The crowd is going wild, slapping the backs of chairs and shaking the cage containing their fervour. A man the size of a baby elephant wearing a sky-blue unitard sails over the boxing ring, propelled by an equally colossal opponent. He clears a good three metres, an astounding effort for a missile of such size. The resulting impact sees the crowd erupt into cheers. Half chant ‘rudo’, while the others shout ‘técnico’, among other less savoury calls. I’m at a lucha libre (wrestling) match in Puebla and the good guy, the técnico, has just defeated the bad boy, the rudo. Despite the luchadores’ (wrestlers) theatrics, my attention is diverted when a snack-seller unexpectedly squirts my bag of crunchy pork skins with a thick, orange sauce. The salty, sour, sweet dousing is chamoy, a Mexican sauce made from fermented fruit – usually apricots – laced with chillies. One bite and my flavour receptors start their own wrestling match. And, like the action in the ring, the punches thrown by the chamoy are perfectly choreographed to deliver the most impact.
Welcome to eating in Mexico, where colour and flavour slap your tastebuds around like a Herculean luchador. Having its moment across the globe right now, I’m here to check out how Mexican food became so sexy all of a sudden. But, of course, it wasn’t all of a sudden. It’s evolved through centuries of conquests and adaptations and was delicious long before there was such a thing as a food trend.
Puebla seems like a good place to begin. It’s the home of mole Poblano, the rich, deeply flavoured sauce often found draped over chicken enchiladas. Considered a national dish, mole is the kind of sauce that inspires immense pride, particularly in the states of Puebla and Oaxaca, which both lay claim to its origins. The most commonly accepted story anoints Puebla as the rightful birthplace. Legend has it the nuns of Puebla’s Convent of Santa Rosa went into a flap when they had nothing to serve the visiting archbishop. They threw whatever they could find into a pot, cooking it for hours until the motley muck turned into a thick, shiny sauce. The nuns then cooked a nearby turkey and served it up to the righteous dinner guest slathered in the cloying concoction. Presumably everyone liked it, because they’ve been making it ever since. Interestingly, mole Poblano doesn’t translate to the trend for Mexican food back home. Perhaps because you need at least 20 ingredients and quite a few spare hours to make it.
“People think Mexican food is Tex-Mex,” says Reyna Montiel Campos, screwing up her nose. “But it is nothing like that.” Rosy-cheeked and with iPod earphones casually draped around her neck, Reyna fires off the ingredients in her mole Poblano, which includes four types of dried chillies (ancho, mulato, guajillo and pasilla), chocolate, plantains, sesame seeds and, oddly, animal-shaped crackers for thickening. She’s invited us to her fonda (small restaurant), Puebla Colonial, to teach us some traditional recipes. Reyna is the third generation in her family to cook in a Puebla kitchen and her sons, Alan and Sebastian, will be the fourth. Reyna’s mother, now 82, is the proud recipient of the keys to the city, given in recognition of making outstanding Poblano food for 50 years. Puebla Colonial still makes Mama’s mole, selling tubs for shoppers to take home. It’s an excellent example of Mexico’s multi-layered cuisine: made using indigenous ingredients, and, arguably, first thrust upon a Catholic archbishop. One of the best places for a closer examination of this layering, in both food and culture, is the capital.
Mexico City is a vast, sinking city. Its slow descent is visible in the beautiful Spanish-era buildings that lean on each other like drunk old men. Down she goes, more every year. But it’s not news to anyone; the city has been sinking since the Aztecs first built the city of Tenochtitlán (now located in the central part of modern-day Mexico City) on an island in the centre of a lake in 1325. Even then, the lake would slowly reclaim the buildings. Rather than relocate, which might have been prudent, the Aztecs built new temples around the original, enclosing the older, smaller temple inside, like Babushka dolls. The Spanish did the same, pilfering stone from Aztec temples to build their own Christian churches on top, then draining the water to expand into the silty lakebed.
