Latin Cooking

The arrival of the Spanish in the New World revolutionized the region's indigenous cuisines and put the "Latin" in Latin America cooking. The Spanish brought some good and some controversial changes to the region's traditional food ways.

The Spanish introduced a host of Old World ingredients to the Americas. Meats like beef, lamb, pork, goat, and chicken were new to this part of the globe. Dairy products, like milk, cream, sour cream, and cheese had never been used in the region. Citrus fruits like oranges and limes (which are now essential in Mexican and Spanish-Caribbean cocktails and marinades) were hitherto unknown. Grains like wheat flour for making bread and pastries, and ever rice, were new. Seasonings like cumin and oregano (now cornerstones of Spanish-Caribbean cooking), saffron, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and anise brought diverse flavors to the New World table.

Sugar, in the form of sugarcane, arrived in 1493 in what is now the Dominican Republic. Without it, there may never have been a Latino dessert like flan. Other key imports included beverages like coffee and brandy. The Portuguese were also active in the transcontinental trade, bringing a wide variety of Old World, African, and Asian Foods to the Americas. Portuguese slavers and supply ships introduced two fruits that would become mainstays in the Latin diet: bananas and mangoes. Millions of slaves were brought from Africa to work the sugarcane plantations that soon stretched  from Havana in Cuba to Bahia in East Brazil. And with them came palm oil, yams, and okra.

Equally influential were the new kitchen technologies introduced by Europeans. The oven (invaluable for baking breads and desserts), metal pots and pans, and techniques for sauteing, deep-frying, and rendering pork fat changed the face of Latin American cooking. Europeans also brought several new manufacturing technologies that had a profound impact on New World economies and nutrition: the oil and grape press, the wine barrel, the lambic or still, and the sugar mill.

many of the world's primary foods originated in the Americas. Potatoes, corn, squash, avocados, chayotes, sweet potatoes, jicama, yuca, malanga, and  cactus, to name just a few vegetables. Tomatoes, tomatillos, pineapples, papayas, guavasc , cherimoyas, passion fruit, cashews, walnuts, brazil nuts, and peanuts, to name a few fruits and nuts.

Chile peppers were also native to the Americas, as were seasonings like all spice and annatto. Even turkey was a New World food ( the people of Mexico domesticated it). So was the arrowroot used to thicken the gravy. As for sweets, the entire world's dessert repertory would be severely impoverished without two ingredient that originated in Latin America: vanilla and chocolate. Food historians suggest that the native peoples of the Americas had a much more interesting, diverse, and healthy selection of foods available in their markets in the fifteenth century than Europeans did in theirs.

Hundreds of dishes popular in Latin America today originated with the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, from the salsas, moles, and tortilla dishes beloved by Mexicans to the ajiacos (meat and vegetable stews) and barbecued meats enjoyed in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The English word barbecue originated on the island of Hispaniola from the Arawak Indian term barbacoa, which refers  to the cooking technique of spicing and smoke drying meat on lattices of green wood built over a fire. The Incas invented the grain puddings and potato soups now prized by Peruvians and Bolivians. the toasted manioc flour enjoyed by modern Brazilians, Uruguayans, and Argentinians (who sprinkle it over grilled meats) originated with native Indians of the Amazon. Tamales and their cousins nacatamales, pasteles, ballacas, and humitas were popular throughout the region. These variations on a theme of a corn-based dough cooked in a corn husk or banana leaf seem to have sprung up simultaneously all over the continent.