Let’s Get Regional

Authentic is the bane of an anthropologist’s existence. Authentic implies one way; it implies the truth and the past. It ignores change and innovation, which all people are allowed.

I do love traveling, don’t you? I’ve been going back to some home places this last month, revisiting favorite parts of the country and, of course, favorite dishes. My journey began with a stop in New Mexico, a state I lived and worked in for a few years. I have to tell you, I love the food in New Mexico. When I was pregnant in Arkansas, all I wanted was ground lamb-stuffed sopapillas with red sauce from Angelina’s in Española, New Mexico. I actually shed tears about this craving. Bitter, bitter tears.

Honestly, Angelina’s is home to a few fabulous dishes, including their chile rellenos.

Some people think that New Mexican food is not “real” Mexican food. Here is a thing I want to tell you about “Mexican food”: It’s not one way. There is not a right way. There can be a way you like, for sure, but do not come at me with “authentic.”

Authentic is the bane of an anthropologist’s existence. Authentic implies one way; it implies the truth and the past. It ignores change and innovation, which all people are allowed. Now, anthropologists would like for people to be allowed change on their own terms and at their own pace, but cultural mixing and trying new things are truly features of being human.

Let’s take tortillas, shall we? I can’t tell you how many times that people in the U.S. have told me that corn tortillas are “authentic” and that flour tortillas are for gringos. In many parts of Mexico, people mostly make corn tortillas for themselves and they grow lots of corn. Lots of it, every spare place, like by the mailbox and in the backyard. Corn really is the thing. “Sin maíz, no hay país,” (without corn, there is no nation) as Francisco Toledo likes to say in his campaign against genetically modified corn in Oaxaca.

Yet in Sonora, a northern state in Mexico bordering Arizona, wheat has been cultivated from early Spanish colonial times. Wheat can be grown in winter and spring, times when corn cannot be grown there, allowing for two productive crops in a year. Indigenous farmers welcomed the introduction of this crop in the 16th century. Today, a specialty of Sonora, and also of the O’odham people, are tortillas sobaqueras. These flour tortillas are huge, stretching nearly from the hand to the armpit (or sobaco). I had these for the first time in Agua Prieta, Sonora, where they were served with local pride. And as a side note, when a Mexican friend ordered a chimichanga in front of me long ago in Nogales, Sonora, I asked naively, “But, are those really Mexican?” She said, “Well, people argue over whether they were invented in Sonora or Tucson, so I don’t know, but I love them.”

When someone at a restaurant asks me what kind of tortillas I want, I always ask, “Do you make either of them here?” And if they do, that’s the one I get. Homemade is always better. When I was working in Douglas, Arizona, right on the border, I interviewed a Mexican-American woman in her 80s. When I left her house, she sent me home with a dozen of her freshly-made flour tortillas. When her daughter heard, she was jealous almost to the point of anger. “Those are gold,” she told me fiercely, “They are like gold.”

My point here is not that flour tortillas are the best. I just want people to be open to difference, and to realize that difference may have it’s own “authentic” history. We had a favorite Mexican place in Little Rock that has closed. The Yelp reviews were full of complaints about how it wasn’t like what the reviewers had in San Diego or Dallas. If you asked the owners, they would proudly tell you what state in Mexico they were from and how their dishes were from that region. Many people claim that they know “authentic” Mexican, and dismiss what is in front of them, without realizing that Mexican cuisine is hugely regional. Embrace the local versions! Sure, some restaurants cater to Anglo tastes. I always ask what the waiter likes the best, though, and try that. Figure out what they do well and stop pretending that a chile relleno will be, or should be, the same everywhere you go.

In New Mexico, the green chile is king. Okay, someone is going to be mad that I wrote that because red chile sauce is also king. All you have to do is look at the ristras strung up on peoples’ porches and doors to know that. But, the smell of roasting green chile all over the state beginning in August is quite something. Grocery stores have giant drums set up for roasting, so you can get yours fresh. And you should definitely do that.

I’m just going to admit that the way I like chile rellenos best is the way they do it in New Mexico. I don’t even order them in other states anymore and I don’t make them myself. I know what I want when I ask for a chile relleno. I want them a little crispy. I want them with green chile on top. I want the chile itself a little al dente, with some chew to it.

And I want sopapillas to come with them. Big ones, with honey. Hot.

Do you know how this is? I don’t order certain things in restaurants. I am always disappointed with gazpacho because it is not MY gazpacho. I like it the way I make it. I would never order chicken piccata in a restaurant. Mine is better, and also, chicken? Why would I get chicken if I could have something else? That better be some special chicken. Life is short, friends.

My strategy, again, is to get regional. Order what they are good at where you are. Get the huevos with the plantains and posole on the side and piñon-atole pancakes.

