| What's also interesting is to imagine Mexican food before 1492 (Aztec and Mayan), without cheese or wheat flour. They ate tortillas, tamales, and other breads made out of cornmeal dough, with protein mostly from beans, but also turkey, duck, fish, deer, and sometimes sources odd to us today like lake algae, ant eggs, and dog meat. They'd make sauces from tomato and peppers, and the mole sauces of Oaxaca would fit in quite well (using ingredients like cocoa and ground peanuts). They'd use honey from stingless bees and nectar from agave plants instead of sugar, and quite sparingly. Imagine hot cocoa without milk, flavored with honey, vanilla, and sometimes spices like white cinnamon, Mexican anise, allspice, and even chile powder! Mexican food would look very different from the Tex-Mex interpretations we're fimilar with but not too different modern cuisine from rural Mexico. On some cooking show, a contestant challenged to cook for a gluten-free vegan passed easily by cooking Mexican food while all of the other contestants struggled. |