In Mexico, the search for the Mexican tradition, for indigenous and colonial Spanish traditions, sucks all the air out of culinary commentary and culinary history, something I will be writing more about.  And my friend, Nick Gilman, savvy explorer of Mexico City dining, is ambiguous about the Jewish delis etc  in Mexico, which didn’t match his New York memories.  And he found only one cookbook, a collection of Sephardic recipes.

Outside Mexico, Claudia Roden, who in her wonderful Book of Jewish Food, managed to get as far as India and China, left the Jewish cooking of Latin American countries out of the story (somewhat to the consternation of some of my cuisine-minded Latin-American Jewish friends).

The failure to recognize Jewish Mexican cuisine is changing at least in the United States. And as this branch of Jewish cuisine becomes better known in its own right, there is no need to measure it (or Argentinian or Panamanian or other Latin American Jewish cuisines) against the American.   I wish I could speak about it with more authority but being neither Jewish nor related to anyone in the community I have to rely on others.  Not such a bad fate, actually, given the interpreters coming along.

First came the lovely and exuberant Pati Jinich, determined to make Mexican food a little less a matter of daunting rules, at least as she explained to me when we had breakfast last year.  Ending up in Washington D.C. with her banker husband she has forged a career as interpreter of Mexican cooking, first with classes, then a blog, and now a cooking program on American Public Television.  Many of the dishes she talks about are standard Mexican fare.

Pati does not forget Jewish Mexican dishes though.  Here is an article by Joan Nathan in the New York Times on her Mexican-Jewish classes, including gefilte fish a la Veracruzana. And here she is talking about it on The Splendid Table.

And on her website for the television series (which incorporates her earlier blog) here’s this fantastic tamarind-apricot-chipotle chicken recipe, (presumably derived from a Sephardic dish) now firmly in my repertoire of favorite dishes.  Here’s the story she tells.

My Lali, as we called my grandmother, was an extraordinary cook. I could write down pages and pages listing the dishes she made that I loved. My favorite ones always had a sweet spin to them. The roasted duck with the plum sauce, the chicken paprika with sweet pimientos, the stuffed cabbage with that heart warming sauce…

If I could have my Lali over for Rosh Hashanah next week, I would treat her with the Chicken with Tamarind and Apricots I learned to make from Flora Cohen right before I got married. A cookbook writer and teacher from Syrian ancestry, who like my grandmother, was an immigrant who made Mexico her home bringing along exotic flavors from her birthplace. Flora was known to turn ignorant brides, who did not know how to boil an egg, into competent cooks who could bring bliss to the tummies of their new husbands (hey, at least my husband didn’t starve in those first years…)

And now we have a book by Susan and Alex Schmidt which I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on,  and an accompanying  blog Challa-peño. Here’s their story.

 On that table in the middle of Mexico City, on a Sunday afternoon in 1962,  there sat, nokedli, those Hungarian dumplings, toltotkaposta, my Grandma’s famous stuffed cabbage, or Hungarian chicken paprikash.  Without fail, on the side, there were  hot tortillas, guacamole, bright green serrano chile peppers, and a shallow bowl filled with fresh cilantro leaves.

Excitedly we’d all sit down to eat to the din and clang of Hungarian, Spanish and English being spoken, with Sinatra playing in the background.

So next time you want a change of pace, here’s another of the world’s ever-increasing number of cuisines to try out.

And another on the chicken industry in the US.  Planning ahead so that your chicken will be ready.

As an aside, I’m going to use this next time my husband tells me that boiling an egg is child’s play. I don’t think so. You can’t see inside the damn thing to know what point it’s reached. I bet that’s what the purchasers of those 54 million eggs were worried about.

But back to Delia. She’s just published a new cookbook called How to Cheat at Cooking. It’s designed to help people get meals on the table quickly using preprepared ingredients. Another aside. It’s the perfect illustration of why cookbooks are always so country specific. Imagine trying to hunt down frozen mashed potatoes or canned minced lamb in Mexico or even in the United States.

But back to the main point once more. In the course of the publicity for the book, she took on two icons of the British culinary establishment: Jamie Oliver (also famous for a much-publicized and not-entirely-successful effort to make British school food healthy) and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, champion of all bits of the animal. They’d come out urging Brits not to buy battery chicken.

