Shopping spree a la mexicana

After swearing I’d never be back, I did go to La Merced one last time with some classmates this morning. FINALLY found naranja ágria (sour orange).

They neither look nor smell nor taste like oranges, but we call them oranges because taxonomy is weird.

The market is a lot better when you’re with someone who knows the geography of it, and also when you’re with people who are buying stuff—while they’re haggling with vendors, you get a chance to just stand and gawp, which is what you want to do in the first place but can’t get away with when you’re alone.

Never have I so regretted not checking a bag.

Bananarafters

You guys, all of this is different kinds of garlic.

We looked at peppers, baskets, and cookware. One classmate wanted a copper pot, and others wanted comals and clay pots, but since I couldn’t bring any of that home in my tiny backpack, I split off from the group and had my first real Ciudad de México rush hour experience, then a very enjoyable day of making tacos al pastor, some interesting enchiladas, ceviche (which I ate—for the SECOND time this trip!) and a bajillion salsas, including some that featured a pepper from my bucket list, chile manzano. It’s quite hot, but it’s so round and cute and perfect that I had to eat it anyway.

Serving up tacos al pastor in my great grandaddy’s apron like a boss

That evening, my classmate (the one that does historical culinary stuff at the Smithsonian) had invited me to Donceles, a street in the historic center that has several blocks of used bookstores, to look for interesting food resources.

Just leave me here, thanks.

People of the world, listen to me. This street is a treasure. Normally, if you tell someone you’re into anthropology of food, the response is some variant of “That’s weird.” Unless they’re a bookseller, in which case they show you the cookbooks, which are mostly—Surprise! Keto! Again!

Not here.

We visited 3 shops before our baggage allowances gave out, and at each of them we found at least 2-3 gems. One of them, which I take credit for finding even though it ultimately went home with my classmate, was a side-by-side photocopy and transcript of a 1785 cookbook of New Spain. It was really interesting to see what recipes had already existed in that time and how the way of writing recipes has changed. Though it was a great find, ultimately, a book like that belongs with the Smithsonian employee, not on my bedroom bookshelf. She promised to send me scans, though. I also found the report that Mexico’s government put together when they were applying to have Mexican cuisine recognized as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO (a distinction it received in 2010), as well as Corn: Institutional Policy and Agriculture. Every shop also had books specializing in different regions, driving home how much more present food is here in people’s cultural identities than it is for us.

In class this week, we had made a mole recipe that specified a particular brand of chocolate, and the chef let us try some of it plain before we put it in the sauce. It’s a small-batch, traditional-esque (as traditional as a chocolate bar can be, I guess) operation, and the chocolate is distinctive for only having four ingredients–cacao, sugar, almonds, and cinnamon– and the fact that the sugar is undissolved, giving it a texture that is by turns melty and crackly-crystalline.

I decided this was a must-bring-home, but that turned out to be easier said than done. When I asked where to find it, the chef advised me to go to the market and find a Oaxacan (By what, just marching around la Merced shouting “¡Señor! Es usted oaxaqueño”?). I decided to go the American route and search online. That’s how I learned that the stuff was sold in just 3 places in all of Mexico City, all of which were way out in the suburbs (in retrospect, I think these were commercial distributors). Upon hearing my dismay, a classmate said she was going to visit family out that way, and she offered to pick some up and ship it to me once we’d both gotten back to the US. It was a very generous offer, but also a bit silly.

I had just about given up on ever finding it when my classmate and I were walking back to the subway from Donceles and passed a place called Cafe Xocolatl. I stuck my head in, and lo and behold, a whole wall of the chocolate I was looking for! I bought a kilo.

A chunk of Mayordomo, prepared hot chocolate, and the molinillo, the device traditionally used to foam the drink.

 

Carnitas are life (unless you’re the pig)

I keep forgetting that I’m in Mexico, where portion sizes tend towards American proportions. I ordered a large Americano, which I typically expect to be somewhere in the 10-oz. range, and got a mug that had, no joke, the volume of my entire face. It kept me warm for 2 hours as I cuddled with the random dogs that would explore the cafe as their owners sipped and munched.

Class actually went well today. The main event of the day was making carnitas. All the food was good (except the brain quesadillas, which I maintain are not food, at least for me, and therefore did not try) and I got to practice lots of salsa-making skills.

