La Merced: Eat your way through Mexico City’s largest market

Mexico City CNN — Mexico City’s love affair with food – from street-side tacos to warm, fluffy tamales that give off a puff of aromatic steam when released from their husks – is abiding and all-encompassing, and no trip here would be complete without a thorough exploration of the culinary riches the city has to offer. The modern market was built in the late 1950s, but Merced has been a very active commercial area since the 1300s, and because of all this, it’s one of the best places in the city to find traditional market food.” Tours are done only in small groups, especially on the busy weekends, as it is, first and foremost, a working market, and shoppers and vendors have no time for gawking tourists getting in the way. Euan McKirdy/CNN Head tacos Blinking in the bright Mexico City sun, the group exits the building – one of the market’s eight – through a slim passageway and walks along a narrow, bustling alley. Euan McKirdy/CNN The tacos de cabeza – literally, “head tacos” – are complex in taste and texture, but it takes a certain concentration to ignore the fact that we’re eating parts of the animal that, in the US or Europe, would normally be discarded. Still chewing the last of the sticky, flavorful meat we wander to our next stop, El Pollo, which serves us quesadillas de huitlacoche – quesadillas served with corn smut, the musty, earthy fungus also known as “Mexican truffle.” It’s unique to the country – elsewhere in the world smut is seen as a disease and farmers will destroy whole fields to rid their crop of the infestation, but here it is actively encouraged.