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Mexico in May (Intro): Three Great Food Cities
Posted by extramsg on Thursday, October 13, 2005 @ 20:45:33 PDT
Contributed by extramsg
This last May, I made my seventh trip to Mexico and visited my 10th city there. Shamefully, this was only my first trip to Oaxaca -- the area of Mexico Diana Kennedy describes as "by far the most complex ... to know and understand" with numerous sub-cultures and micro-climates that produce so many "different types of chiles, herbs, and wild edible plants" that they and their uses "could be the study of a lifetime." (My Mexico) With only a part of my two weeks being spent there, you can safely assume that I didn't even explore the tip of the tip of the iceberg. But what I did get to enjoy, certainly made me want to return and test Kennedy's assertion.
It was also my first trip to Puebla, the central city of the state with the same name. In A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain declares it the place "where cooks come from." "If there was a mandatory day of rest --" he explains, "or a public holiday for all Poblanos -- a lot of restaurants in America would have to close their doors. As it is," he continues, "the day after the fifth of May (Cinco de Mayo), half the cooks in America are hungover." While it was a town overlooked by most foodies, I left loving the food and the people as much as Bourdain did. It's a city I could imagine living in quite easily.
Then there's Mexico City. Like most massive metropoli, DF can feel oppressive. The city expands as concrete buildings across the high dessert and into the hills for hours in every direction. Millions pile daily shoulder-to-shoulder in the subways. Traffic lights are treated more as a suggestion than a command. The smog and altitude leave you breathless. But so does the staggering variety of food options, from cheap and soulfull antojitos on the street to creative and refined haute cuisine. It's been that way since before the Conquistadors.
The great island city of Tenochtitlan, on top of which was built Mexico City, had one of the largest pre-Columbian markets, Tlatelolco. "With sixty-thousand daily visitors and whole streets devoted to prepared foods, [it] provided a fertile environment for gastronomic innovation. ... Many people visited markets simply for the spectacle, the delicious stews, and the latest gossip. ... An innovative popular cuisine developed in Mesoamerica on the modest foundations of corn and chiles. ... Tamales assumed a great variety of forms and flavors with no ingredients beyond maize, herbs, and chiles. A cook could shape corn confections into ovals, canoes, animals, or stellar constellations." (Que Vivan Los Tamales)
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a Spanish historian who joined the likes of Cordoba and Cortes in their conquests of the New World, described one of Motecuhzoma's banquets as consisting of over 300 dishes with ingredients ranging from "fowl, wattled fowl, pheasants, native partridges, quail, domestic and wild ducks, deer, peccary, reed birds and doves and hares and rabbits, and many other birds and things." Of course, this meal ended with foaming liquid chocolate served in gold goblets. (America's First Cuisines) What is now Mexico City has always been at the forefront of both food for the peasant and the powerful.
I hope you'll look forward to my coming reports, a project that's much overdue. I've filtered through over 1,000 photos. I have a filled notebook, including rough maps of Mexico's two largest markets. Expect separate entries on the street foods and the haute cuisine of Mexico City, Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca, the restaurants and street food of Oaxaca, and the foods of Puebla.
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