I mean, hypothetically, because that would be a lot of food.

My father-in-law was born and raised in New Mexico, though he has lived in Colorado for many years now. He is completely particular about his Mexican food. For him, real Mexican food comes from New Mexico. He drives to a certain farm stand in northern New Mexico to buy his fresh and dried chiles. He is not compromising on this issue.

He makes a chile verde, which I will share with you, that is sometimes insanely hot and other times not so insanely hot, depending on the chile. It is what it is. He will serve it to you with corn or flour tortillas, rolled or flat. It’s not the presentation, it is the chile verde that matters.

He got this recipe from a guy he knew, now passed away, named Jesus. It was a family recipe and he was given it on the condition that he never change it. So don’t mess with it, or Jesus in Heaven will be mad. (You can blame my father-in-law for that one!) He says that, but my husband has an ancient hand-written recipe for chile verde from his dad that is substantially different from the version that his dad put in the fundraiser cookbook for the local ski club. What stays the same are the ingredients – the ratios vary with your taste and the heat of the chiles. So, for god’s sake do not put onions in while you cook the sauce, but you can sprinkle on raw onions when you serve and if you don’t (I don’t) people think there might be something wrong with you. I’m going to share the fancy typed version of the recipe with notes, because I think he has refined his technique over the years. He has also become more fond of a very hot version, and that’s just fine. Pretty much everyone who has this dish wants it again, so I think you’ll like it.

Jim’s New Mexico-Style Chile Verde

4-5 lb pork butt (old recipe says 3-4 lb)

20-25 whole roasted green chiles, a mix of medium and hot (old recipe says “green chiles”)

5-6 cloves of garlic, minced (old recipe says 3)

1 16-oz can of stewed diced tomatoes (old recipe says 28-oz can diced)

Roast the pork butt at 300 degrees for about 3 hours until done (old recipe says 325°). Cool enough that you can remove the hard fat and cut into 1-inch chunks, but reserve the juices. While the pork is roasting, remove the skin and seeds from the chiles and dice them (old recipe says put them in a blender). Don’t wash them too much with water or you will remove some of the heat and flavor. Combine all ingredients, along with salt and pepper to taste, in a large pot on the stove. Add enough water to get things boiling, but you will want to end with a fairly thick consistency. Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer for 6 hours, adding more water as necessary.

You cannot eat these without beans. Jim makes them from dried pinto beans and he adds bacon or salt pork to them while they cook.

To serve, you can make stacked enchiladas with corn tortillas. Put down a heated tortilla, add beans and chile verde and cheese, and diced, raw onions, add another tortilla and repeat with chile verde and cheese. You could fix this up in a casserole to serve the family. You can also roll up the beans, chile verde, cheese, and onions in a heated flour tortilla and make burritos. Or you can put the beans in a bowl, add chile verde, and top with cheese and onions, and eat with a tortilla on the side. It’s how you like it!

As you can see, the ratios adjust the heat of the chiles. Cooking this will require tasting. If it’s too hot, you can add more tomatoes. Too mild, add some more roasted chiles. And remember, this recipe won’t be like the other chile verde you have had. It’s a regional dish. Enjoy!

Making Tepache: How Did They Figure that Out?

At the end of the trip, I asked a friend about whether I could buy some. He pointed to a table by the side of the road with filled plastic bottles, recycled for this purpose. “There’s some. Want me to stop?,” he asked. Uh, no.

I often ask myself how humans ever came up with some of the food we eat. Like bread. What happened there, with the yeast and the grinding up a grain that didn’t really seem like food for people? Who thought, I’m gonna mash this stuff up and let it sit around and then put it over the fire? Or noodles. Who thought boiling up a paste pulled into thin strips might be a good idea? We are inventive, we humans!

I made pasta recently. Isn’t that dough lovely?

And then there’s alcohol. Did people just let things hang around long enough and then think, I’m gonna drink this anyway, even though it smells a bit off? I am fascinated by the human propensity to try out.

One of the great things about traveling is that you are going to try out quite a bit. The willingness to try really enhances one’s experience of a place. When I take students with me, they are often a bit reluctant to try the more unfamiliar tastes. In Oaxaca, one is truly compelled to eat insects, for example. Eating chapulines, a little grasshopper commonly cooked and seasoned, guarantees your return to the state, and once there, you will want to return.

chapulines — Ready to sprinkle on a taco. Photo: Lora Adams

Most people at least try it. I heartily encouraged my students to do so. My husband, though, embraced this culinary pleasure with vigor and we bought several varieties.

chapulines market — We got the garlic and the chile flavors. So many to try!