Roasted peppers and seeds for salsa

Teaching us how to peel prickly pear for a salsa

The only bad thing, which kind of ruined it, was that once again, some of my team members got their Toppers and packed up before we ate. I know a few days ago, some other team ate some of our food, and M has been annoyed about it. I think she needs to chill the heck out. Anyway, she carefully partitioned our carnitas into equal portions to ensure that no one hogged them. I packed my tupperware, leaving a little bit on the cutting board to try fresh, and went to find a plate. When I got back, someone had stolen the clearly-not-theirs pile of meat, and once again I had nothing to eat with the class except what I’d already packaged to take home. It would have been depressing to eat out of my little Topper by myself while the rest of the class was having family dinner on handmade clay dishes, so I left early.

Carnitas!

Chopping carnitas as a basket of brainsadillas looks on

In the evening, I had a good time getting hopelessly lost at Mercado Jamaica (Hibiscus Market), the icon for which on the metro is, inexplicably, not a flower, but an ear of corn.

Welcome to our market. Everything here is dead.

YOU GUYS LET’S MAKE POZOLE

Crystalized yams and pumpkin

Just a bowl of bad decisions

I bought a number of fruits, including one called a noní, from a nice man whose daughter lives in Texas and who gave me some helpful tips about when and how to eat the fruit. Once I got home and googled, I learned that the noní is known in English as vomit fruit, for reasons that are clear to anyone who smells it. I threw it away.

I’m impressed by the compassion people have for buskers and street vendors here. If you’re sitting outside, people come by your table constantly asking for change or offering a lollipop or a bottle of water. Whereas in Germany you typically avoid eye contact and shake your head or ignore them, here people look you in the eye and either say “No, gracias, señor/ita/chico/chica” or, surprise of surprises, actually buy something. Also, when buskers come by and sing a song, they go individually to each table asking for donations, and I would say at least half of the tables typically pitch in. It took a bit of time for me to stop defaulting to being kind of a jerk, just because that’s how it’s done elsewhere. But it’s nice to not be immersed in that weird classist posturing.

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Boo.

Today was uneventful and disappointing. Wanting to not be lazy, I looked online and found a breakfast place that would push me out of my comfort zone and in a direction I had never explored. After getting slightly lost, I found the place—except that it was closed or had never been open to begin with, and then I had to walk all the way back to my neighborhood and start the search again. Ended up having breakfast on my very block.

Fancy salsas!

Fancy breakfast!

On the bright side, the fact that breakfast had been so late meant that for the first time, I wasn’t ravenous during class. We had a nice chat with the other students before class, followed by a lecture where I was able to understand and copy just about everything. Once we got into the kitchen, things got chaotic, so I ended up following instructions for most of the day without ever really knowing which dish I was actually working on. It was frustrating, but less frustrating than previous experiences when not only the “why,” but also the “what” and “how” were lost on me.

Toasted ingredients for mole negro

paste for mole negro

Mole negro ready to serve

The setup for enchiladas placeras, plus the very giggly Japanese guy who only joined us for 2 days

Someone else’s enchiladas placeras

Before I was even aware that we were finished cooking, people were loading up their Toppers (this is Mexican Spanish for Tupperware, and I love it) with chicken, enchiladas, and leftover huaraches. In contrast to previous days, where we had plated all the food on the big table and eaten together with our teams, my team was packed and gone before I knew it. We didn’t even try making the enchiladas placeras, which are fried on this neat table that you set up over a charcoal fire, and which have to be eaten immediately after cooking. Another team did make those, but the teams sometimes got weirdly political and territorial about Their Dishes (I don’t understand this—there’s plenty for everyone, and we’re all following the same recipes), so I ended up packing up and leaving without trying any. A few days later, my teammates apologized, saying that they had had family obligations and hadn’t been able to stay, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth: the taste of no enchiladas.

Make-it-better seafood tacos after class

 

Breakfast, adventures, and breakfast adventures

This is the day when I make servers angry all day without understanding why. I think it has to do with tending to order the cheapest items, but (a) I am ordering what I want, and (b) I tip like a millennial, so it evens out.

