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.

Claudio Hall, grandson of the founder, [explains that] . . . grandma was neither an indigenous braided countrywoman nor a chef. A glamorous upper-class lady, she was an astute businesswoman who liked the idea of creating an elegant restaurant that served Mexican food. It took off, and during the ‘época de oro’ of the Zona Rosa the Fonda became a hangout for the likes of Cantinflas and Maria Felix.
“Grandmother never touched a stove in her life”, explains the affable Hall, who speaks in unaccented English.

“Surely the recipes are treasured family secrets?” I ask. “Not a one” he replies. “She was a great collector of classic Mexican cookbooks – we have an amazing library. All our recipes come from books”.

I’m not a bit surprised.  The wealthy in Mexico City, like the wealthy around the world, ate French food. (as I obsessively repeat on this blog).* If they went out to eat, it was to cosmopolitan restaurants, though with great cooks in every well-to-do family, eating out was not the prestigious leisure activity that it now is.

Nick’s blog (link above), if you don’t already know it, is your best bet for up-to-date information on dining in Mexico City.  He covers mainly the central areas.  After all, one man can do only so much in a city of 20 million and that’s the area his readership needs to know about.

A hundred years ago, Barcelona was booming, textiles factories were spinning, the well-to-do had a social round of balls, country excursions, racing. Women shopped for new furniture, fancy clothes, fine china.  Everyone socialized in restaurants and cafes that served French dinners and te anglaise, owned by migrants from the north of the Italian peninsula–the Swiss Ticino, the part belonging to Sardinia (historic ties to Catalonia), Genoa.

For a really fancy meal, they went to the Maison Dorée in Plaza de Cataluña owned by the brothers Pompidor.  And for the absolute latest dish, too time-consuming and complicated to make at home, you called ahead and ordered canelons.  The restaurant set to making the pasta, stuffing it, and coating it with bechamel.  Bechamel said that you understood food just like olive oil does today.

And here the story branches.  The first branch has to do with ladies learning to cook canelons.

Ladies who wanted to cook this kind of food (or more likely teach their cook to make it) attended the near-professional classes offered from 1924 to 1931 in the feminist Institut i Biblioteca Popular de Cultura de la Dona. We may not think of cooking classes and feminism as a natural pair, but to the founder of the Institut, Francesca Bonnemaison, they were, like libraries, part and parcel of improving women’s culture and competence.

The classes were taught by a professional chef, Joseph Rondissoni, an Italian Swiss, who during his career was executive for various hotels, opened a gourmet shop, and edited the journal Menage, very influential in Spain, designed to improve household management, particularly cooking.  Rondissoni was a disciple of Escoffier who prided himself on sending out well trained chefs around the world.  In Ma Cuisine (1934) Escoffier offers a recipe for canneloni stuffed with chicken, foie gras, game, or other meat (though he coats them with a demi-glace sauce with tomato).

And when Rondissoni published his Culinaria after the Spanish Civil War in 1945, recipes for “canalones” and other pasta are in one of the first sections.  This book is still in print.  The 6th edition was prefaced by Manuel Vasquez Montalban, one of the best writers on gastronomy not just in Spanish but in any language (though look him up–he was much, much more).

(A recipe for canelones Rossini had been published earlier by Ignasi Doménech, one of the founders of modern Catalan cuisine,.  Following the custom of associating the Italian singer and gourmet with truffles, these were to be stuffed with a mixture of chicken livers, bacon, pork loin, brains, grated cheese, tomato sauce, truffles, breadcrumbs, sherry, and egg yolks. (EDIT. Nestor Lujan, see below, credits Domenech with the popularity of canelons, an attribution that fits nicely with recent Catalan nationalism.  I tend to credit Rondissoni, just because he did so much to shape Catalan and Spanish cooking in this period.  But it would need more research to resolve the issue. )

The second branch of the story concerns the pasta.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, part of the great explosion of factory-made dried pasta, canelons were imported from a French firm called  La Poule (the chicken), 16 to a box. It tells you something about how prestigious (and presumably expensive they were) that they were separated by pink tissue paper.

Canelones el Pavo

Ramon Flo, who made industrial pasta in Barcelona from 1911 on, saw an opportunity.  After various efforts, he found ways to make these cylinders, now flattened out now round, selling them under the brand name El Pavo (the turkey) from 1914.

