Rachel Glueck

This looked interesting. I usually judge Mexican cookbooks by the way they describe making tortillas. If they just start from the packet of store-bought tortillas (frequently wheat flour) then the book gets a big negative mark in my view. But this book is remarkably true to its title about being the Native Mexican Kitchen....complete with a pretty good explanation about making "real" Mexican tortillas. As I got into the book, I realised that there was much more here than just recipes. It is a rather rambling commentary on Mexican culture and life in Mexico. I lived there for some years in the early 70's and visited many of the places that Rachel refers to...driving the road through Guerro to Acapulco numerous times..and staying with friends in Tepoztlán.I really liked the book but still have a few wishes: I would have liked a more systematic treatment of the pictures of the dishes......basically I'd like a picture of every dish...not just random dishes. And I'd also like a few more pictures of some of the ingredients when they are a bit obscure; The most obvious one being the set of different chillies that she refers to in the book. But apart from this, I really liked the rambling kind of style and the details about the manufacture of Mezcal and pulque. Some of the gems that I liked in the book are as follows:
The attitude to time:"In thirty minutes we’ll go. No—in an hour. Mmmm . . . maybe in the afternoon. Noel’s uncle, Serafín—our guide and key to our safety in the territory above town—is still drunk from the night before, so maybe tomorrow. Nothing is certain. We get different answers every time we pose the question, each answer given with equal confidence, like it’s a sure thing. And this is Mexico. This is what you get when you wander beyond the comfort of the known: full-frontal uncertainty. Nothing goes as planned, yet it tends to all work out."
Molė: I thought mole always was made with chocolate but no. If there is one dish that represents Mexico, it is surely mole. Mole is the ancient name for salsa, except that mole is much more complex than salsa. And though there are classic moles, each person interprets a traditional recipe their own way. If mole is the first form of magic, then the mastering of a great mole makes one a culinary wizard. The recipes below include a minimum cooking time. Generally, the longer you cook a mole, the better; but you can still get a dish with great flavor with an hour or two of cook time. The mole poblano is the most famous, the most complex, and the most widely interpreted of the moles. It’s not spicy, but its multifaceted flavor is sure to impress.
Low wages: “Pero, Doña Rosa, es un pueblo muy chiquito,” I say. It’s a tiny town. Why would anyone come looking for work in such a small corner of the state? Noel explains: these are people making less than three US dollars per day working twelve-hour days in the fields. Even a town with only 1,200 inhabitants provides more opportunities than where they’d come from.
Living with violence....in Guerro: If Noel is nervous about safety, I should be terrified, no? Ismael assures me his brother is exaggerating. Ismael is also habituated to the violence of the region, living with it daily as he does.
Loading the Mezcal, oven: The manual loading of an agave oven is an impressive labor. I watch as twenty men spend a full hour carrying the agave hearts, whose pencas (spiky “leaves”) had been previously removed, to the oven, loading it just so with the larger agaves in the center and the smaller ones lining the outside. Some had been cut in half and a few were so large they had to be rolled across the dirt to the oven. I can see holes in some where a worm had burrowed in.
The virgin of Guadalupe: The Virgin is, in fact, more visible and more celebrated than Jesus Christ himself. The reason goes back to precolonial times. The Virgin is quite simply a Catholic representation of Tonantzin Tlalli: the goddess, Mother Earth, the provider of all our needs. The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is that she appeared to the native Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill just outside the former Tenochtitlan (in what is now Mexico City) and instructed him to ask the bishop to build her a church.
Another virgin in Oaxaca: There are different stories about Juquila, but the most widely accepted is that the image of Mary was brought to the Sierra Sur region by the Dominican priest Frey Juan Jordan, and in time the concept of Mary combined with the native belief in a central, female fertility figure to produce the Virgin of Juquila. But there’s another story—one you’re not so likely to hear. This story tells that she existed as a Chatino goddess before the Spanish arrived, and that the church, eager to convert the indigenous population, placed their image of Mary on top of the native goddess and blended their characteristics to create the Virgin of Juquila. With her dark skin and hair, she’s identifiable to the natives; with her Catholic robes, she is accepted as a virgin of the Catholic Church. She represents the same thing for the Chatinos that the Virgin of Guadalupe does for the Náhuatlacah. I’m surprised to find her stone figure is no more than a foot-and-a-half tall. She stands on an alter covered by a miniature gazebo. She’s been given a black wig and is dressed in red silk, in the triangular shape common to so many of the Mexican virgins. The following morning, we climb the steep street to the official santuario, where the Church houses her Catholic statue.
Mixote: The name mixote refers to the agave leaf that is typically used to cook this dish. On the coast, however, they use banana leaves, which make for a beautiful presentation.
Nahuales: are shape-shifters: humans who can take their animal form when they choose. In many communities, nahuales are considered brujos: witches or wizards who shapeshift into their animal form to kill, steal, and generally cause problems. But among other groups, it’s accepted that those who can control their nahual are healers and protectors of people, local traditions, and the environment. “A nahual is someone who has made a compromise with the ‘dark side’—the animal side,” explains Noel. “In exchange for having their animal senses—keen vision and smell, heightened intuition—they sometimes have to act to maintain the balance. In ancient native belief, there is no good versus bad. There is only the balance of energies. If a human enters a jaguar’s territory and the jaguar kills the human, the jaguar isn’t bad. The human invaded his territory. He’s merely maintaining the balance.”
