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.

It’s Candelaria. The 2nd of February. The midpoint between the winter equinox and the spring solstice. Originally known as Candlemas in English, for the blessing of candles in the church, it’s a day that has been reduced to a shadowy presence in the United States, eclipsed by Groundhog Day, when a groundhog from Punxsutawney, Pa., is paraded on television as a weather predictor. In Mexico, though, Candelaria is still celebrated. It’s the start of spring planting, the tail end of the long Christmas period and the commemoration of Christ’s presentation at the temple in the Catholic calendar. The Candelaria tradition springs from All Kings Day (Jan. 6), for which a sweetbread known as the Rosca de Reyes is baked with a figurine inside representing the baby Jesus. The sweetbread is eaten with hot chocolate and whoever has the slice with the figurine has to offer a party on Candelaria. And that party means tamales. Although they are eaten throughout the year, especially during the Christmas season, tamales above all are associated with Candelaria. Snubbed by the wealthy The iconic stuffed and wrapped maize dumplings that date deep into pre-Hispanic times, were not always popular with the well-to-do in Mexico. For centuries after the Spanish conquest, they preferred white bread rolls, dismissing tamales as rustic or street food, eating them only as a snack outside of regular meals. In 1901, Julio Guerrero assured his fellow citizens in the “Genesis of Crime in Mexico” that the diet of poor Mexicans — wild greens, beans, nopales, squash, fried pork skins, chiles and corn tortillas — caused social backwardness and delinquency. Tamales were nothing but an “abominable folk pastry.”

My article on tamales for Zester Daily.  To cut to the chase, one part of the story of how an abominable folk pastry became mainstream in Mexico.

And some others.  From Ruth Alegria, something of El Nino Dios (apologies to Ruth for missing the link earlier). From Lesley Tellez, strawberry tamales. From Kathleen of Cooking in Mexico, chocolate tamales. From Ben Herrera Beristain, a tamalada. From Mexico Desconocido (in Spanish) why tamales on this day.

Here’s what the anonymous author says about the wheat couscous.

Grind sugar and cinnamon together, put layers of couscous, sugar and cinnamon, another layer and another dusted [with sugar and cinnamon?]  that remains  at the middle [of the pot] because it grows [rises] a lot; take the broth in which a hen and meat was cooked with lean ham, with fresh parsley, yerbabuena [mint] and cilantro; take the fat of this broth, moisten the alcuscuz repeated times as it becomes spongy, this you do putting the pot over another of boiling water, and when it is cooked and high [in the pot] add a fried lamb’s tail or a cooked bird, or hard boiled egg yolks cut up.

And about the maize couscous.  I take it these are alternatives.

Put a pot with cinnamon and sugar between two fires [that is on the fire with embers on the lid] until it makes a crust; make it with milk like rice, also, or spread a pot with lard and all the spices and beef marrow, brown it, or cook with tomato and spices, like cooked rice with lots of saffron or how they would like it cooked.

These alternatives seem very traditional with the use of sugar and spices with meat.  Typical of dozens of recipes in eighteenth century manuscript cookbooks from Mexico or New Spain as it was called.  Interesting too the comparisons between the maize couscous and rice, either rice pudding, the rice with milk, or pilau-paella style rice with spices, saffron and tomatoes.

Comments welcome and encouraged.

There’s a fascinating example right now.  Beginning with Pope Paul VI Apostolic Constitution of 1966, the Roman Catholic Church has relaxed the changing but always significant rules of fasting that had regulated believers’ diets for well over a thousand years, and that, with regional variations ruled out meat during the weeks of Lent.

Now all that is required is that members of the Church refrain from meat (but not eggs, milk products or animal fats) on Ash Wednesday and Fridays during Lent, and that only one main meal be taken on Good Friday with a little more in the morning and evening.

Mexico, like many other Catholic countries, has a rich repertoire of non-meat dishes developed over the centuries.  Mexico Cooks has enticing photos of some of them.  The question is:  How long will these survive?  How long will they be associated particularly with Lent?  Will they be modified.

Thus far many families still refrain from meat throughout Lent.  The market is large enough that lots of bakeries, grocery stores, and fast food places cater to it.

Here’s a bakery offering empanadas de vigilia (vigil, abstinence): tuna (canned) cooked with a sauce, tuna with mayonnaise, potatoes and cheese, strips of poblano chile with cheese, and slices of nopales (cactus pads).

And here’s Sam’s Club offering more empanadas de cuaresma (Lent), snapped just before the security guard came and gave me a stern warning about photographing in the store: this time tuna a la vizcaína (Biscay style, that is with tomatoes, onions, and in theory but perhaps not in Sam’s olives and capers) and chicken with mole (chicken conveniently not counting as meat).