By the 1920s, canelons had become a modish dish for well-to-do Barcelona families to serve on December 26th, St Stephen’s Day, replacing the earlier rice dish made from leftovers from the Christmas soup.  The distinguished historian of Spanish cuisine, Néstor Luján, remembered that his family used El Pavo.

Sometime in the 1950s or 60s, as Spain began to recover from the Civil War, canelons became the common Catalan dish for St Stephen’s Day. And now they are omnipresent from the highest flights of fancy in famous destination restaurants of the region to humble take out places, besides being obligatory for St Stephen’s Day, made from El Pavo pasta, on sale in any little grocery in Catalonia.

Soon. A recipe.

For now, let me just conclude by saying that this is not just a shaggy dog story about a particular region of Spain.  So many elements of the story—the spread of French high cuisine by non-French cooks, the tangled relationship between feminism and women in the kitchen, the industrialization of pasta, the recent invention of national dishes, the difference that just one person can make—crop up time and again.

And finally, thanks to Jeff Koehler who xeroxed for me the introduction to 100 Recetas de Canelons (1990) by the famous Catalan gastronome and historian Néstor Luján from which part but by no means all of this story is taken.

Hmm.  Go read Michaela DeSoucey’s article on gastronationalism in the prestigious American Sociological Review, an article that uses all the technical tools of sociology to get to the politics underlying this preemptive claim.

Here’s her question.

How does an object vilified in some locales become morally and politically justified as traditional, authentic, and worthy of protected status in others? Foie gras, the fat- tened liver of a force-fed duck or goose, is valorized as a symbol of French national identity, history, and culinary culture. It is also a target of critical opposition, fueled by international animal rights organizations.

And here’s part of her answer.

The conditions of French foie gras production and consumption are, in fact, recent phenomena. Rates of foie gras production and consumption within France have tripled since the 1970s, due in large part to state sup port (through the National Institute for Agricultural Research [INRA]) for new technologies that lowered production costs (Jullien and Smith 2008). In the 1980s, the introduction of pneumatic, hydraulic, and computer-calibrated feeding systems allowed each duck to be fed in several seconds, rather than the 30- to 60-second feeding required for artisanal production.21 Additionally, the industry-wide switch in the 1970s to making foie gras from ducks (which are considered heartier and easier to keep in industrial farm facilities) instead of geese made foie gras less expensive and thus available to a wider range of consumers. In interviews, industry members referred to these processes as ‘‘the democratization of foie gras.’’

She calls the process of coopting certain foods as national symbols gastronationalism and points out how it counter balances the globalization of foods.

Gastronationalism is a potent force in contemporary food.  Her own research shows that foie gras follows in the not-so-ancient footsteps of French wine and cheese (at least in their present incarnations).

And Michaela and I spent a great afternoon drinking coffee in the sunshine on the campus of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) teasing out parallels with tequila.  This was until recently a regional Mexican drink of no particular prestige outside the region. New technologies (French and Spanish distilling apparatus for brandy), branding as national symbols and identity (the film industry), appeals to antiquity, to grandmothers and aunts and uncles, international marketing as a true taste of a different nation, and so on all follow Michaela’s gastronationalism model.

I’m sure lots of other examples spring to mind.

It was the late 1960s and I was talking an after-lunch walk with old French friends S & G on one of their annual visits to my family in England.

This was part of the second of my encounters with French food. The first encounter that I have already described was with the very plain food served by a very distinguished family, a family that played a part in our lives for years and years.

About that time, my brother returned from school one day to say that one of his teachers was looking for a family who would take in a young French man about 19 years old.

So S.  came to stay.  For my father, who had read Modern Languages and Economics at Cambridge, it was a welcome chance to practice his French and for both parents, who as farmers found it impossible to get away, a stream of visitors helped satisfy their curiosity and urge to travel.

While he was with us, S met a young compatriot who was doing a year of her nursing training at the local hospital and a few years and many visits to us later, they married and set themselves up in a small flat in Paris.  S, who was quite an intellectual but who had lost all family in the war, worked as a salesperson, G, his wife, worked shifts as a nurse.  Their flat became a stayover place for our family in Paris, though never more than a night or so because it was small.

