Should you just happen to be in Guanajuato on 27th September, there will be a mole festival in the delightful Plaza San Fernando. MN$ 100 to get in, book signing by Patricia Quintana, tastings of different moles, music, wine tastings, and artesania. Roughly 12-5.

Well, if you don’t look, you won’t find. But, after a tentative start in the 1960s, in the last ten or fifteen years, archaeologists have been looking and it turns out that the state is littered with pre-hispanic remains. Most come from the first millennium AD. They are now just beginning to be opened to the public. This is Plazuelas in the south of the state.

And, of course, if you’re interested in the history of food, they have lots of intriguing remains, including these metates (grindstones). Pretty sophisticated they are, too, with legs, and ridges along the sides. Both, as contemporary metate makers tell me, take quite a bit of skill.

Most of the information about the new research and about the sites that you can visit has been pretty hard to get until now. This month, however, the excellent Mexican magazine Arqueología Mexicana, has an issue devoted to Guanajuato. If you can lay your hands on it, do because it has detailed accounts of five sites, lots of overviews, and information about where to go and what to do. This issue is not yet available free on its website but go there anyway. There’s lots to download.

Edit. Here’s perhaps a somewhat clearer photo of the metate where you can make out the legs.

He names many of the usual suspects: Enrique Olvera, Ricardo Muñoz, Patricia Quintana, Monica Patiño and Martha Chapa (with a nod to Angela Gironella) in Mexico City.

He adds José Luis Diaz in Oaxaca, Guillermo Gonzalez in Monterrey, and, slightly to my surprise, Bricio Dominguez in Guanjuato with two restaurants. Perhaps El Jardin de Milagros, just down the hill from me has changed hands. Last time I went about a year ago it was pleasant but not startling. And Ocho Reales just up the hill has re-opened in the last couple of months. I guess an outing is in order.

Anyway it’s always nice to read something that recognizes that the provinces exist. You can get names and addresses of the restaurants even if you don’t read Spanish.

Just a few comments and pointers. Cebadina means a little thing made of barley so it’s in this great family of barley drinks we’re pursuing.

1. Bob neatly shows that cebadina in its present form was probably invented in the 1940s. Some bright individual had the idea of mixing a traditional barley water with a tepache (lightly fermented fruit drink, another thing on our horizon, horrors how this topic spreads) and with either an agua de tamarindo or an agua de jamaica (that one we still have to talk about) to make a new hybrid. And glory hallelujah if you added a spoonful of bicarb it fizzed.

2. What better for a hangover? Cheaper than alka seltzer, more flavorful too.

3. What better to snow the kids. Refrescos weren’t so common then and this was doubtless cheaper. Magic in a glass.

4. And how quickly traditions are created. Both the Compendio lexicográfico de los alimentos en Guanajuato (Ediciones La Rana 1994), and Bebidas Nacionales, a truly astonishing guide put out by the wonderful magazine, México Desconocido, list it as a traditional Guanajuato drink.

In short, how smart entrepreneurs can transform traditional aguas frescas into proto-alka seltzer and proto-refrescos/soda/pop.

And now that they’re on the way out, how ephemeral food traditions can be.

This November the political leaders here in the city of Guanajuato are asking the State to help with a million dollar clean up of the town slaughterhouse. Of course that’s just the beginning of the bargaining. But even so it suggests that it’s going to cost a lot of money for a town of about 150,000 people and a slaughterhouse that deals with 40 pigs, 20 cattle, and a varying number of sheep and goats daily. But the sanitary conditions are apparently terrible, the treatment of the animals ditto, and the evisceration of carcasses subject to contamination.

Going north, the local phrase for going to the US, is becoming much less inviting as opportunities and wages here increase.