It’s a conference I’ve been looking forward to.  I have wanted to meet the Social and Cultural Studies of Food group led by Peter Scholliers for some time.  My correspondence with the  organizers, Anneke Geyzen and Olivier de Maret has been stimulating. And there are old friends and new people to meet among the participants and attendees.

My Cornish Pasty in Mexico

I shall tell two stories about a taste I associate with home, the Cornish pasty, awarded a Geographic Indication just about a year ago on 22nd February 2011 by the European Commisssion.  The two stories depend on opposed memories about where home is, how taste is created, and who owns that taste.  As the debate about the Geographic Indication shows, these differences have very real consequences for  economic and cultural policies.

I shall do a trial run for the Food Studies Group at the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday 1st February. Benedict 1. 126. 6 p.m. Do come if you are interested.

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.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age. (Bill Bryson, At Home (Doubleday 2010), 37-38   Courtesy http://delanceyplace.com

I have to admit I don’t find this fact (which Bryson simply takes from scholars) particularly shocking or surprising.  There are good reasons it is so.  Our ancestors spent a million years plus surveying the earth’s edible resources.  They discovered how to detoxify poisonous cassava, turn the bark of a tropical tree into sago, grind hard grains into flour, eat algae from the surface of lakes, and preserve perishable meat and fish for a year or more.  In short, they were champions at finding and preparing almost anything that could be eaten.

Many of these edibles were always marginal. Barrel cactus just grows too slowly to be a major food. Moles and blue flies tasted awful as the Buckland family discovered in the nineteenth century when looking for alternative sources of protein.  Lettuce provides micronutrients but isn’t ever going to be a major source of calories.  It’s just too hard to eat enough.

In short, we do our ancestors a disservice to suggest that they simply stuck with the first things that they ran across in the Neolithic.  Quite the reverse.  They were always looking out for new sources of food, sugar cane being a prime example, coming in around the 2nd century B.C. (and shouldn’t it be on that list above)?  They have always leapt on new foods from old plants (sugar and oil from maize).

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to eat as wide a range of plants as possible or that with modern science and technology we couldn’t exploit more plants by breeding and processing (andean tubers for example).  It is to say that to find plants (and animals) that provide palatable calories without huge costs of chewing, digestion, cooking, processing, transport, storage, farming, and environmental impact is the devil of a job.

Candidates anyone? Lot of people would love to know.

Edit:  Continue the rant. 93% of all humans eat? By value, by weight, by calories, by trade?  Hopelessly vague.

And what would happen if you aggregated fruits or vegetables, especially in the advanced world?

Anyway isn’t it a good thing, if we want to have diverse diets, that lots of local plants don’t make it into the top ten or eleven?

How many other bitches do you want with this kind of sloppy rhetoric (which I don’t blame on the amiable Bryson by the way but on the people he is quoting)?

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal sums up some recent research.

New research indicates problems in the gut may cause problems in the brain, just as a mental ailment, such as anxiety, can upset the stomach.

via A Gut Check for Many Ailments – WSJ.com.

Ready meals will become more popular: Brazilians still cook most meals from scratch, even though the country has some of the world’s biggest food-processing companies, which export their tins and sachets to America and Europe. Fine dining at home will largely disappear. “For the 4,000 reais a month a really good cook now costs, you could eat out ten times in São Paulo’s fanciest restaurants,” says Ms Leite. Many Brazilian mansions have no hot water in the kitchen, and there are paulistanos who time-share helicopters but do not own a dishwasher. That will change when getting congealed fat off pans stops being someone else’s job.

This from an interesting article on the parallels between the disappearance of servants in Britain (and I would add the US) in the early twentieth century and from Brazil (and I would add Mexico) in the early twenty-first century in The Economist.

Put another way, lots of the laborious “traditional” cuisines created for the well-to-do are going to vanish if the world keeps getting wealthier.

Domestic Servants Waiting for Street Car, Atlanta 1939. Farm Sevice Administration. Courtesy NYPL.

As if in response, the New York Times had an article on 27th December called Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés – NYTimes.com.  The subhead for the piece went “A thriving movement of food producers wants to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions, and redefine American cuisine for a global audience.”

Hmm, still a few clichés I’d say.  But that’s editors for you.  I wish all those enthusiasts trying to raise great farm products the very best of luck. I’d love their pork and their fruit.

The article does, though, raise yet again the whole question of just who is going to do the work.  One of the growers talks about the  great days of Carolina rice.

The flavor of Carolina rice made it world famous; the finest grains were hand-pounded, barrel-aged and scented with bay leaves. From African slaves, white farmers learned to rotate crops of peas with rice, to replenish the soil; they learned that the two foods, eaten together, could sustain life over many months of winter or hardship.

Hand pounded rice?  Certainly there seems to be evidence that hand pounded white rice tastes better. The Thai royal family, who knew good food, insisted that their rice be hand pounded even when rice mills had come to Thailand.

But is anyone seriously thinking of returning to this, except as an experiment?  Surely not.  Not with slave labor, to be sure.    So by whom? And at what price?

Afterward.  The Economist is on a roll about servants. The psychology of service: Why have servants?  talks about servants as necessary to status as they certainly were through much of history. I know of families who could barely pay their bills but felt that if they “let the servant go” they were themselves on the downward path.

And a link to a roundup of my earlier posts on servants and cooking. Will there be a return to servants? (Open the page completely and the links work).

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

How is this possible?

Mike Archer, Professor of Evolution of Earth and Life Systems Research at the University of New South Wales goes on to explain.  Its an interesting perspective on the often stale vegetarian-meat eater debate.

The chile manzano vine in the garden. 23 December 2011.

And thank you to all of you who have read my posts, sent comments, and confirmed my instinct that blogging opens new doors to sharing ideas and information with others. Happy Christmas to you all and may the New Year bring you new vistas and rewarding work.

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.

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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?

Using NPD’s National Eating Trends®(NET®) research, which has continually tracked the eating and drinking habits of U.S. consumers for over 30 years, MyPlate days were calculated based on consumers who, on the same day, achieved at least 70 percent of the daily recommended intake for dairy, fruit, grains, proteins and vegetables. For the average consumer, two percent of their days (about 7 days a year) come close to the USDA dietary guidelines; and when a MyPlate day is achieved, consumers are very likely to consume more than three meals a day.

I’ve often wondered about the actual effects of the USDA dietary guidelines on eating habits.  Today I came across this.  NPD is a company that provides consumer and retail information to 1,800 companies in many different branches of business, not just food, around the globe.  I don’t see that they have a particular ax to grind.

I think most people want to eat well. It’s also clear that most people eat well enough to live active lives, avoid deficiency diseases, and survive longer than their ancestors.

Is it really bright policy in these circumstances to set up goals for eating that are so utopian that most well-intentioned people can’t achieve them?

An aside.  The press release from NPD is just about as irritatingly vague as the USDA guidelines themeselves. When it says average, is this the median or the mean?  What is the distribution of eating patterns?  Hard to find out because you have to pay to get more info.