What Aguacate means
Aguacate is a Mexican ingredient name of Nahuatl origin meaning "avocado". It comes from āhuacatl (avocado). It is pronounced ah-gwah-KAH-teh, and it is most associated with Michoacán.
The much-repeated claim that āhuacatl meant testicle first is wrong. The fruit sense is primary, the anatomical sense is a later joke by resemblance, and the ordinary sixteenth-century word for testicle was ātetl.
Aguacate is one of the many Mexican food words formed in Nahuatl. Spanish borrowed it, and in several cases English borrowed it again from Spanish. See how Nahuatl builds words and the full list of Mexican food names.
This is a site about what Mexican words mean, so there is no recipe here. For the name itself: The words that appear inside dish names: the chiles (ancho, guajillo, pasilla, chipotle), the corn words (nixtamal, masa, tortilla, elote), and the tools (comal, molcajete, metate). Learn these and most menu items decode themselves.
