San Antonio Book Festival - Adán Medrano
Photo Courtesy of Marie D. De Jesús
Book Festival Author

Adán Medrano

Adán Medrano is a food writer, chef, and filmmaker specializing in the indigenous foods of Texas and the Americas. His book Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes was a Foreword INDIES Finalist. His subsequent book was Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking.

Medrano is the Executive Producer/Writer of the food documentary Truly Texas Mexican, which won Best Documentary at the New York Independent Cinema Awards, the Audience Choice Award at the Hill Country Film Festival, and was named an Official Selection at the Sonoma International Film Festival. 

An advocate for the arts, he was appointed by the governor of Texas and served six years as a commissioner on the Texas Commission on the Arts. In his career as a foundation grant-maker, he spent 23 years working throughout Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and during his travels came to recognize the universal power of food. He has lectured about food and culture and showcased his recipes at many universities and institutions, including the Culinary Institute of America. He is the editor of the Texas Tech University Press book series Indigenous Foodways of Texas and Northern Mexico. His new book is The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook.

More About Adán Medrano

  • The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook

    In 15,000-year-old archaeological sites throughout Texas and Northeastern Mexico, records left by Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Apache, and other Indigenous communities tell stories about their food practices, the roots of Texas Mexican cuisine. Author and chef Adán Medrano, a Coahuiltecan descendant, has made it his life's work to document these food practices and the stories they narrate. In "The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook," he honors the plant-based cooking history, traditions, and knowledge that make up the comida casera (home cooking) of today's Texas Mexican community.

    Each of the 90 kitchen-tested recipes includes detailed cooking instructions intended for contemporary home cooks. Headnotes for each recipe describe how the dish entered the region's culinary traditions and became integral to the culinary act of meaning-making in the community. The book provides explanations of the origins of iconic ingredients like squash, cactus, mesquite, and sunflowers, as well as more recent, post-Conquest ingredients like watermelon, rice, and cauliflower. Texas ancestors ate pecans and black walnuts, along with acorns, grapes, berries, seeds, and tubers. Mesquite and cactus were central to celebrations.

    Home cooks of all levels can discover and reclaim ancient ingredients and simple techniques in this volume and come away with a deeper knowledge of the agricultural systems that belie our current foodways.

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