Community: “In Mexico, family is the most important thing in life,” Noel regularly tells students in his cooking class. “Second is the party—your relationship with friends and the community—and last is work.” Whatever one personally believes, our modern consumer culture certainly emphasizes the reverse: work is what defines our worth in the world. Then our social circles, then family. Many communities are being broken in Mexico now, because of the arrival of different creeds and religious sects that break popular tradition. One example is the tequio, which is community work that everyone participates in to prepare a town for a hurricane or earthquake or flood. Many times, this tequio is affected by the entrance of new religious sects that negate that community work, which has a terrible effect on the community. For example, the people don’t keep a dry riverbed clear of obstructions as they usually would, and the town risks flooding. Chiapas has numerous problems of community dissolution, because of the various religious sects that have implanted new ideas, and the community can’t continue with its traditions. But these traditions exist because, one way or another, they help these social groups to survive.
Mezcal critique: “In the US, we’re focused on flavor profiles, the effects of terroir, and judging a mezcal; whereas in Mexico—with you [husband noel] anyway—the only comment I ever hear is ‘está bueno.’ That’s what you say about almost every non-branded mezcal we try. I have yet to hear a mezcalero talk about citrus notes or astringent qualities. It’s just ‘good,’ or ‘pretty good,’ or ‘puta madre! ’ta buenisma!’”
Making the mezcal: After waiting so many years for the agave to mature, it’s harvested by hand, the spines removed and the corazon—the heart of the agave—cut free from its roots and brought to the palenque. It takes about three days to harvest enough agave to fill the average oven, followed by three to seven days of roasting, and then another two to three days to crush it. A fire is lit in the pit oven and lined with rocks. When the rocks have reached a sufficiently high temperature, the agave hearts are placed inside, covered with palm or banana leaves and dirt, and left to roast for about three days. Roasting time depends on a variety of factors, including agave species and size, oven size, climate, and season. Once they have roasted long enough, they’re removed and mashed. Here in Oaxaca, the tradition is to use a tahona—a large stone wheel pulled by a mule—to crush the agave fibers to a pulp. In Noel’s home state of Guerrero, they don’t have this tradition and use hatchets instead; or, more commonly these days, a wood chipper. Once the agave is crushed, it’s placed in a wooden tina (barrel) with water and left to ferment naturally with airborne yeasts. This process of natural fermentation is one of the main factors that makes artisanal mezcal unique in the spirit world—it is almost unheard of for another spirit on the market to rely on fermentation by wild yeasts as it means the resulting flavors are completely unpredictable. Fermentation in Sola de Vega is generally between five and ten days. And then comes distillation. The entire process from harvest to final product takes about one month. At the Tres Colibrís palenque, they harvest about four to five tons of agave in their most productive months, resulting in approximately three hundred liters, or four hundred bottles of mezcal.
On happiness: “Twenty pesos an hour,” she told me. About $ 1.30 at the time. And yet she was one of the happiest people I’d ever met. I looked at myself: a university-educated woman from an upper-middle-class white family, sick with stress from lack of money. And here was this fifty-year-old woman, with few employment options, singing like a songbird because she had enough to buy beans and tortillas. And that is when I realized I had a lot more to learn. The people here give because they are happy with their life, they’re happy with the little they have, and they’re happy to share.”
On Pulque: Aside from the jovial buzz it provides, pulque is also incredibly rich in proteins and probiotics and has multiple traditional medicinal uses, from calming indigestion to fortifying women just after labor and increasing fertility in men. An agave pulquero in this region can produce approximately two liters per plant per day for about fifteen to twenty years. Pancho himself collects about ten liters, twice a day from the agaves on his land. The seminal [yeast for fermentation)] is a type of wild yeast found in certain regions. In other regions, they’ll use timbre instead—an acacia or calliandra root. The fact that pulque must be consumed fresh nixes that opportunity [of selling in the USA]. I remember trying pulques fresh from the agave where it was being naturally fermented (in Valle de Bravo) ..with a cloud of fruit flies hanging around.....tasted very cactus-like to my untrained palate.
On eating insects: The market is full of all the foods you’d expect and more I’d never seen. We head directly for the insect vendors. There we find chiniquiles, escamoles (ant larvae), chapulines, and little fried fish. The beetles and ants are dead and toasted; the agave worms still wriggling. We buy a selection of them to taste and carry them to the indoor fonda where Rogelio orders a round of coffee and barbacoa for our breakfast. We munch on beetles, grubs, miniature lobster-like critters, crickets, and ants, intermittently sipping watery mercado coffee. I am suddenly hit with severe cramps. I can’t go on. The pain is too intense. I don’t want to believe it was the insects that I’m reacting to, but it’s hard to think otherwise. (She says she was cured by a drink of pulque...well maybe).
A couple of desserts that took my eye: Mousse de Chocolate y Chile Chocolate-Chile Mousse and the second.....Churros con Chocolate Churros with Extra-Thick Hot Chocolate
Re cocktails: Will any cocktail ever knock the margarita from its throne as the king of Mexican cocktails? Probably not. But we think that once you have it with mezcal, you’ll never go back to the mainstream margarita. And once you know it with fresh lime juice (not margarita mixers, please!), you’ll see that the extra, tiny step of squeezing a lime is worth it a thousand times over.
Really quite a fascinating book....and much more than a cook book. I give it five stars....thought it could be improved with a few more pictures.… (mehr)