Why is it worth having another English-language Mexican cookbook given the ones I already cherish by Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, Marilyn Tausend, Zarela Martinez, and Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz among others?  The answer.  Apart from clear and easy-to-follow instructions, Roberto nails it on the head about three important issues.

A few years back I was teaching a cooking class and I had roasted a few trays of tomatillos in preparation. As I was hauling them to the classroom, a student walked by and stopped me. “Uh oh chef,” he said, noticing that the tomatillos were blackened. “Looks like you burned those.” That I actually had not burned them illustrates an important point. Learning to cook an unfamiliar cuisine often means unlearning many of the principles you once thought were universal.

Dead right.

Dead right, too, to chose sauces as the way into Mexican cooking.  Sauces are the defining characteristics of all high cuisines. Get the sauces right and you are a long way to having the cuisine mastered. Mexican saucemaking techniques are radically different from (say) those of France and of the English-speaking world.  Roberto breaks Mexican sauces down into salsas (a much larger category than the salsa that goes with chips in the US), guacamoles, adobos, and moles and pipianes.  Get a sense of their structure and you won’t need to refer to cookbooks when you make Mexican food, you won’t be tied to one sauce, one dish. If anything, I wish Roberto would go even further systematizing and explaining the structure.

And dead right too to explain this about the almond sauces (almendrados).

Because almonds came from abroad and were very expensive, they became a high status nut, a staple in sauces in upper class households.  . . You are more likely to find this array of fragrant sauces in central urban areas and people’s homes rather than the local comida corrida [quick lunch place].

Roberto gives plenty of the everyday sauces that everyone associates with Mexican street food and taquerias.  Much of the great Mexican food, though, is in private houses and to this day very hard for travelers to Mexico to sample, almost impossible outside Mexico (with a few shining exceptions).  That would have been true of most of the world’s high cuisines until very recently.  The well to do with fine cooks in their homes and the homes of their friends and relatives did not frequent restaurants.

So forget French techniques, learn a few basic sauces from each group, and think of long, leisurely meals in the great haciendas and town houses of Mexico and you’ll get new insight into high Mexican cuisine.

And right now I am relishing a lovely, simple salsa of chopped pineapple, cilantro, serrano chiles, onion and a touch of salt. And as soon as I get back to Mexico and have a blender, I’ll add more varieties of salsa roja and verde to my repertoire, and the pipian of pistachios though not, I think with lamb, and the red estofado de almendras with chicken which will bring the cooking full circle since Roberto borrowed this from our mutual friend, Iliana de la Vega.

Across Mexico, chunks of bacalao are sitting in water, being de-salted for dinner at midnight on the 24th.  The middle class Christmas dinner reflects the Spanish tradition.  A dish of bacalao a la vizcaína (salt cod Biscay-style) is an indispensable part of this meal, along with spaghetti or cannelloni, and either a turkey or a leg of pork stuffed with meat, fruits, and nuts.

-

The most upmarket bacalao in the "deli" Europea at about $22 a kilo

Discarded boxes outside Europea

Display of bacalao in Superama, the upmarket branch of Walmart

Norwegian bacalao in Walmart along with the necessary olives

Once the bacalao is de-salted, it is boiled in fresh water, drained, broken into pieces, and the spines are picked out.  The onion and garlic are sautéed in olive oil, tomatoes are added, and the sauce simmered for a while.  Then to finish, the cod, small peeled potatoes, olives, parsley, pepper, and salt if it is necessary are stirred in and the whole heated gently.

To learn more about bacalao, I consulted Ove Fossa who is President of the Norwegian commission for the  Slow Food Ark of Taste to preserve the traditional ways of making the very finest bacalao. Here’s a link to his brochure which is quite fascinating.  None of the bacalao in Mexico is of this quality, I fear.

For the grade of bacalao that ends up in Mexico, he recommended the Wikipedia articles.

