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).

Here I am comparing two supermarkets in south Austin (HEB and Randalls) and two in south Mexico City (Walmart and Mega of the Commercial Mexicana chain). They have similar clienteles, ranging from wealthy upper middle class to lower middle class. They are similar in square footage.

Of course there are lots of people who know all about these differences.  The management of cross border chains and of multinational corporations such as Nestlé.  They don’t broadcast their knowledge though.

Since most readers are from the US, I will take US supermarkets as the norm.

1.  Dairy

More yogurt in the dairy case in Mexico, lots of it drinkable.  (The man behind me at the check out today had 24 drinkable yogurts, 18 flavored ones and 12 gelatinas which are in the dairy case). Better crema and cream (not difficult).

2. Packaged goods

Lots of the dairy is here. Stacks of tetrapak long life milk in different sizes and fat levels. And lots of Nido (Nest-Nestlé, get it?) including special versions for children of different ages and whole milk (great for home made yogurt).

More rice, fewer varieties of rice. More beans, more varieties, some imported but still overwhelmingly Mexican.

Herb teas rather than black tea, single not mixed flavors. Coffee improving though Nescafé continues to reign.

Cheaper cookies, such as the Marinela line (made by Bimbo) with its signature chocolate-covered cake, Gansitos.  Oreos make common ground north and south of the border.  Galletas saladas (soda crackers) and habaneros.  Bimbo bread.

Fewer canned vegetables, mainly mushrooms, corn, and tomato puree and carrots and green beans mixed for rice, overwhelmingly Mexican brands, Herdez, for example, in US part of Hormel.

Lots of bottled and tetrapak sauces including increasing numbers of Mexican red, green, and mole sauces, as well as the indispensable hot sauces, salsa maggi, salsa inglesa (Worcestershire) and soy. Oh and mayonnaise of course. In quantity.

Packaged cake mixes becoming more popular, Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines crowding out national brands.

EDIT.  And if you have read that Mexicans cook with lard, comparing the four 1 lb packets of lard in the meat section with the rows and rows of bottles of cooking oil will make you re-think.

Main foreign cuisines on the exotic shelf are Jewish, Chinese and Japanese. Goya does not cut it in Mexico.

Much less pet food, much less variety.

3. Meat

Overwhelmingly boneless as in US, except that in Mexico it is cut thin rather than thick.  Street food vendors buy in quantity. Move over mole, milanesa of beef, pork or chicken (thin, breaded slices) may be on its way to becoming Mexico´s national dish.

Fish piled up in ice, particularly in Lent.  More tripe and pigs feet.

4. Deli

Packed sliced meats are Spanish.

Chorizo.

Stacks and stacks and stacks of pink wieners, including from FUD (part of the big Monterrey meatpacking group, Sigma Alimentos).  Another candidate for national dish.

Bacon.

Cheeses mainly Mexican (fresco, cotija, crema, chihuahua, quesillo etc.)  Increasing foreign cheese selection, mainly Spanish (Manchego), Dutch (Gouda) and French (Brie and Camembert, often made in Mexico).

Grape leaves, hummus, etc.

5. Bakery and tortilleria

The in-store bakeries mimic traditional bakeries with aluminum trays and tongs to pick up your rolls (bolillos, panbazo) from wooden bins, your pan dulce (sweet bread) from wooden shelves.  I counted around 80 varieties of pan dulce today, though many of them are minor variants on a few general themes. Also some “artisanal” European breads and lots of birthday cakes.  Quality about as depressing as in US supermarkets.

Tortilleria makes corn tortillas on sale in 1/2 and 1 kilo packages and has the longest lines in the store.  Also sopes, tiritos, totopos, etc.

6. Snacks and soft drinks

Large overlap, not surprising since Sabritas, the largest snack company, is part of Pepsi.  Bloated bags of potato chips and chicharron.  Fewer dips.  Some Mexican brands, such as Jarritos.

Lots of water here, but not designer water.  This is because water from the tap is still iffy.

7. Fruits and vegetables

Good stuff here. Everything you find in a US grocery store, but fresher and cheaper. More melons, more tropical fruits. Plus lots of romeritos, nopales, and my very favorite, huazontle.  More chiles, fresh and dried, more ingredients for aguas frescas, such as tamarind pods, guavas, dried jamaica blossoms.