And here’s Domino’s with Veggie pizza and four cheeses, again advertized for Lent.

(By the by, if you’re getting the impression that canned tuna is in danger of extinction during Lent, you’re right.  Here’s my neighbor’s recipe for tuna pie (and very good it is too).  Make a shortcrust pastry, using two cups of flour and a couple of sticks of butter.  Lin a rather deep 9 inch pie dish with half the pastry.  Chop (se pica, the opening to every other recipe) about half a large white onion and fry it gently in cooking oil until it is golden.  Chop three large tomatoes and add them to the mixture along with three drained cans of tuna in oil and chopped chile jalapeño in vinegar to taste (not much).  Put this in the pie dish, scatter over a grated melting cheese and top with the rest of the pastry.  Brush with beate3n egg. Bake for about 40 minutes. )

But back to the question at hand.  How fast are these dishes disappearing or being secularized?  Maria    remarks that the fasting dishes in Crete (Greek Orthodox I assume not Roman Catholic) are more work than the normal dishes.  I have the sense that perhaps that is true for Mexico too, another reason why they may not survive.  Has anyone been tracking these changes in Mexico or elsewhere?  Any observations?

________________

Some more seasonal food from blogs I follow. Another take on capirotada from a Saborearte entusiasma.  Easter customs in one part of the Philippines by Tangled Noodle.  And some Holy Week pastries from Costa Rica.

Your argument is well and good until you look at the bigger picture. You don’t need a liberal attitude toward multiculturalism for ingredients and techniques to spread between cultures. Were the European colonial powers not trying to enter into the markets of the East Indies to access their spices?

Just look at the history of chocolate. The Mesoamericans had their own native cacao drinks, which the Europeans tweaked with sugar and milk to produce the renowned European chocolate-making traditions we see today. The fact that mole recipes include indigenous ingredients such as cacao and chili peppers indicate that there were definately influences coming from the Mesoamerican side.

In fact, your entire argument is based on cross-cultural influences between Hindu, Muslim, and Christian cultures. Why is it such a stretch to suppose Mesoamerican influences into the picture?

Thanks Tim.  Comments always help sharpen ideas.  Here’s the short answer.

I do not deny that Mesoamerican ingredients such as cacao and chiles slip into mole.  In any culinary exchange, ingredients are the very easiest things to include (see current fusion cooking).

My point is that the Spanish brought an entire cuisine to Mexico–ideas, ingredients, techniques, plants, farming.  One of the parts of this cuisine was a way of making a rich spicy stew.  If they added cacao and chile to that, fine.  It was an easy change to make.  But it does not change the point that the cuisine was from al-Andalus and ultimately from the center of Islam.

And I don’t see the adoption of cacao in Europe as being something as easy as tweaking.  It was a transformation.  Hot not cold, sweet not savory, embedded in a different religion.  And I think the milk was a long time coming.  But the drinks are another discussion.

Thanks again for an interesting commentary.

Well, by the 1990s, it was becoming clear that the ejido system was not working as planned.

Now, after reforms, it is possible (if an incredible hassle) for campesinos (peasants) to get title to their land and to sell it.  This is really important in a country where until recently loans, if they were to be had at all, came at interest rates of 50% plus.  It is one of the few ways the rural poor can raise capital for everything from medical expenses to the costs of a coyote (smuggler of humans) to take them across the border into the US to a pick up truck that allows them to take a dozen family members to work as bricklayers on a construction project (the main alternative work for campesinos).

But what had happened from the 1930s on was that farming in Mexico ran along two tracks.  There were all these tiny farmers producing just enough for themselves and a small sale to the market.  And there were the big farmers who had tractors and irrigation wells and all the apparatus of modern farming.

How come there were big farmers if there had been land reform?  Well the reform was spotty.  Some large farmers were ruined when their lands were turned into ejidos–I know many, many Mexican families who lost everything.  But others hung on.  And then somehow or other much of the better land got consolidated and was run as large farms.  All a bit murky wouldn’t you say?

So it is my belief, though I need to get figures for this, that most of the trucks you see lined up at Maseca plants (that is the plants turning corn in to masa harina) are bringing in maize from big farms.

Now, and this is really important, big farms in Mexico grow white corn not yellow corn.  The maize that is imported from the US is yellow corn.  Mexicans think this is unfit for human consumption.  So in fact the campesinos are competing against big Mexican farmers with all their economies of scale, not against US farmers.

So what’s that yellow maize doing in Mexico?  It’s being used to make sweeteners.  And it’s being fed to hogs and chicken.