Soon enough, the same layering of old and new wandered into the kitchen. Stomping through villages, conquistadors would have found the Aztecs grinding maize on flat mortar and pestles called metate to make tortillas, and seen tamales (leaf-wrapped parcels of corn dough) steaming away in underground fires. The prize they discovered in new flavours rivalled the elusive El Dorado and now, long after the hunt for Mayan gold has been abandoned by all but a few hopeful archaeologists, the indigenous ingredients have proved a far more enduring treasure. Stuffing their coffers with New World crops of tomatoes, vanilla and chocolate, the finds were paraded back in Spain and, thankfully, the Old World never smelled the same again. Meanwhile, the Spanish were ferrying cows, pigs, cheese, garlic, wine and rice to Mexico to feed homesick conquistadors. Inevitably, the two cultures merged at the table.
Back in modern day Mexico City, these layered flavours are on every street corner. Nobody seems too worried that the city is being slurped up by a giant sandpit. Instead, judging by the sheer number of street vendors doling out tacos, churros and elote (grilled corn) round the clock, a more pressing concern for locals seems to be walking a block without encountering their favourite snack. This is excellent news for us – the whole city is a giant outdoor food market. And where better to embark on a taco crawl than at a taqueria (taco shop) called Los Famosos.
“The suadero taco is the taco everyone in Mexico City loves the best – and this where to get it,” declares our guide to gluttony and punk-rocking Mexico City local, Gabriel Castro Villegas. Soon enough, baskets of tacos begin to arrive. Among them are the ever-popular carnitas, lard-simmered pork on palm-sized tortillas slicked with salsa verde and topped with coriander; a corn fungus incarnation called huitlacoche; and the famed suadero. There are many cuts you can pop on a tortilla to make a taco, such as tripa (small intestine), oreja (pig’s ear) and lengua (beef tongue), but the suadero is arguably the most delicious. Thin strips of curled beef, crisped at the edges and marinated in lime, are tangled together atop a tortilla. The suadero cut, sometimes called ‘rose beef’, comes from the flank of the beast. It makes for an extremely flavourful, slightly sinewy taco. But with so much still to sample, there’s no time to muse on the nuances of suadero, and Gabriel hauls us back onto the street for more antojitos (or, cutely, ‘little cravings’).
What follows is a cyclonic indoctrination into the world of tacos. When I finally come to my senses, the eye of the storm has passed and I find myself curb-side, tucking into a taco de bacalao (salt cod taco) along with a congregation of on-duty policemen doing the same. It’s time to call it on the tacos for the day and take shelter in a comforting glass of pulque – a milky, alcoholic drink made from the sap of the agave plant. Dreams of Los Famosos, Aztecs and conquistadors ensue.
It’s difficult to imagine Mexican food without cheese, rice, and pork. And despite the unwanted culinary advances of the Spanish, no-one can deny the coupling has created one of the most popular cuisines of the world. But to burrow beneath the layer of cheese and taste pre-Hispanic Mexico, you need to get to Oaxaca.
The Zapotecs and Mixtecs were the original inhabitants of Oaxaca and, today, there are 16 registered ethnic groups in the area. Faces are different here; the wide, fine-boned features are a reminder that indigenous customs remain the foundations of modern Mexican cuisine, with the Spanish influence providing the topsoil. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, Oaxaca is both a popular place for ice-cream-licking Mexicans on mini-breaks and, perhaps more interestingly, where a pre-Hispanic food renaissance is quietly underway.
One place where you can taste this is at Casa Crespo Restaurant in the Centro Histórico. I watch as a waiter drops hot stones into a fragrant, red broth. There’s a plonk, a sizzle and a collective ‘ahh’ as the stone froths away working its magic on the caldo de piedra, or stone soup. This pre-Hispanic dish is made with tomatoes, prawns and nearby river stones and is one of the items on chef and owner Óscar Carrizosa’s menu.
“I was a painter, and painters love parties. They also know how to eat,” laughs Óscar, who began putting as much effort into catering his parties as he did his art, and was soon teaching friends to cook. Eventually, Óscar entirely swapped the canvas for the kitchen. “When you teach, you have an obligation to be informed,” says the self-taught chef, who read cookbooks voraciously to learn his new passion. It wasn’t until 15 years ago that Óscar began to notice a growing interest in pre-Hispanic fare and it was foreigners who first began to spruik the cuisine. “Once Mexicans started to see foreigners interested in this original food, they became proud, and now it is becoming popular with everyone,” explains Oscar as he plates up tostadas topped with pre-Hispanic ingredients of grasshoppers and smushed up gusano (worms), that once gobbled away inside agave plants.