For bacalao, salted and dried fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dried_and_salted_cod
For stockfish, dried, unsalted fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish
The two articles seem to be fairly accurate.
Both kinds are most often made from cod, generally considered the best quality, but several other species are used as well.
Due to climatic differences, the two are made in different areas. Drying unsalted fish can only be done in cold weather in the north, mainly the Lofoten islands, and Finnmark. Bacalao (klippfisk in Norwegian) is made in the south, near the towns of Ålesund and Kristiansund, where the fish would easily spoil unless salted.

Ove also kindly passed along export figures. Although at this time of year, it’s easy to think that Mexico must be gobbling up the entire Norwegian supply, in fact it’s a fairly small market.

The major buyers of Norwegian bacalao are Brasil (35.9 %), Portugal (30.5 %), the Dominican Republic (6.4 %), Jamaica, Congo, Angola and Italy (each 3-4 %) and then Mexico (2.8 %). The numbers are from 2010, they vary a little from one year to the next.

Norwegian stockfish on the other hand is sold almost exclusively to Italy (57.1 %) and Nigeria (30 %).

The export value of Norwegian bacalao in 2010 was 3.6 billion Norwegian kroner (610 million USD), and stockfish 450 million (76 mill USD). In comparison, the export value of farmed salmon was 30 billion (5,1 billion USD).

There’s a huge market in Mexico, though, for something cheaper perhaps because the rapidly expanding middle class wants to taste the kinds of Christmas dishes that once only the wealthy could afford. Last week Buena Mesa, the food page of one of Mexico’s main newspapers, Reforma, gave hints on how to detect imitation bacalao.  Any so-called bacalao without spines was not authentic.

I’d seen lots of imitation bacalao myself in early December in La Viga, the wholesale fish market in Mexico City.  It was made of robalo (Centroponus undecimalis), of sierra (in the mackerel family), and, as below, manta ray (aletas means wings).

Bacalao of manta ray in wholesale market at about $3.00 a kilo

Five foot cube of shark "bacalao" from the state of Campeche in the wholesale market

Sharks' fins in the wholesale market

What are restaurants using, one wonders?  What controls, if any, are there on the sale of endangered species in the wholesale market?  What controls, if any, are there on the naming of bacalao?  What is the connection between the rise of shark fin bacalao and the controversy over shark’s fin soup, descrbed here by Fuchsia Dunlop. Clearly as the Reforma article shows, some people are worried about imitations.  I would love to know more if any readers have any comments.

Here’s a canasta (basket).  US $275

Canasta bulging with liquor, coffee, chocolates

Here’s a despensa (larder).

Despensa with cereal, rice, dried milk, and cooking oil

And then there’s this cubeta (bucket) for $11.

That would really make your heart rise on Christmas morning, right?

Five hours sound too much. You don’t need an almost an hour to grind 1 kg. I did fieldwork in Tlaxcala in the beginning of the 80′s, and maize was sometimes ground by hand on a metate, usually between 5 and 6 or 7 in the morning. And I’ve tried it out myself, too, though to rather uneven results. Yes, it was hard work, but five hours? And there were more than six family members, plus the dogs that were also fed tortillas. Considering all the other stuff a rural housewife has to do, apart from the tasks you mentioned – wash clothes by hand, cook, feed the domestic animals, go out to buy stuff, keep the house and patio in working order, look after kids, help with the field work, it also sounds unrealistic.

From the way Heike phrases it, it sounds as if this village already had a mill so that the metate was used only on special occasions.  So was the dough (masa) for the day or just for a special meal?

Grinding (pineapple in this case, not maize)

Getting a clean measure of the time to grind for a family is hard.

