Mexican Cuisine from a Mexican Perspective

Living in Mexico means that you get a different perspective on Mexican food. In the States it’s usually seen through the eyes of authors such as Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayliss, Zarela Martínez, and so on. Wonderful interpreters, all of them. But their focus is cooking, not the culinary scene.

Not surprisingly they are not the people who command the scene in Mexico. Here it’s what might be called the Mexico City Culinary Establishment. I don’t think there’s any US equivalent. Mexico City is a world unto itself in highly centralized Mexico. For those who live there, it’s the only place in the country that matters (think Paris for a comparison).

Within Mexico City, a core circle of thirty or forty people make up the Culinary Establishment. Among them, in no particular order, and certainly not exclusively, are individuals such as Cristina Barros, José Iturriaga, Patricia Quintana, Jorge De’Angeli and his wife Alicia Gironelli, Lula Bertán, Sonia Corcuera, Luis Vargas, Maria Dolores Torres Yzabal, Lila Lomelí, Victor Nava, Janet Long, Silvia Kurczyn, Graciela Flores, José Luis Curiel, Margarita Salinas, and Martha Chapa.

So who are these people? Overwhelmingly these are people whose first second language is as likely to be fluent French as English, who have a parent or grandparent from Catalonia, Poland, England, France or Italy, who grew up eating a Mexican version of French or Spanish food. (“What you must understand, Rachel, is that we never ate Mexican food at home,” said one, a statement that actually needs some teasing out). They are part and parcel of the rest of the Mexican establishment. To get some sense of this, imagine if in the US, the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, a few Harvard faculty, a fifth-generation Rockefeller, the wife of Alan Greenspan, and assorted poets and novelists were all involved in researching, cooking, and promoting American food. I know the mind boggles, but that’s the way it is in Mexico City.

Given their international connections, it is not surprising that this is the group that represents Mexican food internationally. They are the people who sit on Slow Food Committees, try to find chefs for “internal” Mexican restaurants in the US, shepherd around and/or cook for a lot of the visiting tours from the US, in many cases provide contacts for US cookbook writers, go to the meetings of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, sit on Premios de Gourmand committees, and promoted Mexican food as a UNESCO Patrimonio de la Humanidad.

Ironically, they have probably had much less impact on the Mexican provinces, except perhaps Puebla which is reachable in a day trip from MC. Given that essentially no newspaper food pages reach the provinces, that there are no nationally distributed Mexican culinary magazines with a half life of more than a year or so, no major chains of bookstores, much of their impact is at present restricted to Mexico City.

But what an impact!

This group has done an amazing job promoting Mexican cuisine. Among their accomplishments:

• a series of stunning (and often stunningly expensive) Mexican cookbooks, many or most of them unavailable in English
• opening of high end Mexican restaurants (traditionally high end Mexican food was found in clubs, corporate dining rooms, or homes)
• the investigation and publication of scholarly studies of middle class and “popular” Mexican food across Mexico
• scholarly culinary histories and anthropologies at a world class level
• excellent glossy illustrated culinary histories, studies of individual foodstuffs, foreign influences on Mexican cooking written in understandable ways at affordable prices for a more general audience
• incorporation of a serious culinary component in the Mexico City Festival and lots of other public events
• reprints of classic Mexican cookbooks and manuscript cookbooks at affordable prices
• cooperation between high end restaurant and university academics to offer hands on training in Mexico’s culinary heritage
• support and training for mayoras (traditional female cooks in Mexican restaurants)

No wonder high end Mexican Cuisine is booming in Mexico City

• ← Why Can’t I Eat Refined Food and Plain Food?
• Talking with Jean Feraca of Here on Earth (Wisconsin Public Radio) →