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.

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).

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?

That may be the general pattern.  There are lots of exceptions though. Women do a whole lot of farming, including the staples in many societies.  Men do a lot of post-harvest processing, threshing of grains, for example.  In Hawaii men traditionally cooked the sacred staple, taro.  Preparing was forbidden to women, though in fact they apparently did so when there were no men about.

In Mexico, though, although women helped farm, men did not grind.  Absolutely not.  The women who taught me to grind progressed from amazement to nervous titters to outright hilarity when men friends of mine tried their hand at it.

Five hours sound too much. You don’t need an almost an hour to grind 1 kg. I did fieldwork in Tlaxcala in the beginning of the 80′s, and maize was sometimes ground by hand on a metate, usually between 5 and 6 or 7 in the morning. And I’ve tried it out myself, too, though to rather uneven results. Yes, it was hard work, but five hours? And there were more than six family members, plus the dogs that were also fed tortillas. Considering all the other stuff a rural housewife has to do, apart from the tasks you mentioned – wash clothes by hand, cook, feed the domestic animals, go out to buy stuff, keep the house and patio in working order, look after kids, help with the field work, it also sounds unrealistic.

From the way Heike phrases it, it sounds as if this village already had a mill so that the metate was used only on special occasions.  So was the dough (masa) for the day or just for a special meal?

Grinding (pineapple in this case, not maize)

Getting a clean measure of the time to grind for a family is hard.

• Family size and family appetites vary.
• Children interrupt or grandma pitches in to help.
• It is hard to grind continuously because it is such hard work.  In my experience, at first it goes really quickly because a metate plus woman is a very efficient machine.  Then it gets harder and harder as you tire. So do the breathers the grinder takes count as part of the time?  I would say so. For tortillas, you usually have to make five “passes” across the metate, that is starting with a handful of nixtamal (maize heated with alkali and drained) you move it from the top to the bottom of the metate with a series of back and forth strokes.  Then you gather it up with your fingers and move it back to the top, a small breather.  Then repeat four more times, with a few seconds’ rest leaning back on your heels between each repetition. Then a slightly longer breather as you put the dough (masa) in one container and take nixtamal out of another.
• Some women are better grinders than others, producing a consistent dough quickly.  Why there should be differences I am not sure, but it is a widely repeated claim.
• The dough for tamales and gorditas takes less time than the dough for tortillas (though tamales then take longer to make than tortillas).

Even given these problems, I’m pretty certain that grinding was the dominant task of the day, day after day, for whoever it was that did the grinding, taking not just an hour or so but hours and hours.

What about the other chores Heike mentions?  In the past washing would have been less of a chore because there were fewer clothes and yet fewer bed linens.  Keeping the house and patio clean (largely endless sweeping) was often handed off to girl children (who did not go to school), as well as the care of chickens, dogs, pigs, and younger children.

Child care, I think, often got very short shrift as women had to balance turning out the tortillas with spending time with the kids.   It’s purely anecdotal, but I remember being very taken aback in the mid 1990s to hear Eugenia Ricaud, then working for DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, the government family welfare agency run by politician’s wives) in San Miguel de Allende, say that the very best way to improve childrens’ lives was to put a mill in the village.  This allowed women to spend time with their  children (or take paid employment or develop handicrafts).

Of course, the ladies of DIF varied in their grip on life in the villages so I went back to Eugenia several years later to find out if I had really understood what she was saying.   Her answer was yes.

Leaving Mexico for a second and going to western Eurasia where simple grindstones were the main way of reducing grains to meal until Roman times (and in backwaters long after), grinding was work reserved for the lowest in society, usually slaves/prisoners so far as I can see.

The Roman army adopted rotary mills, I think largely because they ground more rapidly.  Even so it took a hefty legionary an hour and a half to grind enough meal to feed his group of eight for a day. And not only was the mill faster and less tiring because it was not driven by the weight of the grinder, the meal was almost certainly not as fine as the dough for tortillas. (Anyone who can get me a rotary mill so that I can do some comparative studies with the simple grindstone will win my unending gratitude).

But this is to get into Nick Trachet’s questions which will have to wait for tomorrow.

Heike also asks where I got my information on maize processing.  The answer is from observing, cross-questioning and working with women in different villages in Guanajuato: Margarita Muñoz Ramirez, who started grinding at the age of twelve in a village outside San Miguel de Allende, AltaGracia Sanchez Torrez and Maria Jesús de Cabrera Parra of Rodeo San José and Emily Bonilla of El Capulín, both outside Guanajuato.  I am also grateful for the input of the metateros (metates/grindstone-makers) in Comonfort, Guanajuato, particularly Manuel Olalde and Rafael Hernández Laguna and families.  Comparing notes with José Rodriguez of Mexico City who is finishing a Ph.D. thesis on Mexican metates and grinding for the University of Barcelona was also very helpful.  And of course my own experiments.

