While researching late 19th-century European-style sweetshops and bakeries in Mexico City, I stumbled across a recipe for Caracoles a la Mexicana—Mexican-style snails. I found this peculiar recipe in El Gastrónomo, a cooking magazine dedicated to providing the middle- and upper-class public with multiple modern cooking techniques, as well as a variety of national and international recipes. This dish, and El Gastrónomo more broadly, illustrates the complexity of Mexican cuisine between the 1920s and the 1930s: a moment when a growing sense of nationalism began to define daily practices while coexisting with an established appreciation of cosmopolitism, carried from the 19th century.

The candy shop and bakery H. Deverdun, pictured here around 1910, illustrates the influence of Europe on the culinary world of Mexico City. Courtesy Louis Deverdun Bompard

El Gastrónomo was founded in 1928 by French chef Alfred-Louis Deverdun, the former owner of the renowned candy shop and bakery H. Deverdun, one of the finest high-end gourmet shops in Mexico City through the 19th century. Deverdun came from a tradition of French cooks based in Mexico after the Second French Intervention, when France invaded Mexico in the 1860s. Therefore, Deverdun was quite familiar with how positively Mexican elites received European cuisines by the turn of the 20th century. From the 1880s (when Deverdun inherited the shop from his father, Henri) through the 1920s, gastronomical cosmopolitanism reached its peak in differentiating between Mexico City’s upper and lower classes, even as Europeanization started to collide with other culinary horizons.

Alongside many other sweetshops and bakeries, H. Deverdun went bankrupt in the 1910s following the revolution. But Deverdun didn’t step away from the culinary arts. Instead, he collected the recipes he had learned through the years and published them in both a cookbook, Cocina Casera Francesa, and in El Gastrónomo. While nearly all dishes included in the cookbook stemmed from French culinary traditions, El Gastrónomo featured Mexican dishes alongside recipes from other parts of the world such as Russia, Britain, and Austria. The incorporation of this greater selection of food, especially the emphasis on Mexican ingredients and preparations, stands out as an early form of what José Luis Juárez López has called “culinary nationalism.” This culinary nationalism had its origins in patriotic discourses held by 19th-century Mexican intellectuals such as Guillermo Prieto or Manuel Payno. And later, in response to the political, social, and military complications that marked the first half of the 20th century, forming a unifying Mexican identity in contrast to other nations and cultures was essential. Culinary Europeanization still dominated the gourmand panorama, but local recipes grew in popularity as the Mexican Revolution reshaped the need to define Mexico by its history and culture.

While cookbooks were essential for the construction of national cuisines—as Arjun Appadurai has argued—magazines like El Gastrònomo were particularly effective in constantly updating culinary trends. Its readers could expect to find the latest in good taste and fine dining, both in and outside Mexico. As such, El Gastronómo showed the necessity of establishing a national cuisine while also promoting cosmopolitism. In its pages, you could read the steps to cooking classical French preparations like vol-au-vents, lobster chaudfroid, or foie gras aspic, while also finding advice on how to prepare Mexican drinks and dishes like pulques, cocadas, and chorizos.

El Gastrónomo featured Mexican dishes alongside recipes from other parts of the world such as Russia, Britain, and Austria.

This leads us back to Mexican-style snails. The 18th issue of El Gastrónomo, published on July 28, 1928, included the article “Snails” on the proper cleaning and preparation of the main ingredient. The piece followed the magazine’s usual format: a brief explanation of how best to prepare snails, followed by two recipes that put them to use. The difference, however, was in the content. The two recipes were snails a la provençale, a classic French dish, and the more unfamiliar Mexican-style snails. This second recipe reads:

Dip a piece of bread in water and vinegar, and mill it in the metate with a couple of garlic cloves, salt, pepper, green chilies, parsley, and peppermint. Once ground, add oil little by little, mixing everything with a wooden spoon until it thickens, and once you get the snails out of their shells, after being well-boiled, dip them in the sauce.

Note: it is good to remove the little black dot of their tails before you serve them.

This brief recipe fuses Mexican nationalism and Europeanization in a case of culinary syncretism. The mixture of French and Mexican cuisine is deliberate, not arising from an organic process of cultural assimilation. But perhaps it’s even more important to note that “Mexican-style snails” is not, by any means, a well-known Mexican recipe. Although snails are used in regional cuisines including those of Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and the State of Mexico, and there have been debates on whether snails were consumed during the pre-Hispanic period, El Gastrónomo’s recipe is different from any Mexican recipe I’ve found with snails as a core ingredient. Classic snail dishes made in San Juan Teotihuacán or Otumba resemble a stew prepared with epazote and onion or a variant of pico de gallo. 

So what exactly makes this particular entrée Mexican? Aside from green chilies, which were already a staple element in Mexican gastronomy by the 1920s, there are practically no other ingredients that seem tied to that era’s idea of national cuisine. Perhaps chilies’ strong flavor and spiciness were enough to mark this dish as a carrier of the Mexican culinary ethos. Or maybe this Mexicanness was signaled not only by the ingredients but also the technique. The use of metate, a pre-Hispanic grinding stone used in preparing various sauces, moles, and pipianes, hints at how tools also could become part of this culinary imaginary.

As such, both the title and the preparation of the dish stand out. By calling them “Mexican style,” the writer implies that this preparation was not a classic, distinctive Mexican dish, but a reinterpretation using the core of Mexican cooking: ingredients like chilies, and methods and tools such as grinding in a metate. This set of ideas was then applied to a French culinary staple, resulting in a rather peculiar form of syncretism that sought to expand the culinary knowledge of the readers through European techniques and ingredients, while also generating a feeling of familiarity in the use of Mexican elements.

Both the title and the preparation of the dish stand out.

Besides chilies and metate, it is hard to identify in this recipe other elements that constituted the idea of Mexicanness in early 20th-century cooking. The most contrasting element here is the bread sauce, a preparation that seems more fitting for a medieval British cookbook. Ingredients such as parsley and peppermint were used throughout Mexico by that point, but that usage does not necessarily translate to being a part of the national cuisine. In fact, almost none of the ingredients or methods used in these Mexican-style snails were symbolic of Mexican cuisine at the turn of the century, unlike staple products like corn, squash, or beans. These products, vindicated by postrevolutionary discourses, became symbols of the strong relationship between Mexican farmers and the milpa, a crop-growing system rooted in Mesoamerican culture.

There is no such thing as an “essence” in national cuisines, so studying cultural processes like syncretism in foodways becomes particularly challenging. Establishing boundaries between national cuisines demands that we also determine what constitutes the basis of a set culinary tradition. Even when we can pinpoint staple dishes, they are still volatile, subject to change in gustatory likings, availability, or cultural receptions. 

What’s interesting for food historians is not necessarily the search for this backbone. Instead, we want to know how such ideas come to be. Sources like El Gastrónomo are just one place that can further lead us to examine the complexity that surrounds food as an object of study.