Both of them thoroughly enjoyed food, S in particular.  When we visited, we always had good food.  But it had little to do with cooking in their tiny kitchen.  True, once I remember G as a special treat had bought a small piece of beef filet neatly tied with string that she turned until browned in an orange Le Creuset casserole in the morning and reheated in the evening when she got back from work.

What made the meal though was the take out: the baguette, a bit of pate or perhaps oil cured herring for a starter, a salad, cheese, perhaps a bought pastry.  I remember realizing that living in a town was not all bad foodwise because you could buy all these things.

And by the by they had wine, something the other family never served en famille, and something that at that time my family never had either, far too expensive.   It took some years before I realized that the excruciating headache that prevented me enjoying my first trip to Versailles was in fact nothing but a hangover from the previous night’s dinner.

But back to that awkward conversation in England. By now I was in my mid twenties.  At university I had discovered the English cookbook author Elizabeth David who captured the hearts of my entire generation, at least that part of it that had the money to go to university.  Her prose was so transporting, so enchanting that it quite overrode my own experiences in France.  This was what France was REALLY like.  And of course I learned her Mediterranean Cooking and French Provincial Cooking by heart.

So  when I went for a post-lunch walk with S & G I turned the conversation to food.  How had S and G put up with the food at my family’s house all those years? I asked them.  After all they were FRENCH.   It must have been a burden they had to bear in return for gorgeous country to roam in and so many historical monuments to visit that they seemed inexhaustible.

That’s when they looked at me with such scorn.  They said nothing more but politely changed the conversation.  I felt myself shrinking like Alice in Wonderland when she ate the mushroom, I felt a blush flood up my face.

That food at my family’s house.   That had not been something to put up with.  It had been something they had anticipated and relished, something that all the take out places around their apartment could not offer, something they did not have time to cook.

Milk and cream from cows milked that day, new potatoes and green beans and raspberries from the garden, eggs laid that morning by the bantams, meat from animals that had names, three home-cooked meals a day, that a French couple who loved food had cherished for a decade.

And I, in the name of sophistication and the reading of a woman who had never seriously cooked in England, had denigrated it. And had spurned and disdained my mother’s extraordinary accomplishment in making such extraordinary food seem so ordinary.

They were puzzled. I was humiliated.

Never again would I so cavalierly dismiss my mother’s work.

Brillat-Savarin, just to remind you, published in 1825 a work on gastronomy called Physiologie du Goût (in English The Physiology of Taste)  self-described as “a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy.”  It’s been in print ever since, was translated into English by the renowned author M.K. Fisher, and as the blurb to that translation says “remains among the most comprehensive, stimulating, and plain enjoyable works ever published on the subject of the palate and its pleasures.”

Well, I just don’t get it.  Perhaps it’s that M.K. Fisher was not the ideal person to translate this.  She knew food and she knew French but she did not know the subtleties of the political and scientific words about food following the Revolution.

But I’m not sure that’s it.  Way back in my historian of science days, I spent hours and hours working through books by French intellectuals in this period–Cuvier, Lamarck, Fourier, Comte, Chateaubriand, Guizeau, among others–and found them in French or in English quite brilliant, provoking me to rage or enthusiastic agreement, but in either case pointing to questions and propounding theories that demanded attention.  Not surprising given that politically and scientifically France had transformed the world for better or worse and that this had to be confronted.

And then there’s dear old B-S.  Just such a let down.  Arch, anecdotal, derivative, and just plain boring.  And this at a time when every truism about food–truisms that were centuries or millennia old– were up for grabs.

What am I missing?

1.  I remain fascinated by firing the monster oven or more precisely by the collecting of real logs not just faggots.  It’s doubtless all in Maget’s book, but that’s a lot of large wood for peasants.  I look forward to reading about the land tenure scheme that gave them these rights?

I’d also love someone to work out the relative energy costs of firing one huge oven versus a number of smaller ones.  How was this system thought up and maintained.

And it does point up, by the way, just how luxurious it is today to be able to construct one’s own bread oven in one’s own back yard.

