The 1692 diary entrée of fourteen year old Mariana Calderón y Oliveira provides important insights about cooking and eating in colonial Mexico. Elite families like Mariana’s generally used Indian, Spanish commoners and casta (people of mixed heritage including folks with African roots) wage laborers as family cooks. In the 1690s, cooks in Tlaquepaque prepared various types of corn tamales. At first Indians loathed the pork fat that Iberians enjoyed so much; later they incorporated them into their cuisine when they learned that using them in corn tamale batter improved the tamale’s texture. Typically they served these tamales with chilly salsa too hot for the average new comer from Spain. But the children of the first Iberian settlers such as Mariana grew accustomed to eating foods like corn tamales served with spicy hot salsa.