• Family size and family appetites vary.
• Children interrupt or grandma pitches in to help.
• It is hard to grind continuously because it is such hard work.  In my experience, at first it goes really quickly because a metate plus woman is a very efficient machine.  Then it gets harder and harder as you tire. So do the breathers the grinder takes count as part of the time?  I would say so. For tortillas, you usually have to make five “passes” across the metate, that is starting with a handful of nixtamal (maize heated with alkali and drained) you move it from the top to the bottom of the metate with a series of back and forth strokes.  Then you gather it up with your fingers and move it back to the top, a small breather.  Then repeat four more times, with a few seconds’ rest leaning back on your heels between each repetition. Then a slightly longer breather as you put the dough (masa) in one container and take nixtamal out of another.
• Some women are better grinders than others, producing a consistent dough quickly.  Why there should be differences I am not sure, but it is a widely repeated claim.
• The dough for tamales and gorditas takes less time than the dough for tortillas (though tamales then take longer to make than tortillas).

Even given these problems, I’m pretty certain that grinding was the dominant task of the day, day after day, for whoever it was that did the grinding, taking not just an hour or so but hours and hours.

What about the other chores Heike mentions?  In the past washing would have been less of a chore because there were fewer clothes and yet fewer bed linens.  Keeping the house and patio clean (largely endless sweeping) was often handed off to girl children (who did not go to school), as well as the care of chickens, dogs, pigs, and younger children.

Child care, I think, often got very short shrift as women had to balance turning out the tortillas with spending time with the kids.   It’s purely anecdotal, but I remember being very taken aback in the mid 1990s to hear Eugenia Ricaud, then working for DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, the government family welfare agency run by politician’s wives) in San Miguel de Allende, say that the very best way to improve childrens’ lives was to put a mill in the village.  This allowed women to spend time with their  children (or take paid employment or develop handicrafts).

Of course, the ladies of DIF varied in their grip on life in the villages so I went back to Eugenia several years later to find out if I had really understood what she was saying.   Her answer was yes.

Leaving Mexico for a second and going to western Eurasia where simple grindstones were the main way of reducing grains to meal until Roman times (and in backwaters long after), grinding was work reserved for the lowest in society, usually slaves/prisoners so far as I can see.

The Roman army adopted rotary mills, I think largely because they ground more rapidly.  Even so it took a hefty legionary an hour and a half to grind enough meal to feed his group of eight for a day. And not only was the mill faster and less tiring because it was not driven by the weight of the grinder, the meal was almost certainly not as fine as the dough for tortillas. (Anyone who can get me a rotary mill so that I can do some comparative studies with the simple grindstone will win my unending gratitude).

But this is to get into Nick Trachet’s questions which will have to wait for tomorrow.

Heike also asks where I got my information on maize processing.  The answer is from observing, cross-questioning and working with women in different villages in Guanajuato: Margarita Muñoz Ramirez, who started grinding at the age of twelve in a village outside San Miguel de Allende, AltaGracia Sanchez Torrez and Maria Jesús de Cabrera Parra of Rodeo San José and Emily Bonilla of El Capulín, both outside Guanajuato.  I am also grateful for the input of the metateros (metates/grindstone-makers) in Comonfort, Guanajuato, particularly Manuel Olalde and Rafael Hernández Laguna and families.  Comparing notes with José Rodriguez of Mexico City who is finishing a Ph.D. thesis on Mexican metates and grinding for the University of Barcelona was also very helpful.  And of course my own experiments.

I also know the article by Arnold Bauer that she mentions originally published in Agricultural History 64 (1990), 1-17 and updated in Enrique Florescano and Virginia García Acosta, coord., Mestizajes tecnológicos y cambios culturales en México (Mexico: CIESAS, 2004), 169-99.  He suggests five to six hours, and cites various studies going back to one by Miguel María de Azcárate in 1837 that come to similar conclusions.  Jeff Pilcher has a good discussion of the mechanization of masa grinding and tortilla making in chapter five of ¡Que vivan los tamales! (University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

While we are at it, here is my response to the question “Why didn’t Mexicans abandon the metate?  And if you search under grinding you will find lots more.