8. Alcohol

Rum, brandy and tequila are the big sellers most of the former made by big international corporations.  Wine is becoming commoner, with Argentinian and Chilean wines perhaps the commonest inexpensive wines,  but beer is the regular drink of choice.  Mexican brands or Heinekens, not surprsing since Heinekens owns FEMSA one of the two major Mexican companies along with Modelo.

9.  Frozen food

Still not popular in Mexico, generally about quarter the space of American stores.  Mainly hamburgers, french fries, some vegetables and fruit, and baked desserts.  Oh, and ice cream of course.

10. Ready to eat

Prepared rice, mole pastes, rotisserie chicken and in some stores complete meals ready to go.  Some salad bars.

In general

I am struck by the integration of the Mexican and US/international food corporations as well as by their careful positioning to local markets (crema de chile poblano y crema de elote instead of beef vegetable soup).

I am also struck, in spite of the bad press supermarkets have had recently, of the wealth of choice and, if you are careful, excellent products that can be obtained in both countries.

EDIT.  And perhaps the most striking difference is the number of items. I would reckon that in the same square footage the US stores have about twice the number of items.  This seems to be largely thanks to the taste and flavor industry.  Where (say) there are half a dozen kinds of canned tomatoes in Mexico, in the US there are more, with multiple different flavoring agents. Same with coffee or with rice or with crackers.

As the chart below shows, while it’s true the largest dollar amount of farm subsidies go to the largest farms (as you would expect, since subsidies are typically tied directly to production, and production is tied directly to gross sales), looking at the microeconomic effects of subsidies on individual farms should correctly lead you to an entirely different conclusion.

For 2007 (the most current statistics) farms that received government payments and grossed less than $25,000 per year — that is, the small, part-time darlings of the authentic farming movement for which the Times Food Section reserves its most lavish praise — took in an average 75 percent of the value of the crops they raised in the form of government subsidies. For the smallest farms — those grossing less than $1,000 yearly — the percentage skyrockets to nearly 300 percent. In other words: The smallest farms that took payments from the federal government earned three times more in subsidies than the typical farmer in the size category earned in crop sales.

Compare that to farms grossing more than a million dollars annually. Farms taking government payments in that size group received two pennies in government aid for every dollar the average farm earned from crop sales. And in the largest, giant corporate farm category, that government largesse falls to less than half a percent of gross sales.

A few comments.

1.  I am assuming that Mike Smith has his arithmetic right.  And his graph is obviously only for farms that receive subsidies.  It does not address the concern that many small farms do not get subsidies.  It does however suggest that subsidizing small farms is a pricey business.  And given the lack of economies of scale that is not too surprising.  What is surprising to me is the huge differential between large and small subsidized farms in terms of proportion of subsidy to market value of the food produced.

2.  I am strongly of the opinion that we need to seriously consider the economics of small farms before we endorse them. They have rarely been the source of food for large urban populations–and that’s what we have today–and there is surely a reason for that.

A suggestion for starters.  Land is expensive, especially around cities. A farmer needs to be able to make enough to pay for that land or to offset the loss of income from investing his money elsewhere if he already owns it.  And he or she needs to be able to make enough to live and put the kids through college. That is, the small farms in this example don’t come close to meeting these criteria.

And it’s very hard to see how you could  on a small acreage unless you have a very high-value specialty crop.  And we can’t live on high-value specialty crops alone.

3.  And if you are tempted to write Mike Smith off as part of the agricultural establishment, well, isn’t it worth considering that those of us who have grown up in cities might learn something from those who have who know farming economics first hand.  No reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The girls of San Antonio

Are lazy at the metate.

They want to walk out bobbed-haired,

With straw hats on.

The harvesting is finished,

So is the cotton.

The flappers stroll out now

For a good time.

This reference that foreshadows so much of the twentieth-century history of the metate was sent to me by  Bea Misa whose blog I’ve quoted  before. I really recommend it  (see this post on Filipinos in Hong Kong).  She in turn located it on History Matters, the indispensable history web site run by George Mason University.

