An Archive of Handwritten Traditional Mexican Cookbooks Is Now Online via Open Culture

“The search for authentic Mexican food—or rather, the struggle to define what that meant—has been going on for two hundred years,” writes Jeffrey Pilcher at Guernica. Arguments over national cuisine first divided into factions along historical lines of conquest. Indigenous, corn-based cuisines were pitted against wheat-based European foods, while Tex-Mex cooking has been “industrialized and carried around the world,” its processed commodification posing an offense to both indigenous peoples and Spanish elites, who themselves later “sought to ground their national cuisine in the pre-Hispanic past” in order to fend off associations with globalized Mexican food of the chain restaurant variety.