...the dishes I enjoyed during a stay in Mexico had little in common with ubiquitous Tex-Mex, refried Taco Bell or the like...here's the real deal:
Does "Authentic" Mexican Food Exist?
Chicana author Stephanie Elizondo Griest searches through a digitised archive of old Mexican recipes hoping to find the answer to one question: what is 'real' Mexican food?
- By Stephanie Elizondo Griest (BBC) 1 February 2021
Growing up Mexican American just 150 miles from the border, I thought I understood my ancestral cuisine. A tortilla was a fluffy, flour disc that your abuela (grandmother) warmed over the stove and slathered with butter and honey. Queso was a brick of neon-coloured Velveeta cheese your mom melted in a pot with a can of green chillies and served with Tostito chips during the Dallas Cowboys game. And tamales were a spicy blend of pork, masa and Crisco shortening that your tias (aunties) smeared over corn husks and steamed for Christmas dinner.
So, it was a shock when, on my first trip into Mexico’s interior 25 years ago, I opened a menu and recognised none of the options. Where were the fajitas sizzling on a platter? What made the enchiladas suizas (Swiss) and the eggs divorciados (divorced), and what happened to the complimentary chips and salsa?
Eggs divorciados are two eggs served on tortillas with salsas and separated by wall of refried beans (Credit: carlosrojas20/Getty Images)
Apprehension evaporated with my first bite, however. I had ordered chiles en nogada, hoping it would approximate the chiles rellenos I loved back in South Texas, but no. This poblano chilli was not battered and fried but blackened over a flame and stuffed with beef, potatoes, peas and squash cooked in a tomato puree. Instead of being smothered in neon cheese, it was covered in a walnut cream sauce flecked with parsley and pomegranate seeds. The flavour was extraordinary: smoky with hints of oregano and cloves.
And it wasn’t just chiles en nogada. In restaurants and at street stalls across Mexico, I savoured foods radically more complex, delicious and nutritious than what my community ate back home. Fresh corn tortillas replaced packaged wheat; pork belly was favoured over Crisco. Herbs and vegetables were harvested moments before use. Cooks selected chillies for their taste and aroma rather than their capsaicin. Cheese was used sparingly, with no Velveeta in sight.
If this was Mexican food, what had I been eating all my life?
Chiles en nogada are covered in a walnut cream sauce with parsley and pomegranate seeds (Credit: Agcuesta/Getty Images)
When they invaded the Aztec Empire in the 15th Century, Spanish conquistadores were also amazed by the food. Montezuma dined on platters of duck, venison, rabbit and fruit, along with cauldrons of frothed chocolate and stacks of corn tortillas. According to scholar Jeffrey M Pilcher in his book Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, the colonisers feared adopting too much of this diet, lest they become "Indians" too. Corn was especially disparaged: the clergy deemed it "pagan". But over the centuries, the food Spaniards brought over on their ships from Europe – cows, pigs, wheat, olive oil, wine, spices – coalesced with Native ingredients and techniques to form a mestizo (literally “mixed blood”) cuisine that was further enhanced by enslaved Africans and immigrants from Asia and Central Europe.To trace this evolution, I logged on to the Mexican Cookbook Collection at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Among its 2,000 volumes is a digitised set of handwritten recipe books that were passed down through Mexican families as far back as 1789. The frayed pages reveal thousands of recipes calligraphically recorded by household matriarchs.
Some are so vague that they serve more as a reminder than as a recipe, like Carmen Ballina’s 1937 directive for caldo [soup] for 12: “Starting early in the morning, boil in water a kilo of meat, garbanzos, carrots and whatever else you’d like. When the soup is done, start cooking whatever pasta you wish to add, tapioca, wheat, fideo, etc.” Such entries, composed in breathless paragraphs, read almost like prose poems. Others are rigorously detailed with meal plans, place settings and – in the case of Hortensia Volante’s 1916 manuscript – an illustration of how to ice a cake.
“I see the world in these books,” Carla Burgos, a UTSA graduate student who has spent the past two years transcribing them, told me.
Back when Mexico was still a colony, the manuscripts mostly contained Spanish dishes such as gazpacho, along with Turkish, Greek and above all French food, plus English cakes for teatime. “They used saffron every day, and quail eggs,” Burgos said. “It was not cheap food.”
That was especially true during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, roughly between 1876 and 1911. He and his cronies feasted on champagne and caviar while Mexico’s poor subsisted on the same corn tortillas that nourished their ancestors. After the Mexican Revolution, however, the new government tried to unify the nation as mestizos. That’s when Josefina Velázquez de León makes an entrance in the UTSA archive. For three decades, she collected recipes from church ladies across the nation, ultimately publishing 150 cookbooks. She helped brand Mexican food as a cuisine of regional specialties ranging from the Yucatan’s cochinata pibil (citrusy pork shoulder) to Oaxaca’s mole (slow-simmering sauces made of dozens of ingredients, including chocolate).
Oaxaca’s mole is a slow-simmering sauce made of dozens of ingredients, including chocolate (Credit: carlosrojas20/Getty Images)
...rest of the article here: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210131-does-authentic-mexican-food-exist?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fw orld