They in turn take it from The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant (New York: Dover, 1971), 308 first published in 1931 by Manuel Gamio, the ¨father¨of Mexican archaeology, promoter of the idea, still so important in Mexico, that the indigenous cultures were the basis of Mexico, arguing for mestizaje in the wake of the early twentieth-century “Revolution” that tore the country apart, advocate of a changed education, diet, etc for the contemporary indigenous, and here turning his attention to Mexican Americans.

We’re eighty years on.  The terms of the debate have not altered that much.

In a great article in the LA Times, fruit expert David Karp explains why this was and how it is changing.

A couple of days ago I finally got around to reading Gary Nabhan’s book Arab/American.  I was entranced as Nabhan,  best known for his work on the ecology of the Sonoran desert, for foraging, and for support of local foods, explained how he kept finding parallels and resonances between the American southwest and Lebanon/Syria, the home of his  ancestors.  He muses on the parallels between the desert that spans the US Mexico border and the Arabian desert, with a good many side excursions to the Sahara, tracking sideways into family history, immigration politics, camel whisperers in the US, and frankincense.

Particularly intriguing given my interests (here and here) were the chapters where he explores the influence of Arabia and al-Andalus on the cuisine of the US Southwest and Mexico and the the words, particularly for water technology and plants, that are also common to both places.   He mentions in passing that dishes such as mole poblano and chiles en nogada are products of arid Arabia as much as of Mexico, music to my ears.   In a move I had not thought of, he links the fruit-based drinks called tesguinos to the tiswin of the Maghreb. And he traces how the word al-Jubb for a covered well ends up in the indigenous American language O’odham as alquives and al-naurah goes through Spanish noria to O’odham no:lik.

All great stuff.  And what was thought provoking was that even indigenous American languages include loan words from Arabic.  That means, of course, that saying that a certain dish must be an indigenous dish of the New World because it has a name in a New World language won’t work by itself.  You have to go further and show that the word is not a loan word that has come in since the Conquest.

Yet from time to time, I felt a bit disoriented by Nabhan’s journey.  And I think the reason is this.  He is an American tracing his roots.  And in that quest, certain distinctions–ones that he is perfectly aware of as a scholar–tend to get overlaid by the dynamic of the story itself.  The wave of immigration from the Middle East to the Americas in the early twentieth century, when his ancestors arrived, comes from a different place and a different time from the first wave from the Islamic western Mediterranean of the sixteenth century.  That earlier wave included Jews as well as Muslims, many of whom were Spanish or Berber rather than Arab (though this term is pretty elastic).  The Siwa oasis of the Sahara, which Diana Bujua has written about eloquently here,  has striking differences from the Lebanon-Syrian border.

So I’d love to see this first step taken further.  Granted that there are both ecological parallels and historic links between the two great deserts (or three if you include the Sahara), are we now in a position to tell a more detailed story about how these have worked to produce the contemporary scene in the arid (and the non arid) regions that stretch from the part of the United States that was once part of Mexico down through Mexico itself?

Cover Thanksgiving Luau

After my post on the invention of the tourist luau, Henry Voigt (who has a wonderful collection of menus that was written up in Gastronomica) sent me scans of this luau menu and asked for some background.

The story behind it is so poignant, it has had me gripped all day.  I’m simply going to tell it here without commentary and without placing it in a more general history of the luau.  I’ll leave that for another post.

On July 7th 1898 President McKinley signed a resolution ordering that Hawaii, then an independent kingdom, be annexed as a territory of the United States.  The news arrived in Hawaii a week later, to the delight of the annexationists (mainly Americans) and the despair of the native Hawaiians.

On August 12th, the transfer of power took place. In Honolulu American troops marched to Iolani Palace (the Hawaiian name). The resolution was read. The Hawaii anthem “Hawaii Ponoi” was played for the last time as the anthem of an independent nation and  the Hawaiian flag was lowered.  The Stars and Stripes was raised and “The Star Spangled Banner” played.

The Pacific Commercial Advertizer reported. “To the Hawaiian  born it was pathetic. As the last strain of Hawaii Ponoi trembled out of hearing, the wind suddenly held itself back.  The Hawaiian flag as it left the truck dropped and folded, and descended lifeless.  The American flag climbed slowly on its halyards, and just as it reached the truck, the trade wind breaking from its airy leash, caught it in its arms, and rolled it out to its full measure.”