I also know the article by Arnold Bauer that she mentions originally published in Agricultural History 64 (1990), 1-17 and updated in Enrique Florescano and Virginia García Acosta, coord., Mestizajes tecnológicos y cambios culturales en México (Mexico: CIESAS, 2004), 169-99.  He suggests five to six hours, and cites various studies going back to one by Miguel María de Azcárate in 1837 that come to similar conclusions.  Jeff Pilcher has a good discussion of the mechanization of masa grinding and tortilla making in chapter five of ¡Que vivan los tamales! (University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

While we are at it, here is my response to the question “Why didn’t Mexicans abandon the metate?  And if you search under grinding you will find lots more.

Basket of shrimp empanadas, 5 for $30 pesos (US$2.20)

Saturday saw a group of three friends in La Viga, Mexico’s wholesale market, claimed to be the biggest in Latin America and the second biggest in the world.  It’s worthy of several blogs which will be coming along. First, though, is the shrimp empanada.  The market appears to run on shrimp empanadas available from the time it opens at three in the morning to the time when it winds down around two in the afternoon.  They’re made on the spot and served hot and fresh.

Roberto, part of a production line of two empanada makers and one fryer, explained how it was done.  The dough is made of flour from a big sack under the work bench and vegetable oil from equally big plastic garafons. It’s more like an Argentinean empanada dough than the flaky pastry (hojaldre) usually used for empanadas in Mexico.

It’s shaped into egg-sized balls (a phrase is worth many jokes in Mexico and probably elsewhere).  These are stored in a plastic bag (on left below).

Then the dough is rolled out on this oilcloth-covered counter. The empanada makers did it with two or three quick strokes. It took me half a dozen.

Rolling the dough

Then the shrimp mixture, at hand in a red plastic bowl, is sprinkled over the half of the dough furthest from the empanada maker.

Adding filling of small shrimp with chopped onion and tomato

Now comes the real artistry, the crimping. The part of the dough closest to the worker is flipped over.  The points are folded over and firmly pressed down. Then working backwards, the two hands in parallel, the sides are crimped to make a neat, secure, half oval.

Securely crimping the edges of an empanada

The empanada is thrown back to a waiting tray ready to be fried.

Perfectly uniform empanadas ready to fry

At this point, the third member of the team takes over.  He fries the empanadas about ten at a time. When they are brown, he scoops them out and arranges them artistically on a foil-lined basket with absorbent paper in the bottom.  He also fills the orders, wrapping the empanadas in absorbent paper and putting them in plastic bags.

Empanadas frying

How do they taste?

With a sprinkle of salt, a hefty dash of hot sauce, the crisp outside and shrimp-salad-like interiors warm and satisfy, cheering up a chilly morning where the wholesale aisles lit by bare light bulbs are awash with melting ice from the refrigerated fish trailers.

Like most fried things, they are not so good cold.  The dough is thin and gets tough as it cools.

Roberto and companions start work at three.  The clientele shifts from market workers to visitors as the morning wears on.  They make four hundred (each, I think, but they were too busy to answer many questions) on weekdays, eight hundred on the weekends. Certainly they were turning out a couple a minute when we were there.  Four hundred empanadas would bring in US$130.

They enjoyed seeing me make a fool of myself.  They grabbed a snack of fried fish in bites as they worked. But it was clear that the production line had to keep going if they were to make a profit.

The ergonomics of ten hours of empanada making. Note the boxes to stand on.

And here you can see the result. My empanada on the left, thick crust and uneven filling.  Roberto’s on the right. Perfect hand food.

My kindergarten-level empanada versus doctoral-level empanada (Beatriz's quip)

Huge thanks to my comadre, Beatriz, who knows the market and its people so well, and was prepared to share that knowledge, and to Tessa who made a perfect companion. And of course to Roberto and his co-workers.

Threat to the supply of basic products

The ad was posted by the National Chamber of Industrialized Maize, which it turns out is the association of enterprises that turn maize into edible products: masa for tortillas and tamales, snacks, and animal food.  Since the half dozen points where these robberies occur are well known, the Chamber is demanding that the government do something to stop this “leakage.”

It’s well known that large quantities of gasoline and crude ($2-4 billion’s worth) are stolen from Pemex, the national company and sold nationally and internationally (including the US).

Now Mexico’s other fuel, the raw materials for the tortillas and meat that keep humans going,  is being ripped off.   Assuming the facts in the ad are correct (and I can hear the conspiracy theories beginning to buzz) here are a couple of thoughts:

• It’s not clear what kind of maize is being stolen, imported maize (largely for animal feed essential for the rapidly growing consumption of meat, poultry, and eggs) or national white maize (for tortillas).
• Few people grind their own maize in Mexico.  Processors of some kind must be buying this (I think even if it’s imported maize). This quantity may be tiny in terms of total Mexican production. It’s quite enough to need some sophisticated logistics.
• I can’t help thinking of the poem in the Confucian Book of Songs composed by Chinese peasants several hundred years before Christ in protest at the way the aristocrats took substantial portions of their harvest by force. The refrain is:

Large rats! Large rats! Do not eat our grain.