2.  Interesting that they did a baking as the oven was warming.  You read so often of foods being put in bread ovens after the bread had been removed.  But it the main bread of the year was baking for six hours presumably it stayed in until the oven had cooled down.

3. Adding boiling water to icy rye flour is a new one for me. I’m beginning to run out of synonyms for interesting and fascinating.

4.  Freeze dried bread all winter–what a neat idea.  Makes one wonder how widespread this practice was.

5.  I look forward to seeing how the grinding was done.

6.  The book by Maget slots into that fascinating period when French intellectuals and city folk were studying their own “peasantry,” inventing myths about the peasant origins of French food and so on.  So besides having lots of wonderful data, Maget’s book itself is part of the history of French food.  Bears further thinking about.

________

William says his blog/web site is in disorder but readers can link to more he’s written on this bread here.

I’m kicking myself for never having come across Maget’s Le pain anniversaire which you can order here.

And here are links to a series of photos of the annual bread baking. Click through to get the whole sequence.

I do sniff whiffs of the folklorico gusting about.

It was the late 1950s.  Nice English fifteen year olds did exchanges with nice French fifteen year olds.  The pall of World War II still hung over Europe and foreign travel was a big deal. Our parents had been to Europe perhaps once, perhaps never.  They were sending their children on a great adventure, just about affordable because all that was required was the travel money. Like everyone else in my class I filled out the forms supplied by the exchange agency.

The school called my parents.  I had been assigned, for reasons unknown, to exchange with the son of a very important French family, with a father who was a senior French politician, diplomat, and intellectual.  Completely unworldly, this left me utterly unfazed.

I somehow got to the family summer (and ancestral) house in the Jura.  We were escorted on the Channel crossing but even so I discovered with a shock that porters were not kind people who carried your luggage for free.  The eldest son met me in Paris, fed me on a sandwich from a rotating automat (wow), and put me on the next train.

Madame had written my mother.  She hoped she’d understand but they had no running water in the house.  The one toilet was across the graveled entry yard.  Not so different from home actually though we had had running water and two toilets in the house for the past decade.  And the house was pleasant.  Tall rather than long, very bare, what furniture there was valuable antiques, a ping pong table in the entrance hall, and a run down garden that produced nothing but red currants outside the dining room.

I never went in the kitchen, a sliver of a room off the entrance hall where Madame cooked with the wife of the couple who looked after the house.  The husband kept rabbits in a cage in the yard and was a dab hand at twisting their necks.

I had no expectations about the food.  I had no idea that French food was supposed to be anything special.  I suppose I was relieved that I liked what we had. It might for all I knew, after all, have been like the food the poor boarders in my school had to live on.

The food was good.  For breakfast there was milky coffee from a bowl (my first real coffee drinking) with fresh bread, unsalted butter, and good jam (except Sundays when the village bakery wasn’t open and we had what tasted to me like a stale bun but I later realized was the much-heralded brioche).

The main meal at midday consisted of a vegetable soup, a sliver of meat, boiled potatoes and perhaps another boiled vegetable, and a green salad, and perhaps a bit of cheese and fruit.  I was shocked that the family ate red currants with sugar instead of made into jelly to serve with lamb or game.

I don’t remember what we had in the evening. Not much, I think.  Bread and cheese.

All in all, it was pretty similar to what I was used to.  The bread was long, not square. I had my first taste of petit suisse which I thought would be ice cream and definitely wasn’t. The local cheese was different from Cheddar but equally good (our families exchanged cheeses for years thereafter).  The main meal came in stages not all at once.  I missed a good cup of tea and didn’t think a tisane while reading Paris Match or Tintin made up for it. Once we each had a very fancy pastry from the pastry shop in the town about ten miles away.

Weekends were special.  Monsieur arrived from Geneva where he was representing the French at an international convention. “Le chocolat suisse” cried the five children in residence (the two oldest were not there) hurling themselves on their father.  He doled it out, one square each.  During the rest of the week, if we went swimming in the river in the afternoon, we had a chunk of baguette and a square of chocolate to put in the middle.

One other food experience stuck in my mind.   Eric (my exchange partner) and I were sent on a tour to visit interesting places and family friends. One was the widow of a famous French philosopher. One was a cardinal.

