. The oldest sources are not books at all. The Florentine Codex — compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in collaboration with Nahua scholars and informants, and completed in 1577 — remains the most detailed Indigenous record of Mexica daily life that survived the sixteenth century. Its twelfth book describes foods, markets, and preparation methods with a precision that later archaeologists and ethnobotanists have repeatedly confirmed in material form. Sahagún did not work alone; his Nahua collaborators, trained at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, are the true authors of most of its content. The document is a collaboration across a profound rupture in time, and it must be read as such. Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, written decades after the events it describes, provides the eyewitness texture that the Codex cannot: the soldier's astonished account of Tlatelolco's market, its scale, its order, the staggering variety of its goods. Hernán Cortés's own letters to the Spanish crown offer a parallel, more politically calculated view. Neither Díaz nor Cortés was a disinterested observer, but what they recorded of the market — Cortés estimating over 60,000 people present daily — has informed every subsequent account of pre-contact urban food life. The demographic ground was mapped, in the twentieth century, principally by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, the Mexican anthropologist and physician whose work on the African population of colonial New Spain changed the discipline. His figures for 1570 and 1646 established that Africans outnumbered Europeans in New Spain in both those years — a fact that had been largely suppressed or ignored in nationalist accounts — while both groups remained small beside the Indigenous majority. Understanding the origins of Mexican food without this demographic framework produces a distorted picture: colonial cuisine was not simply a Spanish overlay on an Indigenous substrate. It was a three-way negotiation, with African cooks and traders playing roles in the kitchen that the written record persistently underrepresents. The labour economics of the tortilla — which is to say, the labour economics of the household — were given their most useful quantitative framing by Arnold Bauer, whose work on women's labour calculated that before the arrival of mechanised nixtamal mills, a woman's daily obligation to grind and press tortillas for one household ran to five or six hours. This figure is not merely sociological. It explains the revolution represented by the 927 nixtamal mills operating in Mexico by 1935, the nearly 6,000 by 1940, and the dry masa flour industry that began at Cerralvo, Nuevo León, in 1949. Bauer's calculus makes visible what cookbooks never show: that the primary ingredient in the tortilla was not maize but time, and specifically women's time. The archaeological record has deepened and complicated the picture that the written sources provide. The Xihuatoxtla rock shelter in the central Balsas valley of Guerrero has placed maize in human use at least 8,700 years ago; the oldest dated cobs, from Guilá Naquitz in Oaxaca, run to about 6,250 years. Squash seeds from that same Guilá Naquitz site reach back some 10,000 years, among the oldest documented domestic plant remains in the Americas. The common bean was domesticated in Mesoamerica, with the Oaxaca valley among the probable centres. A 2023 genetic study added a further dimension: roughly a fifth of modern maize's genome derives from a second, highland teosinte introgression. The picture of maize domestication is not a single event but a long, distributed process. Archaeobotanists, not cooks, hold these threads. In the published culinary record, the first cookbooks in print after Mexican independence arrived in 1828 (Arte nuevo de cocina y repostería acomodado al uso mexicano, published in New York) and 1831 (Novísimo arte de cocina and the three-volume El cocinero mexicano, both in Mexico). The 1831 printed mole poblano recipes contain no chocolate — a detail that complicates the convent legend that has accumulated around that dish. Josefina Velázquez de León's Platillos regionales de la República Mexicana, published in 1946, gave regional Mexican cooking its first systematic documentation for a general readership. Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico, published in 1972, carried that regional project to an English-speaking audience with a rigour and specificity that set a standard not commonly matched since. Kennedy died in 2022; her research papers are held at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The historians matter to the cook because the food is not static, and the changes are documented. NAFTA in force from 1 January 1994, the soda tax of 2014, the warning labels introduced 1 October 2020, the constitutional ban on planting GM maize that passed in March 2025 — each of these sits in a causal chain that reaches back through the nixtamal mill ledgers, the colonial tribute lists, and the Florentine Codex. Knowing the chain does not make you a better cook in any narrow technical sense. But it keeps you from mistaking recent for ancient, invented for inherited, or simplified for true.