Sindoor in your sauce

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: For Chef Guillermo Cadena, India may be at the other end of the world from the place he calls home, but this is his ninth trip to the country. And despite the odd $2,000 it costs just to travel to and fro, the charm of India is intact for him. This Mexico City-based chef has been frequenting southern India more, his current trip being the first where he will take off for a week in the northern parts of the country. In Delhi’s Amigo recently to showcase some of his latest gastronomic creations from different parts of Mexico, he points out that the bases for food in the two cultures are similar. Contemporary Mexican, while still not as popular as Peruvian globally, is finding fans across continents, and India too has seen the first few exclusively-Mexican restaurants come up. Cadena explains to Suman Tarafdar why tortillas and quesadillas have great potential to be accepted at the mass level in India.

The first encounter with modern Mexican cuisine unfortunately but usually comes with Tex Mex food, which is not representative of Mexican cuisine at all. Unlike Europeans, for most Indians, Mexican cuisine comes as natural — rich and spicy and aromatic. There are clear similarities between the curry and the mole sauces, which are practically the same in many cases. In general in Mexico, people are heavy meat eaters, but other than that, an Indian would find Mexican cuisine very similar — not just in the ingredients, but even in the presentation. Just the method of preparation is different.

Mexico and India share a similarity of approach to life in general — especially in the spiritual and religious aspects, and this extends to food as well. We have this saying in Mexico — ‘if there is disagreement in the kitchen, then the tamales would not cook well’.

Today Mexican cuisine is a combination of the old pre-Columbian food, which was largely corn and chili based, the food brought in the Conquistadors — the Spaniards who ruled the land for about four centuries, influencing all aspects of life. Cuisine saw the introduction of rice, new meats such as beef and chicken as well as wine.