The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook

In 15,000-year-old archaeological sites throughout Texas and Northeastern Mexico, records left by Indigenous communities tell stories about their food practices. Author and chef Adán Medrano, a descendant of these communities, has made it his life’s work to document these food practices. With Medrano’s expert eye, in this book we can learn about those ancestors’ ingredients, infer their techniques, and cook alongside them.

In The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook, each of the 90 kitchen-tested recipes includes detailed cooking instructions intended for contemporary home cooks. Headnotes for each recipe describe how the dish entered the region’s culinary traditions and became integral to the culinary act of meaning-making in the community. The book provides explanations of the origins of iconic ingredients like squash, cactus, mesquite, and sunflowers, as well as more recent, post-Conquest ingredients like watermelon, rice, and cauliflower. These ancestors ate pecans and black walnuts, along with acorns, grapes, berries, seeds, and tubers. Mesquite and cactus were central to celebrations.

Texas Mexican food is frequently called comida casera, home-style cooking. Home cooks of all levels can discover ancient ingredients and simple techniques in this volume and come away with a deeper knowledge of the agricultural systems that belie our current foodways.