Even without leading the trend for pre-Hispanic food, Oaxaca has a reputation as a culinary hot-spot. There’s the bright-white, salty balls of queso Oaxaca. And the dark tablets of chocolate that gives mole Poblano its sheen, and becomes the sweet, cinnamon-spiked champurrado (hot chocolate). Not to mention the mountains of chapulines, snackable grasshoppers toasted and doused in lime and chilli – an agreeable alternative to beer nut, even if a little pointy.
All these delights can be found at the markets of Oaxaca, such as Mercado Benito Juárez, Mercado 20 de Noviembre and the farther-flung Mercado Tlacolula. These are bulging, cacophonous places where you can easily lose time and travelling companions sampling colourful juices, nopales (prickly pear pads) and the metre-wide sheets of chicharrón (pork crackling) that are fried intact in the cazo, a purpose-made pot. But of all the morsels on offer, the ones to steer yourself toward are the grilled meats, carne asada.
As we pass through the pasilla de carnes asadas (grilled meats hall) at Mercado 20 de Noviembre, my eyelids shutter like a nosy neighbour’s blinds to let in just a sliver of light. Through this slit and the thick smoke, I can just make out slabs of raw meat adorning stalls. Strings of chorizo dangle from rods like festive garlands and bright orange flames leap from grills fuelled by delicious, popping fat. We shout our orders over the sizzle and shuffle, half-blind, to the seating area, away from the intoxicating smoke. A round of Tecate beer arrives to temper the agonising wait for our asada selection. When it comes, accompanied by a stack of tortillas and the ever-present salsas, it’s piled onto baskets with spring onions and cloaked in the smell of charcoal. We descend on the feast, stuffing tortillas with the smoky meat.
The next day is Palm Sunday, but holiness won’t keep me from another barbacoa (barbecue) feast at Mercado Tlacolula. Afterwards, I make my way out past stalls of lolly-coloured frijoles (beans) and slabs of cornbread. I spot a woman by a cauldron of frothy, white liquid. She’s close to 90, but her eyes are as bright as polished obsidian. She surveys me with palpable disinterest as I peer into the pot. “Tejate,” she throws out like scraps to a stray. I hand over some pesos. It’s cool and sweet, made from corn, cacao and the native plant flor de cacao, which has risen to the top to form a milky foam. It’s ancient and nurturing, miles from that first punch of chamoy back in Puebla.
I walk with my tejate to admire a nearby church decorated with intricate woven palm tapestries. It’s a shrine to Catholicism and, like Spanish ingredients and cooking styles, a hangover from a conquest that altered the course of Mexico’s culture and diet. It doesn’t strain the powers of perception to see how smoky meats and tortillas became popular at home, but here, food carries on as it always has: making use of what’s on hand and embracing the new.
The writer travelled courtesy of Intrepid Travel.
Tour
Intrepid Travel runs eight-day Real Food Adventures in Mexico, visiting Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca. A local guide will take you beyond the tourist traps to discover the food and people of this incredible country. Visit intrepidtravel.com/food for more details.
Intrepid Travel runs eight-day Real Food Adventures in Mexico, visiting Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca. A local guide will take you beyond the tourist traps to discover the food and people of this incredible country. Visit intrepidtravel.com/food for more details.
Recipes
These iceblocks are a sweet, sour and spicy Mexican sweet made using just 3 ingredients. You will need 6 iceblock moulds and sticks.
Two eggs, separated by beans, are topped with two different sauces for a hearty Mexican breakfast.
The word ‘cemita’ can be used to describe the popular Pueblan sandwich as a whole, as well as the bread roll by itself. We give you the recipe to make your own cemita rolls with buttermilk for an extra touch authenticity.
Photography David Hagerman.
As seen in Feast magazine, October 2014, Issue 36.
