Thomasina Miers - Meat-Free Mexican

Cook, writer, TV and radio presenter, winner of MasterChef and mother of three, Tommi has made cheese and run market stalls in Ireland, cheffed with Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries and in 2007, after living in Mexico for a year, co-founded Wahaca, winner of numerous awards for its food and sustainability credentials; in 2016 the whole restaurant group went carbon neutral. Tommis passion lies in great food and how it can positively affect people and the environment: she co-founded the award-winning Pig Idea campaign in 2015 with Tristram Stuart to tackle food waste, helped set up Chefs in Schools in 2017 for which she is a trustee, is an ambassador for the Soil Association and was awarded an OBE in 2019 for her services to the food industry. Tommi has a weekly column in the Guardians Feast magazine, cooking simple but delicious seasonal recipes, regularly cooks at different events and shops at her local food market. Meat-free Mexican is her eighth cookery book after, among others, Mexican Food Made Simple and Home Cook.

First published in Great Britain in 2022

by Hodder & Stoughton

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CopyrightHodder & Stoughton Ltd 2022

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Photography copyrightTara Fisher 2022

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I first went to Mexico between school and university, armed with earnings from a city job I had in London. I had no idea what to expect but took to the country as passionately as I hated the job that paid for it. Apart from the thrill of being somewhere totally foreign and astoundingly beautiful, and drinking in the exhilarating taste of freedom for the first time, it was the food that plunged me into this headlong love affair. Like many others, I had always thought that Tex-Mex was Mexicos national cuisine. But as I stomped, swam, danced and ate my way through the valleys and uplands of Oaxaca, the coast of Campeche and the Yucatn and the rainforests of Veracruz, I was astounded by the diversity of fruit and vegetables and the extraordinarily delicious food.

A myriad of wonderfully named and exotic herbs flavoured marinades and broths; an astonishing variety of chillies across the regions spiked salsas, relishes and ceviches. Wild greens, courgettes, pumpkins and mushrooms were used to fill tacos and make soups and stews; dazzlingly coloured and beautifully shaped tropical fruits I had never seen before made star appearances in nieves and paletas (sorbets and ice-lollies), fruit salads and creamy puddings. It was a far healthier and more interesting cuisine than I could ever have imagined. And it tasted amazing.

It was not until I did an event with Google, Kew and the Crop Trust years later that I learned that Mexico, along with a handful of other countries across the globe, is classified as mega-diverse. While an island like the UK has around 2,000 different native plant species, Mexico has around 50,000 and it is the enormous range of herbs, greens, corn, chillies, squash plants, fruits and edible flowers that makes it such a special place to cook and eat.

A trip to any food market in Mexico beautifully illustrates this abundance of ingredients. Yes, there are butchers aisles a plenty but the largest parts of the markets, and the most stunning, are piled high with mountains of carefully arranged, overlapping and beautifully patterned fruit and veg. Some of the 200 types of Mexican chillies, all with their own incredible flavours and characteristics, will be piled in various sacks and bags; heaps of corn in shades of red, dark blue, inky black, yellow or white, and bags of multi-coloured, beautifully patterned beans, will be attractively organised; radish mountains, piles of tomatoes of every colour, courgettes, pumpkins, bundles upon bundles of wild herbs, an abundance of varieties of greens and stunningly kaleidoscopic piles of exotic fruits all tempt the shopper.

Outside the markets the canny middlemen will sit, shucking corn, de-prickling cactus paddles and prepping neat packages of fresh vegetables for the shoppers to take home, an enticing version of pre-prepared veg. A love of good ingredients and cooking is written across the faces of every shopper and stall-holder; it seems to seep into every pore of Mexicos consciousness. This is a nation that culturally feels that the act of breaking bread with fellow humans is almost as important as drawing breath; where taxi drivers will converse with you at length about what their grandmother used to cook for them; where anyone you meet seems delighted to talk about where they were born and the particulars of that regions cuisine; where every occasion and event is an excuse for feasting. When I look at my own countrys often ambivalent approach to good food, which is often seen as a luxury, not a necessity, I find myself wondering when and where did we get it so wrong.

When we first opened Wahaca, nearly 15 years ago, perceptions of Mexican food were understandably skewed by the meat and cheese fests in Tex-Mex restaurants across the world. Even with the explosion of real Mexican restaurants opening in the UK, across Europe and as far as Australia in the last decade, there still lingers belief that Mexican food is mainly meat heavy and unhealthy. This is not the Mexico I know. Yes, the Mexicans are masters in rich, succulent, chilli-spiked meat braises and great seafood, and yes, as with so many diets worldwide, there has certainly been a steady shift to higher meat consumption. However, the indigenous Aztec diet was a celebration of vegetables and other plant-life, full of beans (uniquely rich in fibre and protein), corn (full of essential vitamins and minerals) and vegetables like chillies, tomatoes and squash, which together provided almost all the nutrition needed for a healthy, complex diet.

This ancient diet is strikingly similar to many vegetarian and flexitarian diets being embraced around the world today; mainly plant-based with masses of protein naturally occurring from the beans, nuts and seeds. Occasionally wild birds, insects and fish from Mexicos long coastline added to the diet but it was largely vegetable-focused. Like so many other traditional cuisines around the world, Mexicos is centuries old but feels thrillingly modern.