Basket of shrimp empanadas, 5 for $30 pesos (US$2.20)

Saturday saw a group of three friends in La Viga, Mexico’s wholesale market, claimed to be the biggest in Latin America and the second biggest in the world.  It’s worthy of several blogs which will be coming along. First, though, is the shrimp empanada.  The market appears to run on shrimp empanadas available from the time it opens at three in the morning to the time when it winds down around two in the afternoon.  They’re made on the spot and served hot and fresh.

Roberto, part of a production line of two empanada makers and one fryer, explained how it was done.  The dough is made of flour from a big sack under the work bench and vegetable oil from equally big plastic garafons. It’s more like an Argentinean empanada dough than the flaky pastry (hojaldre) usually used for empanadas in Mexico.

It’s shaped into egg-sized balls (a phrase is worth many jokes in Mexico and probably elsewhere).  These are stored in a plastic bag (on left below).

Then the dough is rolled out on this oilcloth-covered counter. The empanada makers did it with two or three quick strokes. It took me half a dozen.

Rolling the dough

Then the shrimp mixture, at hand in a red plastic bowl, is sprinkled over the half of the dough furthest from the empanada maker.

Adding filling of small shrimp with chopped onion and tomato

Now comes the real artistry, the crimping. The part of the dough closest to the worker is flipped over.  The points are folded over and firmly pressed down. Then working backwards, the two hands in parallel, the sides are crimped to make a neat, secure, half oval.

Securely crimping the edges of an empanada

The empanada is thrown back to a waiting tray ready to be fried.

Perfectly uniform empanadas ready to fry

At this point, the third member of the team takes over.  He fries the empanadas about ten at a time. When they are brown, he scoops them out and arranges them artistically on a foil-lined basket with absorbent paper in the bottom.  He also fills the orders, wrapping the empanadas in absorbent paper and putting them in plastic bags.

Empanadas frying

How do they taste?

With a sprinkle of salt, a hefty dash of hot sauce, the crisp outside and shrimp-salad-like interiors warm and satisfy, cheering up a chilly morning where the wholesale aisles lit by bare light bulbs are awash with melting ice from the refrigerated fish trailers.

Like most fried things, they are not so good cold.  The dough is thin and gets tough as it cools.

Roberto and companions start work at three.  The clientele shifts from market workers to visitors as the morning wears on.  They make four hundred (each, I think, but they were too busy to answer many questions) on weekdays, eight hundred on the weekends. Certainly they were turning out a couple a minute when we were there.  Four hundred empanadas would bring in US$130.

They enjoyed seeing me make a fool of myself.  They grabbed a snack of fried fish in bites as they worked. But it was clear that the production line had to keep going if they were to make a profit.

The ergonomics of ten hours of empanada making. Note the boxes to stand on.

And here you can see the result. My empanada on the left, thick crust and uneven filling.  Roberto’s on the right. Perfect hand food.

My kindergarten-level empanada versus doctoral-level empanada (Beatriz's quip)

Huge thanks to my comadre, Beatriz, who knows the market and its people so well, and was prepared to share that knowledge, and to Tessa who made a perfect companion. And of course to Roberto and his co-workers.

 A man who died on the killing stone or on the field of battle did not immediately dissolve into nothingness, or rather everythingness, which was the common fate.

Instead for four years and for four years only he became a member of the warrior escort of the sun during in its progress across the heavens. . .

And that was the end.  . . . The warrior was dissolved into the general life force, the same life force which  was believed to animate hummingbirds and butterflies, creatures summoned into existence by the sun. . . .

Butterflies and hummingbirds are represented as endlessly displaying their beauty, dancing in the sun, and sipping the sweet nectar of flowers.

Monarchs flying in the warmth of the sun. Courtesy farflungphotos. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Every year, coincident with the celebration of the Days of the Dead (October 31 to November 1), the skies over the little town of Calvario del Carmen, northeast of Mexico City, are darkened by the fluttering wings of hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies completing their 3000 mile migration south from Canada and the United States.

Next morning before dawn the village youth go out with sticks to knock the butterflies, now numbed with cold, from the trees where they have settled.

