Read More: New Mexico's oldest cuisine goes modern-while staying authentic. Chile became a dominant feature in this period of isolation.” “There was little influence back and forth between what is now New Mexico and Mexico in the 17th and 18th centuries. A wagon train would come up every two or three years and bring nice things for the rich folks in the area, but not for the general population. “It’s really important to understand that New Mexican food, as similar as it is to Mexican in some respects, grew up independently,” says Bill Jamison, co-author with our culinary editor Cheryl Alters Jamison of Tasting New Mexico: Recipes Celebrating 100 Years of Distinctive Home Cooking (Museum of New Mexico Press). Yes, we share staples-chiles, posole, tortillas, and beans, for instance-but our only-in-New-Mexico spin is a centuries-old distillation of Native foraging and cultivation, Spanish colonial imports, and a long period of geographic isolation, before the railways began offloading edibles from elsewhere. The confusion is understandable to a point. NOTHING BURNS OUR BURRITOS like hearing people-including otherwise knowledgeable foodies-refer to New Mexico’s cuisine as “Tex-Mex” or “Mexican.”
