Oaxacan dishes have deep-rooted history
In Mexico’s Oaxaca, cooks have been making traditional dishes for centuries
In Oaxaca, culinary roots run deep. The mountainous Mexican state, with its golden stretches of Pacific beaches, is home to remarkable biodiversity and rich traditions.
It’s the birthplace of corn, and Indigenous communities have been cooking with myriad varieties of this and other foundational ingredients — chilies, chocolate, herbs and spices — for millenniums.
“The Indigenous identity has been passed down through multiple generations, over and over, and it really is what makes it so different,” says author Bricia Lopez, owner (with her siblings Fernando, Elizabeth and Paulina) of Guelaguetza, a James Beard Award-winning Oaxacan restaurant in Los Angeles, Calif.
Oaxaca is known as the land of the seven moles and the trademark sauce encapsulates the soul of the state, she adds.
But with her debut book, Oaxaca (Abrams, 2019; with writer Javier Cabral and her family) — “the first mainstream book in English, published in the U.S., written by an Oaxacan family about Oaxacan food ” — Lopez set out to illustrate that the food culture of her home state is much more than just the celebratory dish.
“Aside from mole, there are so many dishes that have this complexity of flavour because of the ingredients, but not because of the technique,” she explains, adding that Oaxacan cooks are adept at achieving a bold earthiness in their food using deceptively straightforward methods such as smoking and roasting. “It’s something that can be seen as simple when you eat it, but when you realize the amount of love that goes into every step and detail, then you understand, ‘Oh, this is what makes Oaxaca so special.’
“It’s because they’ve been making food like this for centuries, for generations. It’s not just a fad. It’s not just something that was born even 50 years ago. It is something that has so much deep-rooted history.”
In the book — filled with recipes passed down from the women in her family — Lopez tells the story of her family’s journey from Oaxaca to Los Angeles in the 1990s.
Her father Fernando founded Guelaguetza in 1994 and the following year served the late Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold for the first time. In his transformative review, Gold called it “the best Oaxacan restaurant in the country.”
Named after the time-honoured Oaxacan rite of reciprocity, guelaguetza as a custom also lies at the heart of the cookbook. In practice since the 15th century, Lopez explains, it’s “an ongoing ritual of kindness”: to give and receive in a spirit of generosity and selflessness.
Recipes excerpted from Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico by Bricia Lopez and the family behind L.A.’S Guelaguetza, with Javier Cabral. (Abrams)