Mexican quesadillas filled with squash blossoms, cheese and epazote
Origin: Oaxaca & Mexico City, Mexico
From the journey of Pumpkin & Squash.
Squash blossom quesadillas are one of Mexico's great indigenous foods: a direct continuation of pre-Columbian Aztec and Oaxacan cooking in which every part of the calabaza was eaten, including the flowers. The male blossoms of the squash plant (the ones on long stems, not attached to forming fruit) have been eaten in Mexico for thousands of years, stuffed with cheese and epazote (a pungent, essential Mexican herb with no Western equivalent) and folded into corn tortillas cooked on a comal. In Oaxacan cooking the quesadilla is not merely a filled tortilla; it is a fresh masa disc pressed by hand and cooked on the griddle with the filling enclosed inside. Mexico City street markets still sell them this way: enormous, griddle-cooked masa quesadillas, stuffed with flor de calabaza, huitlacoche, or squash itself. This is the food of the Aztec capital, sold in essentially the same form it was sold in Tenochtitlan.
Squash blossoms are available at Mexican markets, farmers' markets in summer, and increasingly in mainstream supermarkets. They are highly perishable; use on the day of purchase or the day after at most. The epazote is the herb that makes this taste authentically Mexican; without it the flavour is pleasant but generic.
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