Taking them home in plastic bags, they twist off the wings, mottled bright orange, the orange of the marigolds on the tombs in the cemetery, before roasting the bodies and eating them rolled up with salsa in tortillas.

The arrival of the butterflies is regarded as the arrival of the souls of the dead.

Beef head tacos/Tacos de cabeza

Delicious beef head tacos from El Torito (the little bull).

On right.

Macisa.  Solid meat

Trompa.  Muzzle

Cachete. The meaty bits below the eyes and between the ears and mouth.

Ojo. Eye

Lengua. Tongue

Surtida.  A mixture

On left.

Suadero.  Smooth, soft meat from above the udder or penis

Longaniza.  Spicy sausage (of distant Roman origin)

Campechanos. Mixed (not, as it sometimes means, a sweet bread)

Every small town I know in Central Mexico and every neighborhood in Mexico City has someone who specializes in tacos de cabeza.  The meat is chopped finely, a small taco is dipped briefly in hot fat to warm and soften it, and the meat is spooned on).  $4 pesos (30 US cents) a taco except for tongue which comes in at 8 pesos.

The drawing of the bull is standard, though the one below does not have a ring in his nose.

Another torito with chopped onion, salsa roja, limes, and cilantro to add to the taco.

Why hasn’t rising inequality resulted in in the much-predicted oligarchy?  Or to put it as he does: with so many unemployed, and income increasing faster among the affluent, why aren’t people hiring more servants?

Or to put it more personally, would you hire a servant?  Would you go out to work as a servant?

McArdle suggests that neither the rich nor the poor are enthusiastic about these options.

1. The cost is greater.  The poor are wealthier than they used to be. Hard as times may be, they don’t want to work for as little money (even inflation adjusted) as 100 years ago.  The rich don’t want to pay the higher prices. Plus taxes, regulation and liability make servants less appealing to the rich.

2.  The hassle is unappealing.  For the poor, they have more independence in regular service sector jobs.  For the rich (or middle class) servants have to be managed, including training.  And the rich value their privacy more, they don’t want servants in the house. And McArdle does not mention that it is socially taboo to have servants now in the United States.

As someone who feels that living in Mexico, as a rich gringa, I really should employ people, I would add that it’s not just a matter of managing. Servants are part of your life, other very real human beings. They have their own problems, usually much greater than yours. Taking these seriously (their child’s persistent eye infection, their jerk of a husband, the murder of their father) is something no one with any decency would avoid. Equally there’s no denying that it takes time and money.

3.  The alternatives are greater: cleaning services, take out, dry cleaners, and washing machines, for example.

I don’t think Americans will go back to working as or employing servants until things get a lot worse.  And that’s another reason to hope they don’t get worse. I would dearly love to live a servantless life.

Understanding food history, however, means you have to take the presence of servants into account.  This seems a good moment to repost a summing up of several of my posts about servants in the kitchen.

1. Lest We Forget: Servants in Culinary History

Why we tend to forget servants and who servants were

2 Mistress and Servant Go to Cooking Class

How the mistress learned to supervise the cook and how the cook learned to cook

3. Servants who Steal

What did and didn’t count as stealing, a response to readers’ questions

4. Servants: The Missing Link in Culinary Change

How an Indian servant learned to cook Indian food from a cookbook for British housewives

5. Servants and Ethnic Cuisines

The shadowy role of servants in “ethnic” cookbooks designed for an American market

6. Servants and Julia Child

The shadowy role of servants in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

In Mexico City, I find the tianguises (the moving markets) the most fun.  I am particularly addicted to one in an utterly dull upper working class, lower middle class area of south Mexico City.  Perhaps it’s inverted snobbery.  I like the fact that it’s huge, three city blocks long, three aisles wide, under tent, put up and taken down every week.  I like the fact that it’s utterly unpretentious, that the fruits and vegetables are terrific, that there are always surprises to be found, that I can get glimpses of what ordinary people eat unlike the denizens of upmarket areas such as Polanco, La Condesa, Coyoacán and San Angel, that I can buy shelled fresh peas, the best chicharron ever with lots of crispy meat attached, heavenly nata (clotted cream), whatever bit of the animal takes my fancy, as well as everything I don’t know where to find anywhere else from stoppers to prevent smelly drains to hand knitted children’s clothes to a great stall for cool reading glasses to nifty glassware (pirated?).