The First New York Volunteers had arrived in Honolulu being cheered on by the American public that gathered at railroad stations all the way from New York to San Francisco where they had embarked for the islands and their post in the shadow of Diamond Head at one end of Waikiki beach.

Private Booth wrote home “The natives are a funny lot, half negro half malay they are intelligent and honest.”

I suppose NY Volunteers were then sent to the Big Island (Hawaii) for R & R.  There  C.C. Kennedy and Laura Kennedy invited the officers and men to a Thanksgiving luau at Waiakea Plantation, one of the big sugar plantations on the windward side of the island.  They thought it sufficiently important to have this menu printed.

C.C. Kennedy was the manager, with a reputation for being  charitable, kindly and strict with the workers (mainly Portuguese and Japanese at this stage).  Managers were the powerful and wealthy on that part of the island, so distant from Honolulu. His wife Laura Kennedy was parks commissioner, and used her own money to convert the old Hawaiian fish ponds in Hilo into Lili’uokalani Park.

The men at least must have looked forward to the luau because as Private Booth reported earlier from Honolulu.

We are not allowed much liberty so when we do get our we generally look for some fun or some one that can give us a feed as our food has been something fierce since we have been here. We steal all we can but but the Colonel has gotten on to our racket and has put mounted guards on all the roads leading from camp.

Luau Menu

Here’s what they had at the plantation.  The menu is in Hawaiian on the left, in English on the right and it consisted of

Fish from the fish ponds

Pig wrapped in Ti leaves

Sweet potatoes

Breadfruit

Beef

Kukui nut (this would have been ground with salt to make a relish)

Rolls

Turkey

Poi

Kulolo (translated as Hawaiian pudding, coconut milk and taro mixed to a solid paste, very good)

Fruits

Soda Water

Lemonade

As I said, it’s so poignant to think of those New York boys sitting in one of the most remote spots on earth, Hilo, Hawaii, eating a Thanksgving luau of largely Hawaiian foods in the wake of the annexation of the islands.

And I loved it because Anne is a fan of the food of the British Isles.  While I have become accustomed to just putting on a Mona Lisa smile when well-meaning American friends sympathize about how horribly gastronomically-deprived my young life must have been, I welcome with open arms anyone who can even consider that it might have been otherwise.

Well, Anne is now Dr Anne Bramley.  She has a baby.  And she has a book.  How about that for sheer energy?   She told me when she sent me a copy that I had encouraged her by saying “Three cheers. Not just another paen to the Mediterranean.”  I have no memory whatsoever of the conversation.

But Eat Feed Autumn Winter is an exuberant celebration of the possibilities of winter entertaining.  It’s full of quotes from Shakespeare, suggestions for parties, lists of apples or beers that make it clear that Americans are the beneficiaries of an incredible global system, fantastic photos, and very nice recipes.  If this is what she offered to fellow graduate students, just wait till she hits full stride.

It has given a jump start to my rather hesitant party self. It’s too late for Guy Fawkes and here in Mexico there is no first snowfall–any snowfall is cause for amazement and celebration.  But yes, afternoon tea.  She’s reminded me of clotted cream and the delights of gossip around the tea table.

Onward and upward, Anne!

Here’s the always informative Dorie Greenspan on rice paper.  I’d always wondered how those thin papery pancakes and so on were made. Now I know.

And Joe Pastry on marshmallows.  Go on.  Have a go.  Just in time for Thanksgiving.

And Ken Albala on pork pie.  No recipe here, just a record of his efforts.  Ken remarks that this is like a country pate.

Exactly.  That’s exactly what it is. One of the problems English cooking has is the down home name it gives to its dishes.  Pate en croute sounds exotic and appealing, pork pie ordinary.  They’re the same thing, folks.

And go for the free form. It’s lots of fun. Pork pie, game pie (even in Mexico we can get venison), all those great English cold raised pies are just wonderful to take to a party.

In the gratuitous advice department, the crust needs to be thicker and not too much lard.  And no you don’t roll it, you kind of squidge it out and up.  Ken, you’re a potter, think of moving clay.  Lovely, lovely stuff.