I started out with some coffee at the park while waiting for Anna to wake up. Once she finally did, I paid the waiter, who was glad to see the back of me, and hopped on the metrobus (one of those buses that has dedicated lanes on the road and elevated stations so it functions kind of like a subway) to go to Santa María la Ribeira, the very Mexican neighborhood where she lives. We took a stroll through the park, which is home to the ornate Moroccan Kiosk, and ended up at Anna’s favorite Oaxacan breakfast place, where you can get a big plate of chilaquiles, a cafe de olla, and a fresh-squeezed orange juice for 90 pesos, or about $4.50. In other words, it’s my new favorite breakfast place, too. I added on a tejate, a traditional Oaxacan drink that’s similar in concept to atole but is served iced instead of hot, and in which a key ingredient is ground-up mamey seeds. I could have stayed at that cafe forever, and we almost had to, because both the waiters seemed to be making a game out of ignoring us. No matter—I came for the food, not for them.

Kiosko Morisco

Tejate. In Mexico City people get ice (made from purified water) delivered in trucks, so you don’t have to worry so much about, you know, dying. So that’s cool.

Chilaquiles and cafe de olla.

After breakfast, Anna was off to play rugby, and Kirsten was headed to a date, so I went walking through Parque Chapultepec, which is bigger than Central Park and houses several museums, including the renowned Museum of Anthropology. Since it houses the largest collection of pre-Hispanic art in the world, I worked hard to pace myself and hopefully stave off museum fatigue, to which I am prone. The museum is organized around a sprawling central courtyard with a concrete ceiling that is supported by a single massive column/fountain hybrid (presumably installed and maintained by the same government that’s constantly preaching about not wasting water). 23 exhibition rooms, organized by region or society, surround the courtyard, and outside each of those is a garden housing plants and replicas of artifacts, including some whose originals Nathan and I saw last year in the Yucatan.

I was surprised at the way that the exhibits were interpreted. Instead of identifying each artifact with a date, name, and location, as is typical in such museums (in my admittedly limited experience), there was just a paragraph or two explaining the general significance of the items next to each case. I wondered whether this was a stylistic decision (after all, does it really matter that this phallus sculpture was from 1400 near Teotihuacan, and this other one was from 1430 from next-to-Teotihuacan?), or an artifact of something about the way that archaeological records were/weren’t kept during early excavations. I’m going to go ahead and guess that it’s the second one, and that it’s Spain’s fault. That seems to be the trend.

I like that you thought I was making stuff up.

After an hour or two, I was just about to fall over from looking at stone serpents and bowls whose purpose was “unknown, but possibly sacrificial” (does everything have to be sacrificial just because it’s Aztec? They had to eat their cornflakes out of something, after all). That’s when I made an exhilarating discovery: a staircase! Turns out some of the rooms had 2 floors, with ancient stuff on the bottom, and a more modern perspective on the top. That part was much more interesting. I learned about modern-day crafts, looked at replica houses, and learned a lot about the social structure and issues affecting indigenous communities around the country. For instance, I learned that some communities expect men to dedicate a day each week to community projects, and this is how roads get maintained, public buildings get built, etc. The obligation is so strong that if someone isn’t able to come for whatever reason, he’s supposed to send one of his children or, failing that, hire a worker to replace him for the day.

An interesting aspect of visiting Mexican museums on the weekend is that many of the major museums in the city are free to citizens and residents on Sundays, a fact that teachers use to full advantage. Both the Museum of Anthropology and the Templo Mayor were packed with moms toting their kids toting their worksheets, and I enjoyed eavesdropping on the moms’ explanations, dumbed down to a language level and knowledge-of-Mexican-history level that I could relate to. I particularly enjoyed one mom’s explanation to her child of how and why they live in a big city with cars and hospitals, but there are people in the south that live in thatched houses and cook over a fire. “But why, mamá?” “Because they don’t have the opportunities that we have, mi vida.” (Sidenote: Language aside, it’s difficult to distinguish between the terms of endearment used by Mexican mothers to their children and Khaleesi to Khal Drogo).