One of my unexpected pleasures while in Oaxaca was tepache. I was served a glass at a lunch on one trip. They told us that it was mildly alcoholic and made on the premises of the restaurant. Well, I admit that this statement struck a little fear into my heart. Like, what does “mildly” mean? And I’ve got a full day ahead of me and it’s a bit hot. And homemade alcohol is kind of a thing I’ve been warned about, and I’m avoiding raw vegetables and ice in Mexico, so this drink does not fall into my cautious eating plan.

But this is how it looked.

So you know I had to drink it. Oh, so refreshing. A bit sweet. Where had this drink been all my life?

Over the course of that trip, I was served a glass occasionally, but I never saw it on a menu. At the end of the trip, I asked a friend about whether I could buy some. He pointed to a table by the side of the road with filled plastic bottles, recycled for this purpose. “There’s some. Want me to stop?,” he asked. Uh, no.

After I returned home, I researched it a bit and found that it really is something that people brew for themselves. And it turns out that tepache also makes me wonder how anyone figured this out. It is made from the rinds of pineapple. The rinds. Of pineapple. Which have naturally occurring yeast on them. What?! People talk about tepache a bit like they do about kombucha. You ferment it on the counter. I am not 100% certain that it actually is alcoholic. More about this later.

I gathered up my courage and attempted it myself. It came out delicious, and about a week has passed and I have suffered no ill consequences. I feel safe passing it along to you.

My Recipe for Tepache

Start by getting a pineapple, a nice ripe one. Rinse it well. Cut off the leaves and discard. Cut off the rind and put in a large bowl. Cut out the tough core and throw that in the bowl too. Now cut up that tasty pineapple to eat later and put it in the fridge.

Now, most recipes have you just cover the rinds with water and stir in some sugar, but I didn’t do that. I don’t know what got sprayed on that pineapple coming to my store. And a lot of fruit goes through a quick heating and cooling process when it comes into this country (like mangos and avocados). So I figured my natural yeast might have been cooked already.

I brought 8 cups of water to a boil with 1 cup of turbinado sugar and one cup of brown sugar. It’s what I had on hand, but most recipes call for piloncillo, a hard, dark sugar chunk you can buy in Mexican groceries. Add 2 sticks of cinnamon and a few whole cloves. Let boil for just one minute to dissolve the sugar. Throw in the pineapple rinds and core and turn off the heat.

It will already smell great in your house. You can transfer to a glass pitcher, but I just left mine in the pot. Once it cools, I sprinkled a little yeast on top. Just a little. Just in case that other yeast was cooked. I covered it for 2-3 days. It gets a white foam on top. This is the yeast going to work. Do not freak out. This is what needs to happen. After about two days, strain it into a pitcher, discarding everything but the liquid. Store in the refrigerator to stop the fermentation.

A note on alcoholic content: I have no idea. I drank about an 8-ounce glass that first day after fermentation, over ice, and I loved it. I really didn’t notice any alcoholic effects. Then I made a wonderful cocktail of my own invention with it the next day, and it didn’t impact me at all. A couple days later, I made the same cocktail and I felt it. I don’t know if I was a little dehydrated or if the alcohol had gotten stronger.

Tepache Solstice (or just a Solstice at our house)

Fill a rocks glass with ice. Add one shot of dark rum and three drops of Angostura bitters. Top up with tepache and a slice of lemon. Finish by marveling at how some human figured all this flavor out.

A Cocktail to Make You Weep

Did your mind jump to mezcal? Of course it did!

When my daughter was about two years old, we visited some good friends in Phoenix. She was sitting on their low garden wall, entranced by their elusive (to her) cat. She reached out for him and toppled backwards, right onto a small cactus. It wasn’t until we pulled her up that we saw the cut under her eye, sliced ever so neatly by the spine of a nearby agave. She cried bitterly as we pulled the cactus spines out of her back. Fortunately, her pain drew that little cat to her; he wove around her legs and let her pet him, finally, which stopped the tears. She still has a thin scar under her eye all these years later. She has had a thousand cuts and scrapes over the years. None of the others left a permanent mark.

Anyone who has spent any time in the Sonoran Desert knows the agave plant, though hopefully not in such a bloody manner. In fact, their range extends much farther than the Sonoran Desert, reaching north into Utah, throughout Mexico, and even down into parts of South America. Though I lived in Arizona for years, it wasn’t until I spent some time in Oaxaca, Mexico that I fully came to appreciate agave and all it has to offer.

Did your mind jump to mezcal? Of course it did! Before you leave this post already, let me reassure you that I was not a big drinker of mezcal before going to Oaxaca. My prior exposure to mezcal and tequila always seemed to be hearing about people wanting to get drunk quickly and then regretting that decision rather fervently. That is not what this post is about, I promise!

