










































Review of: 
Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes 
By Adán Medrano 
Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014, Pp. 186, bibliography, index. 
 
Review By: MM Pack 
Austin, TX 

 
The region of North America now known as Texas has always been a crossroads of food cultures. The 
earliest inhabitants were primarily nomadic groups with trading connections ranging from Arizona to 
Georgia, into Central Mexico and up the Mississippi River Valley. In the 16th-century, Spaniards and 
mestizos migrated into this northernmost province of colonial Mexican territory; they were joined in 
the 19th century by Northern Europeans and Africans arriving via the American South, Anglo settlers 
from the Midwest and Upper South, German and Czech farmers brought by enterprising impresarios. All 
these cultures, seeking land and opportunity, contributed to the state’s culinary traditions and the 
foods that Texans eat today. 

Adan Medrano’s Truly Texas Mexican is a book of history, context, and recipes that focuses on the 
segment of Texas food traditions rooted in the cuisines of original Native American inhabitants—both 
north and south of the Rio Grande—who intermingled with and were ultimately absorbed by early 
immigrants from colonial Mexico. His thesis is that the foods of pre-Hispanic peoples coupled with 
ingredients, influences, and flavors introduced early from points south constitute a regional Mexican 
cuisine equivalent to other regional Mexican cuisines like those of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Michoacán. 

Medrano names this cuisine Texas Mexican and stands firm that it is not the same as Tex-Mex, the 
popular and widespread concept of Mexican-influenced Texas food. He contends that Tex-Mex 
represents only a limited and anglicized facet of the larger, far older regional cuisine. He posits that 
Texas Mexican is the home cooking for descendants of early Native American/Hispanic residents (also 
known as Tejanos, Mexican-Americans, and Chicanos), while Tex-Mex refers specifically to the dishes 
developed in early 20th-century Texas restaurants that catered primarily to Anglos and steadily 
became popular in other parts of the US. (In the 1980s, Diana Kennedy described such as “an overly 
large platter of mixed messes” (1989:xiii) and was appalled by the liberal applications of molten 
processed cheese.) 

Medrano’s terminology differentiation is useful and should probably be more widely adopted. The term 
Tex-Mex wasn’t even applied to things culinary until the 1970s; before that, it was all simply called 
“Mexican food.” Today, The Oxford English Dictionary defines Tex-Mex as “a Texan style of cooking 
using Mexican ingredients.” Joe S. Graham, in the Texas History Association’s Handbook of Texas, 
characterizes Tex-Mex foods as “a combination of Indian and Spanish cuisines, which came together to 



make a distinct new cuisine.” Both definitions use Tex-Mex to describe what Medrano says ought to be 
called Texas Mexican. 

So what, exactly, constitutes Texas Mexican cuisine? In the varied terrains and climates of Texas and 
Northern Mexico, Native Americans ate fresh- and saltwater fishes and shellfish, hunted deer, bison, 
turkey, quail, and rabbit, and foraged for native pecans, sweet mesquite beans, prickly pear cactus 
fruits and paddles, wild berries and plums, and quelites (wild greens such as purslane and lambs’ 
quarters). 

Ingredients that arrived from far-flung trading connections and then along with early Mexican settlers 
were beans, corn, chiles, squashes, potatoes, avocados, and tomatoes. From the Old World via Mexico, 
Spaniards brought beef, pigs, goats, and sheep; they introduced wheat, sugar, rice, onions, and garlic, 
as well as citrus, melons, and many other fruits and vegetables. Cooking styles included roasting and 
baking in earth ovens, grilling, steaming, stewing and boiling over open fires, grinding, fermenting, 
drying, salting, and smoking. 

These elements all contribute to the blended cuisine that Medrano, a San Antonio native with family 
connections in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, grew up eating at home, along with his 
neighbors and most of the Tejano population. Many of the book’s recipes include extensive headnotes, 
almost mini-essays that are short histories of specific ingredients and cooking processes; two good 
examples are avocados and the preparation of corn. In addition to two introductory chapters that cover 
big-picture context and history, Chapter 3 is a short list of kitchen tools and ingredients; newcomers to 
this cooking might have benefitted from some more of this. Piloncillo is included but canela is not; 
dried chiles are described but fresh ones aren’t. And, perplexingly, the nixtamalized corn masa in the 
index and history chapters is listed as “corn flour” (term not in the index) within recipes. 

The book’s 100 recipes are grounded in traditional ingredients and preparations, which the author 
characterizes as lighter, subtler, more healthful, and far more varied than their sometimes similarly 
named Tex-Mex counterparts. The recipes also reflect CIA-trained chef Medrano’s own tastes, 
preferences, and family traditions. Not all the ingredients used in the cuisine are included in recipes—
no mesquite beans, prickly pear fruits, or quelites, for example. He excludes game and offal dishes as 
well as open-fire cooking, because “the subjects merit books unto themselves.” He does, however, pull 
in a few recipes from other regions of Mexico and include some newly developed dishes (like Grilled 
Clams in Tequila Broth) that are “created in the spirit of the Texas Mexican flavor profile to indicate 
how our cuisine is evolving and creating new combinations of European and Meso-American New World 
ingredients” (Medrano, 2014:4). 

Truly Texas Mexican aims to define and shine a light on a largely ignored cuisine, reclaim culinary 
territory for its practitioners and their ancestors, and interpret that cuisine within the multi-cultural 
context that is modern Texas. Both Texans and curious cooks from elsewhere can enjoy these recipes 
while appreciating how indigenous ingredients and migration patterns contribute to the region’s 
foodways. 



References Cited 

Graham, Joe S. Tex-Mex Foods. Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical 
Association. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/lgtlt (accessed 
February 10, 2015). 

Kennedy, Diana. 1989. The Art of Mexican Cooking. New York: Bantam. 

Oxford English Dictionary http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200001 (accessed February 
14, 2015). 