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By the time I got through the museum, my feet were throbbing. I took a seat on the sprawling plaza in front of the museum to plan my next move against a backdrop of blue umbrella-ed food stalls (Street corn! Prepared chicharron! Popsicles! Chili-powdered tamarind!), Aztec drums, and cooling trees. I decided to nix my original plan of heading north–away from home–to Polanco (Mexico City’s ritziest neighborhood), lest my feet fall off en route. Instead, I decided on a leisurely path that would eventually lead me to home, a chair, and some leftovers.

But wait—what’s this? Oh, neat, just beyond the first line of trees separating the museum from Parque Chapultepec is the pole used for the flying game, a ceremony in which… well, it’s easier to show than to explain. Suffice to say, originally the ritual was developed as an offering to end a particularly harsh drought. Four men competed at a time, and the prize went to the one whose costume and posture during descent were most birdlike.

For the most part, only men have participated in the flying game. There was one master of the sport who started training women, which upset a lot of people who clearly need a real problem to worry about. He died in a flying-game-related accident in 2006, which his critics saw as him getting what was coming to him. I can’t disagree, but I’m going to go out on a limb that it had less to do with gender inclusivity and more to do with a certain cavalierness toward personal safety.

Anyway, as I took in the impressive height of the pole, I noticed a man in traditional dress about halfway up. At the top, four more men waited, perched opposite each other facing in, for the last man to arrive. What luck! Once the final man had taken his position at the center of the platform, he started to play a repetitive tune on his flute and to beat a tiny drum. The four men around the edges of the platform tipped over the sides and began to spin. As they went around and around the ropes attached on one end to the flyers’ waists and the other end wrapped around the top of the pole slowly unwound, giving the flyers time to assume various upside-down bird postures as they descended.

I was so enthralled that when a guy came around with a tip basket, I miscalculated and gave him way too much. There are worse things, I guess.

 

Exploration

I’m sitting at the Mexican equivalent of a greasy spoon, and a guy just came in the front door carrying a pot of rice that’s probably 2.5 feet across and 10 inches deep. Behind him followed more people carrying industrial quantities of staple ingredients into the diner kitchen. I don’t understand. Do they not make the food here?

I’d put this up against Waffle House any day. I mean, Waffle House would win (obvs), but it’d be close.

Except for a quick lunch, I didn’t sit down all day between 8, when I called my mom while walking to the subway, until I returned to my hostel at 6. Since class is smack in the middle of the day and most tourist things and markets are closed by the time we leave, today was my one chance to visit the historic center. I’m pleased to say that I have now seen it, I never have to go back, and I probably never will.

My first stop was the National Palace, where I visited Benito Juarez’s living quarters, about which I could muster only faint enthusiasm, and a series of murals by Diego Rivera. The palace’s central garden also offered an unexpectedly welcome sense of calm and quiet.

Dangergarden

They called these little bits of excavatedness in the middle of the palace courtyard “little windows.”

I think this is maguey/pulque production?

Maguey plants just look unreal.

I dutifully went on a tour of the Templo Mayor, a massive Aztec temple that the conquistadors built a huge plaza over, but that was rediscovered by some electrical workers in 1978. I’m ashamed to say I found it underwhelming. Maybe it would have been better with an audio or in-person guide, but mostly I just hadn’t realized how new the Aztecs had been to this part of Mexico. Compared to the thousand-year history of Mayan culture in the Yucatan, it was kind of a letdown to learn that Tenochtitlan, the Aztec city on which Mexico City was built, was only established in the 15^th century and fell about 200 years later.

Then I spent an hour walking in circles around the Plaza de la Constitución looking for the store of handicrafts, only to finally learn, no thanks to the tourist information desk, that it had closed, and the next one was 3 km away.

Monument to the founding of Tenochtitlan

In my experience, the metro is almost always more trouble than it’s worth for short distances, so I walked. When I had found the place and finished my shopping, my next stop, Sonora Market, was 5 km back the other way. There was no good route to get there by metro, so I decided to walk back, too. That was a mistake. The route took me down the Calle de la República Uruguay, several blocks of which house a street market that is not so much bustling as hypoxic (in fact, it’s the same one I biked down the first day).

