Question
Hilda P J
What are the crossovers of Indian and Mexican flavours and ingredients?. I love both, eg. growing and using oregano a lot.
Answer
Certainly most of the spices that you find in Mexican cuisine, cumin and coriander and chilies and others, right, are common in Indian and Mexican cooking. And there are definitely flavor similarities that can be drawn, especially in certain preparations. And The foundational difference when you have two different regional cuisines that use the same or similar or substantially the same ingredients or flavor profile. I don't mean to characterize Indian and Mexican cuisines as being substantially similar, but there is a lot of crossover in ingredients that are used. The difference is going to emerge in the ratios of these ingredients that are used, and then also the additional ingredients that are used, as well as the cooking methods or those handling methods that are applied to those ingredients. And interestingly, with these spices that are used around the world, in this case, in Indian and Mexican cuisine, is that some of these ingredients originated in India, and they made their way to Mexico or to the New World. And some of these ingredients, like chilies, originated in Mexico, or largely in that part of the world, and then they made their way to India. And this all started as probably as recently as the European colonial era, which would've been a little over 500 years ago. So really not that long ago, in the bigger picture of humanity and even the movement of food. But in terms of the European colonial context, all of this happened rapidly, relatively rapidly. Once things started in the late 1400s, it was really within that following century or so that most of the spices made their way back and forth as subsequent sailors plied the oceans between these two parts of the world. So today, we look at Indian cuisine, it's characterized by chilies, most or all of which came from the New World. And then Mexican cuisine is characterized by a number of spices that would've come from India, and other ingredients as well like sesame seeds. Okay? So that's kind of just a quick example of some of these crossovers and how it occurred. An interesting place to look at this is in Indian regional curries, or what we call curries. In India, they have many different names for these simmered preparations that are based on spices in their whole form and ground form, combined with foundations of onions and tomatoes or nut and seed pastes. Okay? If you take that category of cooking from Indian cuisines and you compare them to Mexican mole or the different types of mole, this is where we start to see these interesting similarities in preparation technique, in the ingredients that are used, and even in some of the flavor threads that can be identified in the tapestry of flavors that come out in these preparations. Give it a try, and see if you can identify some of these aromas and some of these flavors as you look at the recipe lists, and that'll give you some hints as to what to look for on the palate and in the olfactory sensation as you experience these foods, ideally side by side, as you do such a comparison. And anyway, that's just a real quick sort of in a nutshell introduction to a comparison between these two regions, perhaps something that I'll dive deeper to in my own research one of these days. Thanks so much for asking that question.