And the third was a family who still lived in the chateau that their ancestors had built in the 14th century on the south side of Lake Geneva (googling I find that at least some of them are still there).  I’d never stayed in a medieval castle before.  I was stunned by my tiny bedroom in a tower with a view through a tiny vertical window to the lake.  I was fascinated by the tiny pebbly beach and the waters of the lake lapping at the walls of the chateau.

But the food.  If I remember right about thirty family members lived in the chateau.  There was a huge dining hall with a long table.  One of the family acted as cook.   He brought in a big tray.  It was covered with a slab of yellow stuff.  It had some kind of sauce on top, tomato perhaps.  We each got a square.   That was dinner?!

I now realize it was polenta.  And times were hard.

Never to be forgotten, in those days before ethnic restaurants (in fact I’d only eaten out in a restaurant once or twice in my life) this was my first experience of anything other than English food.  But stock, cream, sauces.  Not a trace.  Nor of any of the other dishes that we tend to associate today with French food.

In a house the saize of a small palace, a buffet was laid out: game (in season), fish, fresh breads, made dishes such as devilled kidneys, tea, and coffee. potted shrimp and crab, fish pies, pickled meat dishes from brisket and goose to ox palate and thrush, apple and strawberry fools, a variety of macaroni dishes, and lots of Indian-style dishe, such as pilau, kedgeree and curried lobster.

Only perhaps one English person in a hundred ever tasted such a breakfast, even though a simpler version did filter down the social scale.

(Note that the country house breakfast had little to do with what is now sold as an English breakfast: bacon, sausage, fried egg, baked beans, and toast. This has emerged in its present form since I left England in the 1970s).

In The English Breakfast, Kaori O’Connor, an anthropologist at University College London, offers a “biography of the meal, a culinary detective story and a cookbook all rolled into one”  in her introduction, just over fifty pages in all.  (Most of the book, which is priced so ridiculously I am not even going to give you the bad news, consists of reprints of a couple of small nineteenth-century pieces on the English breakfast, followed by  (1) Georgiana Hill’s The Breakfast Book(1865); (2) Miss M.L. Allen’s Breakfast Dishes for Every Morning of Three Months (1884); and (3) Colonel Kenney Herbert‘s Fifty Breakfasts (1894)).

The breakfast cookbooks, all written for the leisured classes or those who aspired to be part of the leisured classes, are a window into a vanished world.  They are mainly for men (women could stay in bed).    For the British well-to-do male, this buffet-style meal was fortification enough for a day of country pursuits, hunting, shooting, or fishing.

Kaori O’Connor asks: why did the country house breakfast become so important a part of English culture?  For most of their history, the English upper class, like other European aristocrats, did not eat breakfast. The first meal of the day (dinner) was taken at midday, the second in the evening.

Her answer is that the country house breakfast asserted English, Anglo-Saxon identity in the face of expanding French high cuisine. It gained popularity at a time when Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the story of an Anglo-Saxon family in an England ruled by Normans (French).  One of its characters was Robin Hood, established him and his band of “merrry men” as an authentic English hero. It was also the when Alfred the Great was reinvented as one of England’s foundering monarchs.

The country house breakfast consisted of “honest” plain food not fancy sauced food, understood as French. The ingredients from the walled garden, home farm, and estate in Scotland were reminiscent of those advocated by Cato and other republicans in Ancient Rome who prided themselves on home-grown food from the estate.  Move the former midday meal back a bit and you have the dishes that were served.

A breakfast of this size at 9 in the morning allowed men to spend the rest of the day on horseback following hounds, shooting game, or fishing for trout or salmon (the famous trio, hunting, shooting, fishing, pastimes of the country gentleman). All they needed was a picnic.  Dinner became an evening meal.

As a result (and here I extending Kaori’s analysis) the English aristocracy and gentry had a Janus-faced cuisine.

In the morning, particularly in the country, they ate English food, asserting their identity with the nation.

At the evening dinner, they (like the upper classes across Europe) they ate French food, prepared by a French or a French-trained cook, asserting their role as part of a cosmopolitan world and as leaders of a world empire.

Best of both worlds.

I don’t think this happens in other major culinary traditions such as Indian, Chinese, Persian, etc. Or am I wrong? Any thoughts greatly appreciated.