Then the route took me past La Merced, the central market, whose endless winding corridors had served as my first excursion into Mexico City, something of a trial by fire/quesadilla. Well, if the inside is overwhelming, the surroundings border on the intolerable. I got a glimpse of the sex trade (technically illegal, but in this area cops turn a blind eye), came to understand why people in Mexico City sometimes find it more comfortable or even safer to walk in the road than on the sidewalk. I kept expecting the crowds to clear, but the sidewalks and crosswalks remained just as packed as the buses inching past. By the time I finally got close to the entrance of the market, it had turned from a fun adventure to something much more grim, and I only continued because in such a dense sea of people, I couldn’t figure out how to turn around. The point of visiting Sonora Market was to see the herbs and incense that the vendors push as cures for any and all of life’s ills—this section has earned Sonora the nickname “witches’ market.” I saw what I came for, but I’m not convinced it was worth the cost.

Yes yes, safe, normal, and fine.

Cars just driving through the market, continuing the theme of “safe, normal, and fine.”

I like that her sweater looks like lucha libre masks.

When I got back to the hostel, I was sure I’d never get out of bed again. But Anna had invited me to her coworker’s apartment for a wine-fueled bitchfest, which made for an entertaining end to a taxing day. I also used Uber for the first time, and it was OK!

 

In which Kate overeats (Or: Happy Thanksgiving)

Yesterday I was annoyed at all the bad food we made, but it was nice to start off with no leftovers this morning so I could try the classic CDMX breakfast: A tamal and atole. I went to a chaotic stand that is rumored to be the best place in my neighborhood. I got the only seat, which is a generous characterization—more like a spare chair set up directly in front of the only exposed portion of the counter, where change is made.

They were out of tamales chicos (littl’uns), so I ended up with one the size of my forearm.

Class went better today—the chef was very personable and less distant than the others, and he was the first one to ask our names (not that I mind—there’s no point learning our names if they’re only going to spend a few days with us). Best of all, he didn’t speak at superhuman speeds, and he taught us dishes that I might actually make again. We made 3 kinds of stews: menudo (tripe soup), caldo tlalpeno, and crab chilpachole. I was really glad to work on those recipes because they showed how important technique is. The caldo was so basic: chicken, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, squash, and garbanzos, plus a single chipotle in adobo and salt and pepper. But it turned out to be my favorite dish of the day. Basically, I’m learning that good food takes time.

Doomed crabs

Crab chilpachole

Caldo tlalpeño

Menudo. Tripe! I ate it! Well, at least I chewed on it for a while.

After class, I had a quick nap/fruit party, then went to my classmate’s impossibly posh hostel to help her and another classmate cook Thanksgiving dinner. Kathy, the mastermind of the event, is a demonstration cook at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (#jobsthatdontsoundreal), and Irma, a native of Mexico City, now owns a restaurant in DC. Needless to say, they put together a stellar menu. I was in charge of the macaroni and cheese, which featured a mix of cheddar, pepper jack, and cotija, plus a healthy dose of Irma’s homemade adobo in the bechamel. I was originally annoyed at the menu because I didn’t want to eat American food, but the adobo-glazed chicken, the chayote-avocado- mango salad, and the Mexican kick in the mac made for a meal you could have nowhere else.

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Anna came and met some other Welsh people who had just moved to town, so I hope they’ll meet up again.

 

Day 3:

This morning featured another successful trip to a random market, in this case Mercado Medellin. One of my major problems in markets is that all the vendors seem to run away and hide when I find something I want. I could ask, of course, if this booth belongs to whoever is standing nearby, but even apart from my general reluctance to ask questions of strangers ever, if the answer was anything other than “yes,” I probably wouldn’t understand it. A further complication is that, because of my class schedule, I’m only able to go to the markets early, while most vendors are still setting up (note that this is still a good 3 hours after the posted opening time), so I rarely have the opportunity to simply imitate the behavior of another customer. But today, I made a breakthrough discovery: booths are not necessarily (ever?) contiguous.

So that explains why sometimes people don’t even look up when I’m standing next to a booth, looking expectant—it’s not their booth. Overall, I’m impressed with people’s patience with me—one man had some fruits that weren’t in my guidebook, and he kindly told me the name, told me again once I got my notebook out, helped me to choose good ones, and then explained how to eat them. One of them was crazy—like a tiny banana on the outside, and fruity orange salamander eggs on the inside.

