Latin American Cooking/Recipes [antikvár]

'The Melting "Pot ^oMth of the 'border Jin the nearly 500 years since the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and South America, a series of richly diverse cuisines has developed in the region. In Mexico, where there was a high Indian civilization, modern cooking is still firmly based on its Aztec-Maya foundations, while revealing clearly the impact of Spain, which introduced its own foods and cooking methods. To a lesser extent Mexico was influenced by the sophisticated dishes that were brought in from France and Austria during its brief experience as a French puppet state ruled by the ill-starred Maximilian and Carlotta. The dishes of Peru, heart of the great Inca Empire, which took in most of what is now Ecuador as well as the better part of Chile and Bolivia and a small part of Argentina, still bear the unmistakable stamp of their antique past overlaid by Spanish imports. Brazil is kaleidoscopic. There was no great Indian society here, so the indigenous peoples contributed little more than raw materials. The country's modern cooking is a mixture of Portuguese, African slave and primitive Indian influences, and it is both unique and quite good. The cuisines of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, with no great indigenous past to guide them, have evolved as the many European strains in the population—Spanish, English, German, Italian and others—reacted to native ingredients. Many a fine dish started as an improvisation using a local food instead of an unobtainable European one. Many home dishes suffered a sea change in the long migration. English bread sauce, surely one of the most innocent inventions of the kitchen, becomes quite complicated in Chile when as salsa de pan it takes the place of he'chamel as a base for what would have been creamed dishes. Adaptations and invenrions, the clash as well as the wedding of cultures, have produced a repertory as varied as the geography of the mountain-dominated conrinent. Overlying all these Latin American cuisines is the influence of Spain. The pace at which Spain introduced its food to this hemisphere is remarkable in the face of the difficulties of transporting animals and seed in less than speedy ships across the Atlantic, and then up formidable mountains to cities at 8,000 to 10,000 and more feet of altitude. The beef,