And that means that the diet of campesinos has been transformed in the last fifteen years.  They eat meat.   It’s the custom here that any full-time household employee gets their main meal.  When I arrived here about fifteen years ago, they would fix beans and tortillas and perhaps an egg or a can of tuna.  Now they expect a chicken leg or a bistek or ground beef.  Mothers have gone from a newly-cheap chicken once a week to some kind of meat daily.

OK, OK, we have Mark Bittman (an American cookbook author typical of current trends) urging Americans to go to a grain and vegetable diet.  But really, this has been a boon in Mexico in my opinion.  Children grow tall and strong.  An American friend who visited one of Mexico’s poorer regions, Oaxaca, where this shift has not occurred, said how much better he liked our more prosperous area.   “In Oaxaca,” he said “there are a lot of very short people.  And there’s only one reason for a lot of very short people.”

So, bottom line.  What about NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and Mexican agriculture?  So far as I can see it goes like this.  For big farmers it’s a huge boon, a huge new export market.   In fact, in our part of the world, farmers are growing for the American fruit and vegetable market.  If they are to use irrigation water, this brings a good return.

For campesinos, well, being a campesino is not a great way to live.  I just can’t go along with the huge numbers of Mexican academics (and city folk elsewhere) who believe that the campesino should be kept on the land no matter what.

Later, subsidies on tortillas and the pandering to the cities, maize biodiversity, and environmental impacts.

Here’s a Sunday dinner we had with our friend Jordi and his family just outside Barcelona a year or so ago.

First course:  Fideu.  Short thin pasta fried until crisp in oil, then cooked in fish broth until tender.  Served with aioli.  The real stuff. Just garlic and oil.

Second course.  The fish, the source of the broth.

Third course.  Bought pastries.

Here’s a meal I can have with my neighbor across the street any time.

First course.  Fideos.  Short thin pasta fried until crisp in oil, then cooked in chicken broth until tender.  Served with a few cooked black beans and fresh Mexican cheese on top.  (Versions of this are a Mexican standard–many have tomatoes but I prefer them without).

Second course.  The chicken, source of the broth, served with one of half a dozen sauces.

Here’s a link to a picture of Mexican fideos, though not the same recipe.

Accidental similarity.  Of course not.  Mexico has its own old pasta making tradition that goes back, I suspect, to the Conquista though there aren’t many records.  But there is some evidence.   Here’s a press for pasta in the great monastery of Yurriria in the south of Guanajuato.  This is an Augustinian foundation,l a fortress monastery from just a few years after the Conquest.  Each of those tiles is a foot square so this is some mean press.

And there are old-established companies making dry pasta in Mexico.  Their history is yet to be explored.  But there is a sufficient market that the Italians are moving in.  See two bags below: traditional Mexican on the left, Italian Barilla made in Mexico on the right.

So what does this have to do with the Islamic connection?  Because most historians of food believe that the pasta of Catalonia and Andalucia was Islamic in origin.

“When an Indian looks at a mole, we see, deconstructed, the following parts to the gravy: 1) a garam masala, the sweet spice paste 2) the chile/chile seed paste + any chocolate 3) nut/bread/plantain paste thickener, raisin 4) fried onion base, thickener [optional] 5) any tomato or other souring + liquid agent

So the construction seems very familiar, its origins pre-Arabic, Indo-Iranian in fact, with the onion base + sesame/nut paste thickener+sweet spices. Brought by Arabs to the Mediterranean, this became a fried bread +nut paste thickener so loved in Spain. The complex chiles and chile seeds and nightshades are Mexico’s very own contribution, not just to moles but back to Indian cookery as well! Mexico had its own “nut thickener” in the form of pepitas, though! Almonds provide an extra touch. Try some lightly roasted cashews, almonds, sesame, in your mole paste and see what texture and taste you get. But be careful: anything with cashew paste will stick and scorch easily, so use non-stick and keep it moving. If you use garlic, fry it in big cubes earlier and paste it.”

This analysis of basic sauce-making techniques is right up my historian’s alley. I have lots of thoughts which I’ll save for later. Meanwhile, any comments?

Last night I was lucky to attend a reception with Patricia Quintana prior to the mole festival here in Guanajuato. Not surprisingly in her eloquent history of mole, she affirmed that the basic techniques were  indigenous with some Islamic ingredients added later. No chance, of course, in the crowd, to pursue this further.

Just a couple of days ago, though I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the second issue of a new Mexican culinary magazine, Sabor (highly recommended by the way). The banner headline on the title page was mole and curry, backed by photos of the kinds of spices used in these dishes. The culinary editor, Marina Skipsey, had been to India and come back with wonderful photos. These preceded analysis of ingredients common to mole and curry and those that were unique to each, and then photos of the making of a mole amarillo and a rogan josh. One of the references cited was the book Mulli by the eminent Mexican culinary entreprener, Patricia Quintana.  The other, I was delighted to see, was my article on the Mexican Kitchen’s Islamic Connection. An honor for me.