After that, it would probably be one of the flourishing markets, Coyoacán, or the upmarket San Juan, though that’s too far except for special occasions.  I go to these for specialty meats, specialty fruits, and to get my pressure cooker seals. I’m not much of a fan of their so-called hand-made tortillas.

When I was in Guanajuato, I preferred to leave the slightly depressing city mercado and head off to nearby small towns such as Silao.  The markets there were livelier, the produce fresher, the surrounding shops (seed shops, for example for beans and animal feed etc) more bustling.  And as Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo bean fame says, this is where you find super interesting plant foods and prepared dishes sold by people sitting in nearby doorways and sidewalks.  Sometimes these are farmers, sometimes not.  It often pays to pay a widow with few resources to sit there all day.  This is where you find exotic kinds of tamales, the delicious pinole, local honey, small caches of fruit, local yocoque in pottery cups.  I didn’t find the tianguises big improvements on these markets (except that perhaps if you wanted really nice imported fabric, for example, it might improbably be in the tianguis).

And, like all the working middle class Mexican women I know, I am truly grateful that there are supermarkets where I can get detergent, dog food, meat, aspirin, and toothpaste all in one trip.

I wanted to find out more about your last paragraph about the mercados here in Mexico. I am currently studying abroad in Puebla Mexico and I’m an environmentalist so I wanted to know what exactly you meant by the fact that most of the food in mercados is from whole sale markets? So it’s the exact same food you’d find in a supermarket? I want to believe that the food in mercados is much more fresh than that in the supermarket, but is that true? What would be the best way to help these poor farmers? Also the closest market to me is in San Pedro Cholula Puebla. Thanks!

Carolyn, for decades Mexico has operated with a series of regional wholesale markets, roughly one to each state. (There is a widespread feeling that the system needs to be modernized in light of modern transport, marketing, and communications, I believe).  Anyway, these, with their wholesalers specializing in mangoes or nopales or whatever, are fascinating to visit.  You should ask someone to take you to the one in Puebla in the list I have linked to.

The supermarkets, as I understand it, buy largely from the huge wholesale market in Mexico City, the largest in the world. (Here’s a description of this Central de Abastos by my friend and food blogger, Lesley Tellez.) They also buy from regional wholesale markets and in addition have supply chains of their own.

How fresh the food in the mercados is compared to the supermarkets depends on turnover, I think.  In Guanajuato, the supermarket re-stocked weekly on a Wednesday or Thursday, the vendors in the city markets went with their pick up trucks to Irapuato as necessary.  And then there are the tianguises, the moveable weekly markets that also stock from the wholesale markets. And the restaurants, of course.

It is hard for the individual small farmer anywhere, not just in Mexico, to sell directly to the supermarkets as they need to purchase in bulk and to certain standards. Hence the middle men.

It is also ¡mportant to ask whether it is worth the farmer’s while spending all day at a market. It depends on the crop and on the society. My father, a grain and dairy farmer, did not find it so.  Vegetable growers might find it so.

So far as I can tell direct farmer-consumer selling occurs largely either in very poor societies (which Mexico has not been for some time although obviously there are still some very poor people) or in very rich societies like the US.

How to help the Mexican small farmer?  Well, there are lots of Mexican volunteer and government groups trying to do that.  I would suggest you ask around for the groups in your area.  They could really speed things up for you.  And it’s worth remembering that not all the Puebla farmers are small or poor.  Some are, some aren’t.

Caveat.  This is not my main area of expertise and you should continue to investigate on your own.  Good luck.  And please keep in touch and let me know what happens.