Class today could have gotten better. I spent the whole day making aguachile (a searingly spicy shrimp ceviche) and oil-soaked chicharron, two things I never plan to make again. The chicharron turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I learned a lot about technique while making the sauce for it (TL;DR saute the salsa for the rest of your life. Chef, is it done yet? No). I was all alone on the ceviche. It took a lot of time and focus, so I didn’t participate at all in any of the dishes that interested me except for dredging a couple of fish pieces in batter, which, let’s be real, ain’t that complicated.

Fillings for basket tacos clockwise: potato and sausage, chicken green mole, pressed chicharron, refried bean

How to stack basket tacos so you can keep the different kinds organized in your basket

This basket will hold 400 tacos, and we filled 2 of them.

Salsas and toppings for fish tacos, and I think that’s my aguachile with the metal spoon.

In Mexico they say that if you cook while angry, the food will turn out spicy. My aguachile made Mexicans cry.

After the far-from-satisfying class, the evening took a turn for the better when I met up with Nathan’s friend from high school, Anna. She’s living in Mexico City and teaching English, and despite her stressful week at work, she invited me out for pulque and tacos.

We had such a nice time that we made plans to hang out every day this week.

 

Day 2

Today I visited my first tianguis, a kind of itinerant street market that has been the center of Mexico City commerce since Aztec times, long before there was any Mexico City to speak of. My guidebook had recommended it for high-quality produce, so off I went, knowing that I was pressed for time if I wanted to not be late to class. Immediately, I was confronted with a display of ripe mameys, a fruit that I just can’t refuse when it’s offered. The vendor told me I could have 1 for 50 pesos, and I agreed. He then tried to offer me a freebie if I bought another one. I refused—there’s only one of me, after all, and many more beguiling fruits to try—but as we were talking, he put three in my bag, then asked, “100?” No, I said I wanted one. He took 1 out. “80?” I shook my head. “You said 50. I want 1 mamey for 50.” He eventually conceded, but not before getting me to try his candied figs and sweet potatoes.

It was a joyful and overwhelming experience to be surrounded by so many people who wanted to feed me. I made my silly tourist purchase: a molinillo, a handheld contraption that was used before hand mixers to froth hot chocolate. After extensive Googling and observation, I still can’t get a handle on whether people still actually use them—it really could go either way.

Then it was off to class, which went much better now that I had some idea of what to expect. A few of the older (not old, but also not 30) women in the class have adopted me, one of them, who speaks English well, checks in with me periodically to make sure I know what’s happening.

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It was pozole day, which is my all-time favorite that I never get to have. There used to be a place in Louisville that would make it on Sundays, but they stopped because it’s a lot of work, and I was the only person who ever ordered it. It’s a pork and hominy stew that comes in white, red, and green varieties (the colors of the Mexican flag). Mexicans may be the only culture that’s more obsessed than Americans are with eating their patriotic colors (berry-flag cake, anyone?), so pozole is obligatory on Independence Day, Sept. 15. But now I can make it any time, any color that I want, provided I have 4 hours to stand over the stove—and that’s with a pressure cooker.

The chewy hominy and spoon-tender pork make pozole so comforting, and my favorite variety, the red one, features a puree of guajillo and ancho chiles that make it a little spicy and very deep and earthy in both flavor and color. But the real thrill is in the customization options—it’s like the Build-A-Bear of soup. Sliced lettuce, radishes, avocado, chopped onion, lime, tortilla strips, chicharron, powdered chiles… the possibilities are truly endless, and if you really load it up, you can almost forget how many days’ worth of pork you’re eating.

 

Day 1: Yucatecan recipes

We arrived at the school and gathered at long tables in an airy place that was a courtyard before someone hung a canvas roof over it. The walls were lined with plants and metates, and in the middle of our table was a 4-gallon carboy of hibiscus tea, surrounded by lime green tumblers and traditional clay coffee cups.

One of several walls covered with metates, or grinding stones where, traditionally, you would turn corn into cornmeal and spices into mole.

At 11:00 sharp, the assistants led me and about 10 other students to a room with cubbies for our things, let us get our aprons out, then brought us to a room lined with posters boasting of the diversity of baked goods, corn, chiles, and vegetables in Mexico. On the table at the front of the room were at least 20 kinds of dried chilis, labeled and arranged in earthenware pots. We each received a packet of recipes for the day.