Oh go ahead, says Delia. I don’t do organic. If there’s nice reasonably-priced organic, fine. If not, fine too. And those broiler house chickens have made chicken available to millions who would not otherwise be able to afford such luxury.

Well, that, combined with Delia’s spirituality and her love of soccer, is quite enough to make many people see red. Just scan the negative reviews on Amazon.

Now, I’m not a fan of spirituality and have no interest in soccer, but without having seen the book, I’m inclined to think the positive reviewers are right that it’s full of useful ideas. I have a couple of her earlier books and like them a lot.

I also suspect that I, like many of her fans, find her non-preachy voice and concern that everyone eat well, is a welcome change from much food writing.

And I don’t just suspect, I’m pretty certain that she’s winning the numbers game at least.

And of these other parts of the world, few are more impacted than Mexico. Mexico is the land of corn, the place of its invention, the place where activists today chant “Sin maíz no hay país“–without maize, no country or homeland or nation. Last week more demonstrations were organized (organized is the operative word) in Mexico City against NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement or TLCAN in Mexico).

With emotions running so high, it’s almost impossible to figure out what is actually going on. So I was especially glad to see Sergio Sarmiento‘s editorial (under the pen name Jaque Mate) in Reforma on the 1st of February. Too bad he doesn’t list his sources but more on that later. For now, here are some interesting facts and figures.

But before we get started, when talking about corn in Mexico, it is essential to distinguish between white and yellow corn. No, white is not that super-sugary white you get in the US. White is what the US calls field corn, starchy, terrific non-sweet flavor, and the essential base for Mexico’s flat bread (tortillas) and steamed dumplings (tamales).

Now, according to Sarmiento,

1. Mexico remains self sufficient in white corn for tortillas and tamales.

2. Between 1970 and today, corn production in Mexico has risen from 8.9 million tons to 21 million tons.

3. This has been done by using modern agricultural methods. The acreage has essentially not changed while the output has almost tripled.

4. Imports of corn have also soared in the same period from 2 million tons a year to between 6 and 8 million tons. Almost all of this is yellow corn, destined for animal feed and for high fructose corn syrup.

5. With so much imported yellow corn (and sorghum and soy) now available, Mexico has become the world’s fourth largest producer of chicken and eggs, and its sixth largest producer of pork. Roughly speaking these have increased from 4.5 million tons a year in 1970 to 7.5 million tons now.

And so? Mexico is still producing enough white corn for human consumption. And it’s producing chicken, eggs and pork as well. A net gain of quite incredible proportions. When I came to Mexico ten years ago, the poor in the country around here ate very little meat. Now, at least in this area of Mexico which is relatively wealthy, they take it for granted.

There’s more about this and about Mexico’s agricultural subsidies, but the latter make my head ache, so I’ll leave them for later.

I couldn’t agree more even though I have to admit that I don’t think mass-producing chickens is the most agreeable form of husbandry. The smell of the sheds is pretty grim.  Indeed when I was a child my father refused to allow us to eat chicken although we had lots of free range ones scratching around for eggs. He thought they were dirty birds even when allowed to roam. But this just meant that chicken became something very desirable and today I just blank out that bit of my mind and eat the things with pleasure.

Meanwhile in Mexico, Sergio Sarmiento, who writes editorials for the Mexican newspaper Reforma pointed out last week that Mexico is now the fourth largest producer of chicken and eggs in the world.

The difference this has made to Mexicans, especially poorer Mexicans, in just a decade is quite extraordinary. Now all but the poorest can afford chicken, at least once in a while.  Chicken fast food places are everywhere, some just a single unit, but many small (300 outlets in this case) chains such as Pollo Feliz that does a nice charcoal-grilled chicken with tortillas, a salad, and grilled jalapeños. Supermarkets and street markets alike are full of chicken.  And eggs are also within everyone’s reach: the price of eggs per pound is about the same as the price of tortillas per pound.

It’s affected the landscape too. You can be driving in a remote bit of country and off in the distance you will see the long sheds that house the chickens. Often this is on land that is no use for crops. One of the biggest producers is Bachoco. Or here.  Although they started in the north of Mexico, they are now headquartered in Celaya just an hour’s drive from us in the thriving agricultural Bajio region.How come this change? Well, it’s all due to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. And more on that later.

So it was great to find Farid Zadi’s summary of how Algerian Cuisine has changed in the last thirty or forty years.

In a word, more butter and marge, more chicken breasts, more vanilla, more western-style desserts.