Ready to think way outside the bun? Chicago’s Field Museum is teaming up with more than a dozen area restaurants to give us a sampling of truly old school Mexican food, a Taste of The Aztec World. This weeklong, multi-venue celebration is part of their exclusive exhibition, The Aztec World. Acclaimed and up-and-coming chefs and mixologists will create dishes and cocktails with the Aztec empire’s cuisine in mind.

That cuisine, it turns out, has a lot in common with what we think of as traditional Mexican food. Plenty of maize [or corn] for tortillas, tamales and pozoles [soups or stews], for example. Lots of legumes, vegetables and fruits. And maguey, or agave, a native Mexican plant with broad, long, spiked leaves; it resembles a cactus plant, but it’s not—in fact, it’s related to lilies. I’ve seen these large, impressive leaves [often two feet or more in length] in produce departments of Mexican supermarkets in my Logan Square neighborhood and wondered what they were for. I’m still not clear how home cooks use the leaves, but agave nectar is a very sweet syrupy liquid that you can use like honey—in tea and coffee, on pancakes or French toast or in desserts… Agave is also used for making high-end tequila as well as mezcal and pulque, fermented maguey juice whose boozy origins actually predate the Aztecs. Seafood was also an important part of the Aztec diet, as it is in modern Mexican cuisine. Continue reading “Forget “Walk Like an Egyptian”—it’s time to eat like an Aztec” →