Here are my thoughts on what I take to be Tim’s three main worries.

Worry 1. Since many families in rural Mexico have their own mole traditions, since these families often tend to the indigenous end of the Spanish-indigenous spectrum, and since they share many customs with pre-hispanic cultures, doesn’t that point to an indigenous origin for mole.

Point i. Let’s assume here that we are talking about one of the highly elaborated moles of the mole poblano type, not, say, mole de la olla for example. These, just to make things clear, are not common dishes even today in Mexico. They are prepared for weddings, festivals, and other special occasions.

I don’t take the fact that rural families have such traditions to be necessarily a sign of their pre-hipanic origins.

Consider beef bourguinon, the classic beef stew of Burgundy. I would bet that there are lots of rural families in Burgundy who have their time-honored recipe. Yet there is every reason to suspect that this tradition goes back only about a hundred years at most (thanks to Adam Balic for correspondence on this).

In short, I don’t think the widespread use of a particular dish in a community is (a) either evidence that it originated in that community or (b) evidence that it is particularly old.

Point ii. I think lurking behind Tim’s point here is the belief that cuisines begin with the peasants and are gradually “built on” and or refined. This belief is one of the most widespread assumptions there is about culinary history.

I happen to think it’s more or less completely wrong. The more I read about the lot of the poor around the world until about 150 years ago is that they ate an incredibly meager diet.

Furthermore I believe that those who ate a high cuisine (of which mole poblano is unquestionably a representative) intended at all costs to show their distance from the poor and therefore were extraordinarily unlikely to refine “peasant” cuisines. It was far more likely that the poor would try to imitate a high cuisine than vice versa.

In short, I believe that most culinary evolution from, say, five thousand years ago until the last hundred and fifty years has been top down not bottom up.

Worry 2. Thick spicy sauces are found world wide. So are salsas. This does not mean a common origin.

Point i. This is simply a point of clarification. I’m not clear, Tim, whether you are referring to salsa in the Mexican sense or the American. As you know, when Mexicans talk about salsa, it is usually a thick, spicy sauce. When Americans talk about it, they are talking about a pico de gallo type thing: mixed, chopped, raw veg. But leave that to one side.

Point ii. Obviously not all similar dishes all over the world are part of families. Some must have been independently developed. But the more we investigate the history of food, the more I believe that we find dishes/sauces/relishes do fall into small numbers of families. Take Hawaiian inamona. For anyone not intimately familiar with indigenous Hawaiian food this is a relish made by crushing the kernels of what in Hawaii are called kukui nuts (the nuts they polish to make those shiny black bead leis). But I would put this in a family with similar relishes in Southeast Asia from whence the tree was introduced to Hawaii by the native Hawaiians. I would not be blown away to find family relations between egusi stew and pipian–there was a lot of back and forth between West Africa and colonial Spain. See also Ji Young’s comments on harissa on the thread already linked, or Holly Chase in the thread on carnitas and their possible Turkish cousins and Adam Balic’s post on shrimp pastes.

In short, I believe that most techniques (the basis of these families), however obvious they may look in retrospect (just grind oily seeds, just salt shrimp) in fact required considerable know how. Therefore independent invention was much rarer than we might think.

Worry 3. If they didn’t eat mole, what did pre-hispanic Mesoamercians eat?

Good question. We really don’t know much about what they ate for all the vast literature on pre-hispanic cuisine. The fog may clear, thanks to two developments. (1) all the recent scientific techniques, such as residue analysis and (2) a comparative study of colonial cuisines across the Americas and in Spain.

What is clear is that even if there was something that resembled mole, it would have been for the wealthy.

Anyway, thanks to any of you who plow through these ruminations. Your comments are so helpful to me in thinking through these issues. And Tim, thanks for the comments that provoked this.

Just one last personal note. It so happens that I went to a friend for coffee this morning and she introduced me to someone I’d wanted to meet for ages on the recommendation of many different mutual acquaintances, a woman famous as one of Mexico’s best cooks.

As the three of us chatted about pre-hispanic ballparks (which crop up in a novel the hostess is writing partly based on her work with archaeologists), the famous cook remarked how impatient she got when people presented “pre-hispanic” meals for the public. Games and foods alike, to her mind, were based on such different concepts of the world, such different tastes that we could barely fathom them. Then followed a discussion of the effects of the Conquest.

Later the hostess remarked that one of my theses was that mole poblano had Spanish and ultimately Islamic origins. Oh yes, side the renowned cook, a few years ago I was reading Ruperto de Nola (the 14th century cookbook in Catalan) and thinking so many of these recipes could be Mexican.