Who are these large rats?   And where do they fit in the Mexican economy in all its shades from white through gray to black?

My Lebanese-Mexican friend had to pick up the coffee, bread, stuffed grape leaves, and date pie that she’d ordered from Restaurant Emir on Miguel Angel de Quevedo so we pulled into the parking lot of a small shopping center on Miguel Angel de Quevedo, one of the major east-west streets in the south of the city, lined with bookstores, restaurants, and small businesses.

While the waiter piled the bags in the back of the car, we sat at an outdoor table of this tiny restaurant and ordered drinks, some pale, ivory hummus, a wonderfully smoky baba ganoush (called by a different Arabic name) and raw kibbé.  “Take that back,” said my friend explaining that she did not like the Mexican custom of adding chopped serrano chile on the side in addition to onion and mint.

The plate returned suitably purged of the chile, and as we took our servings, dribbling them with olive oil, friends of the owner began to trickle in for their regular Friday reunion, resulting in rounds of greetings and questions about friends and families.  The restaurant has a heritage of almost a hundred years, the owner’s family establishing the first Lebanese restaurant in Mexico in the historic city center in 1921, and although Lebanese restaurants and coffee shops have proliferated and every grocery store sells hummus and tortillas arabe (aka arab bread), this remains a favorite.

It was early for the Mexican midday meal so we passed on the heavier dishes and ordered their lovely grape leaves, the rice tender but not soggy, firmly packed but not dense, with a nice proportion of small chunks of lamb.

Then it was time for coffee and dessert.  As we contemplated the tray of pastries, we declined the offer of a large lady to read our coffee grounds though various other customers accepted.  Then the owner, Pepe, whispered something in my friend’s ear.  They have “kenefay,” she explained.  They don’t make it every day.

Something that wasn’t on the menu nor made every day sounded like something I should try, even though my friend’s description, “it’s bread and milk,” did not sound so encouraging.  I am no fan of soggy bread.  Forget trifle, pass on the capirotada, don’t offer me bread and butter pudding.

Ten minutes later the dish appeared.  It was about three inches square, 1/2 inch thick, what looked like the finest golden breadcrumbs on the top, what looked like a thick pastrycream beneath, all bathed in a thin syrup.  We each dug in with a teaspoon.

This wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination bread and milk.  It was rich and sweet and creamy, perhaps even a little acidy or cheesy tang and a bit of texture from the topping. Something to savor, not to eat quickly.  A lovely creamy texture, not a bit like the soggy bread I had feared.

So how did you make it?  Well, said my friend, there was a short cut with Pan Bimbo that people used at home but it wasn’t as good.  That slight hint of cheese?  I wanted to ask Pepe but he was deep into cucumber slices, tomato slices, what looked like a Cuba Libre, and conversation with his friends.  “Nata” said the waiter.  Nata is Mexico’s answer to clotted cream and really delicious.  How did you spell it in Spanish?  Well, why would you spell it in Spanish?, said my friend  who is very much part of the intelligensia?  It’s a Arabic word.

As soon as I got home I rushed to Anissa Helou’s Lebanese Cuisine.  There are three or four Mexican Lebanese cookbooks, unusual because immigrant cookbooks in Mexico are few and far between, but I thought Arabic to my native tongue would reveal more than Arabic to Spanish.  And of course, there I tracked it down.  It took a bit because I had to figure out that the golden crust corresponded to the first couple of words in her English title “Shredded pastry and cheese pie”  and that this was not a bit like what I understood by pie.  It could be made with a fresh cheese (she suggests mozzarella as a substitute)  or it could be made with clotted cream. Now  I had an English transliteration.

By now bells were ringing so it was off to Anissa’s blog.  And sure enough,  the alarm bells were right. Anissa had recently blogged about k’nafeh describing it as her favorite breakfast wrapped in sesame bread.  The dish shown in her photo could have been taken in Restaurant Emir, except that they serve it as a dessert and there is no sesame bread.  I’m not sure I could cope with sesame bread as well.  An amazing dish.  See if you can find it.  It’s wonderful.

Here’s a link to a map that shows Restaurant Emir.  It is run by members of the same family as the restaurant of the same name in the historic center.  The coffee shops are a different operation altogether, I understand.

EDIT. My friend says that the best place to eat Lebanese cuisine in the south of the city is in the Centro Libanés which has a Lebanese chef.  No take out, though.

And bit by bit, I will talk more about Lebanese Mexican cuisine, part of my on-going project of understanding the cuisines of Mexico’s immigrants.

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.