7.02

Cultural influences

Native American influence

Information about Native American cuisine comes from a great variety of sources. Modern-day Native peoples retain a rich body of traditional foods, some of which have become iconic of present-day Native American social gatherings. Foods like cornbread are known to have been adopted into the cuisine of the United States from Native American groups. In other cases, documents from the early periods of contact with European, African, and Asian peoples allow the recovery of food practices which passed out of popularity in the historic period. Archaeological techniques, particularly in the subdisciplines of zooarchaeology and paleoethnobotany, have allowed for the understanding of other culinary practices or preferred foods which did not survive into the written historic record. The main crops Native Americans used in Mexico and Central America were corn and beans, which are used in contemporary dishes such as pupusas, tamales, pozole, chuchitos, and corn tortillas. The main Native American crops used by Natives of South America were potatoes, corn and chuño, used mainly in modern-day Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Bolivian and Paraguayan dishes such as arepas, papa a la huancaína, humitas, chipa guasu, locro and many more.

African Influence

Africans brought and preserved many of their traditions and cooking techniques. They were often given less desired cuts of meat, including shoulder and intestines. Menudo, for example, was derived from the habit of the Spaniards of giving the slaves cow's intestines. Enslaved Africans developed a way to clean the offal and season it to taste. African slaves in the southern United States did the same thing with pig's intestines, creating the dish known today as chitterlings. In South America, the scraps of food the landlords did not eat were combined to create new dishes that nowadays have been adopted into the cuisines of their respective nations.

European Influence

Europeans brought their culinary traditions, but quickly adapted several of the fruits and vegetables native to the Americas into their own cuisines. Europe itself has been influenced by other cultures, such as with the Moors in Spain, and thus their food was already a mix of their world. The European influence for many Latin American cuisine mainly comes from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and to a lesser extent France, although some influences from cuisines as diverse as British, German and Eastern European are also evident in some countries' cuisines such as Argentina and Uruguay, which have Italian cuisine as a main influence, with great Spanish, British, German, Russian, French, and Eastern European influence as well.

Asian Influence

A wave of immigrants from Asia, such as China and Japan, also influenced the cuisine of Perú and Brazil. The Chinese brought with them their own spices and food-styles, something that the people of Latin America accepted into their tables. Not only that, but several Asian restaurants also adapted many Latin American food-styles into their own. Other countries in Latin America such as Uruguay and Argentina have adapted Armenian and Israeli cuisine due to mass immigration from those countries to Argentina and Uruguay.