Agave flavors everything in Oaxaca in some sense. It has been cultivated for thousands of years across its growing region. People decorated pottery with agave designs. They stored it in caves. They used different varieties for needles, cloth, thatched roofs, paper, food, and for both alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks. Recently, archaeologists Paul and Suzanne Fish of the University of Arizona (and others) have argued that agave wasn’t merely planted widely in the ancient U.S. Southwest, it was domesticated. That means that they see evidence of techniques used to make these plants more beneficial for those farming it. Indeed, we may need to speak of a fourth “sister” crop, complementing corn, beans, and squash, when considering its importance to indigenous people.

agave cultivation — Agave field in Oaxaca Photo: Lora Adams

While I was in Oaxaca, I saw fields of multiple varieties of agave. I was also delighted to sample pickled agave flower buds. I might have eaten more than my share of those little honeys.

I was fortunate enough to meet with a shaman, or traditional healer, on one visit. A group of students and I participated in a temazcal. A temazcal is a kind of sweat lodge, and we used several plants during the sweat – coffee, mango, bouquets of basil, and definitely mezcal. Before the temazcal itself, the healer worked on two or three members of our group. Mezcal was used as a substance to purify both healer and the person in need of healing. At one point, our host filled his mouth with it and sprayed it vigorously all over the patient. It was offered many times throughout our visit, and he explained repeatedly that it was very pure. It could not give you a hangover, he said, because it was nothing but agave. The intention was never to get someone drunk, but to cure.

shamans table — Shaman’s Tools Photo: Lora Adams

Our group was still shy about mezcal at this point. The idea of drinking early in the day, and right before sweating profusely, didn’t entice us.

Later in this trip, we visited a mezcal producer. Now, if you visit Oaxaca, you can take many tours of palenques for mezcal. They are made for tourists and export, and have numerous flavors and types available. That wasn’t where we went. On our way to Juchitán, a community on the coast, our wonderful guide took us by his favorite producer of mezcal. No one was around that day, and we were intimidated (okay, I was intimidated) by the family of turkeys roaming the site protectively.

Happily, we returned in a few days to find Telésforo Martinez and his sons available to show us their excellent mezcal. They produced every aspect of the spirit. They harvested the plants, keeping different varieties separate; they roasted the piñas, or hearts of the plants; and they distilled the alcohol.

agave for mezcal — *Piñas* ready for roasting

To give us samples, they put a rubber tube into a cask and sucked until it began to flow into a small dried gourd. We then passed around gourd after gourd of mezcal, trying each type. This one is small and grown in the wild, this one is aged for so long, this one is the most popular. To take some with you, you simply paid for the amount you wanted and transferred it into a bottle that you brought with you.

Our kind and encouraging guide assured me that we would have no trouble getting them through U.S. customs. I just couldn’t believe him, so I bought labels at a store in town and decorated them to fool the agents.

Don’t laugh. That is totally convincing. Also, they didn’t stop any of us or question it at all.

One night in the city of Oaxaca, we ate at a wonderful restaurant called Zandunga. I had their fantastic red mole, but the highlight was truly my cocktail, La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), made with local mezcal. People in Mexico and the United States tell many versions of the story of La Llorona. Always, she drowns her children and is doomed to cry for them forever. In some places, the tale contains elements of class inequality (she was poor but her love was a wealthy man who scorned her after she bore him children), in other places she is a warning to women (she was a neglectful mother who prefers the attention of men to caring for her young children). Some of you may know the gorgeous Mexican folk song of the same name, which originates in Oaxaca. Check out Lila Downs’ version if you are feeling weepy. (When the song came on as I watched the movie Coco with my daughter, I totally burst into tears.)

I approximated my own version of the cocktail when I got home. I swear I get a little teary with nostalgia for Oaxaca when I drink it.

La Llorona

You have to begin by making jamaica, a sweet drink from hibiscus flowers. You can find the flowers in any Mexican grocery.

Bring 6 cups of water to a boil and then add 2 cups of dried jamaica flowers and 3/4 cup sugar. Boil for one minute. If you are using a non-corrosive pot, leave it there to steep for about 2 hours, or transfer to another container you can’t stain. After it has steeped, pour the liquid through a sieve over a pitcher to strain out the flowers. Push out all that liquid! Check for intensity. Sometimes I need to dilute the strength with cold water.

Enjoy over ice and keep in the fridge for a refreshing drink on its own.

For the cocktail, fill a tall glass with ice. Combine 2 shots of pineapple juice, 1/2 shot simple syrup, and 1 shot of mezcal. Top with jamaica. Add some freshly grated ginger to taste. I also sometimes throw in some Penzey’s crystallized ginger for extra fun. Stir and enjoy! I make this without alcohol as a special treat for my daughter.