The chef arrived, sat down, and gazed at us for a moment before he began his lecture on the richness of Mexican cuisine. He flowed smoothly from criticizing the soullessness of English tea to the Mickey-Mousification of the stuffed cheese wheel, a technically demanding specialty of the Yucatan that many restaurants try to fake. He interrupted himself from time to time to ask his assistants (who are long-term students at the school) for a coffee or “unas tortillitas” (some tortillas, but cuter), or to scold them for being able to make a bechamel with their eyes closed, but failing to identify chiles or to know the traditional method of foaming hot chocolate. His manner was always calm and kind, as if to show he wasn’t criticizing his assistants, but the culinary milieu they’d been trained in.

Eventually he started talking us through the recipes, still interspersed with stories. He told us about his Yucatecan grandmother, who had been expatriated after her husband found himself on the wrong (or at least losing) side of the revolution, and who had fought to keep her Yucatecan traditions alive while adapting to the climate and ingredients she found in Texas. He told us about chayote and about the history of different avocado cultivars and… oh #*!%&@, he’s dictating the recipes to us, and everyone’s copying but me.

Once we got into the kitchen, I was more than a little lost, not only because I had ingredient lists but no recipes (bear in mind that we prepped, for example, 4 kg of tomatoes for 4 different applications in 3 different recipes, so there was a lot to keep straight). Also, there were about 15 people in the narrow kitchen, all busily chopping, frying, and chattering back and forth. In short, I was totally lost, and it did not get better. Although Chef Yuri, as the director of the school, couldn’t afford to hang out with us losers for 5 hours in the kitchen, his team of assistants and other teachers were there to answer our questions. For instance, an assistant explained to us how to know when your cochinita pibil is ready, which is useful information. Unfortunately, as he was explaining it, a pressure cooker was being released, so I didn’t catch a word.

The structure of the class is … well, there’s less of it than I expected. They pretty much hand us the recipes, talk us through the ingredients, then hang out and wait for us to ask a question or mess something up. At some point, our group acquired a filet of fish, which we cooked for the whole class. Another group received a different filet, and they were the only ones to make the Veracruzan-style red snapper. The chef would pop in from time to time and show us how to make refried beans, tortillas, and other basics that were just listed as ingredients in the recipes.

Dogfish bread? Sounds gross. Pan de cazon, at any rate.

Chef Yuri tops the cake with warm salsa.

The first day featured one big-ticket item: cochinita pibil, the most famous main dish from the Yucatan Peninsula. I tried it last year and wasn’t impressed; today’s was better, but still the appeal for me was grinding the vibrant achiote seeds and wrapping the meat in banana leaf, not the eating.

Before it cooks, the cochinita is bright red, its main claim to fame. But if it’s still red after cooking (according to the chef), someone’s tampered with it to accentuate the color.

We served the cochinita and a chicken dish prepred the same way on top of another pan-Yucatecan delicacy, panuchos, which, along with salbutes, sopes, tostadas, tacos, gorditas, chalupas, and so on, form the category of “flat, topped corn snacks that maybe don’t all need to have their own names.”

Panuchos ready to be topped with cochinita, vegetables, and habanero salsa.

Having made panuchos, though, I can now at least appreciate the skill that goes into them. You fresh-make a tortilla and, while it’s still hot, slice it open along the edge like a pita and pull the two halves apart without tearing them (I still have no evidence that this is actually possible) so you can stuff it with refried beans. You then deep-fry this little pocket and top it with meat and vegetables. Tasty? You bet your boots. Worth the effort? Ehh…

 

Perritos, y’all

It seems that having at least 1 dog is a prerequisite for living in this area (below are some of the dogs that visited me in cafes).

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Since leash laws are not even almost a thing, there are lots of happy fetch-playing dogs and leaping-over-hedges dogs and guilty-faced-pooping-on-the-sidewalk dogs, but also lots of

… dogfights. The winner so far in the category of dog mischief is the black-and-white mutt that decided to do his business right in the middle of a busy intersection as cars, bikes, and a mortified owner looked on.