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In the description of his discoveries in New Spain, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún speaks of a variety of “monstrous” trees, of which the edible leaves and fruits are part of the natives’ diet. He refers to nopalli, a plant of the cacti family, sacred to the Aztecs because they considered that its roots connected with the underworld, and the prickly pears, also called “sacred hearts”, with heaven.

This ancestral ingredient is an icon of our identity, an essential element of Mexican cuisine and landscape, immortalized in the national emblem by the myth of Mexico-Tenochtitlan’s founding, where the Aztecs witnessed the eagle devouring the snake standing on a paddle cactus.