Cua Magazine. Eating in Mexico. Winter 2014 / No.1 by CNTRL

Cua: Let’s Eat

Mexico is a nation culturally and geographically blessed, whose millennia of history have been enriched by multiple waves of immigration and extraordinary biodiversity. All of this comes together to create one of the world’s most diverse and complex culinary traditions. The nation is home to such rich, wide-ranging cuisines that you might not find two a like its entire length and breadth. While the past has been the fundament for a vibrant and innovative present, the current national scene seems to include not only Mexican heritage, but as well, integrates and elaborates based on knowledge and information that is driving food trends worldwide. This has led to contemporary iterations of Mexican cuisine that deserve to be shared now—and in the best possible way. I’d even hazard that Mexican cooking’s enormous riches— both on today’s cutting edge as well as in traditional kitchens, and as varied as the nation itself—still await discovery, even as they become yet another testament to the nation as a one-of-akind culinary destination. I celebrate projects like Cua, knowing they will help spread the word about the extraordinary food scene that is currently developing in Mexico. Claudia Ruiz Massieu

Minister of Tourism

Cua, año 1, No. 1, invierno 2014 es una publicación trimestral editada por dos45media. Chapultepec 540 interior 609, colonia Roma, delegación Cuauhtémoc, C.P. 06700, México, DF. Teléfono 55141577. Editor responsable: Guillermo Israel Galina Vaca. Número de Certificado de Reserva de Derechos al Uso Exclusivo: en trámite. Certificado de Licitud de Título: en trámite. Certificado de Licitud de Contenido: en trámite. Impresa en Offset Santiago, Av. Río San Joaquín 436, colonia Ampliación Granada, delegación Miguel Hidalgo, C.P. 11520, México, DF. Teléfono 91269040. Cua tiene un tiraje trimestral de 2000 ejemplares; esta edición terminó de imprimirse en octubre de 2014. Distribución controlada. El contenido de los artículos es responsabilidad exclusiva de los autores y no refleja el punto de vista de Cua. Todos los derechos reservados. Queda prohibida la reproducción total o parcial del material publicado sin consentimiento por escrito de Cua.

A Message from the Editor

“Something is happening here,” René Redzepi declared ecstatically, after using a tortilla to “spoon up” some mole Enrique Olvera was making at Pujol. We share his enthusiasm: something big is happening on the Mexican food scene—something we want to portray in the present publication, which takes its name from the language of the Aztecs, spoken to this day by some six million of their descendants. The word is cua—“eat.” Cua is an invitation to explore Mexico’s way of eating today. Something that would be inconceivable without the gastronomic history that led to unesco’s Intangible World Heritage designation, or without the tremendous vitality and diversity of contemporary expressions from the nation’s chefs and cooks, the central protagonists of the pages that follow.

Contributors Jorge Lestrade Sadurní Editorial Director Israel Galina Edition Marco Antonio Hernández Editorial Coordinator Michelle Pérez Lobo Writer Rogelio Vázquez Original Layout and Design Claudia Álvarez Design Víctor Lozano Web programing Michael Parker English-language translation and copyediting Local Cuisine: Fernando Figueroa Photography Cyndi Jiménez y Rafael Tabla Chefs Claudia Álvarez Photo Assistant Abril Salas Art Cover photo Molcajete Muux Design by Diana Shkurovich and Rocío González de Cossío Website www.revistacua.mx contacto@revistacua.mx Editorial Offices dos45media

Alejandro Escalante, Journalist Alejandro Escalante is a journalist and Mexican food writer, critic and student, as well as the author of La Tacopedia. Enciclopedia del Taco (Trilce Ediciones, 2012). He is also a regular contributor to the website Animal Gourmet. —

Jeff Gordinier, Journalist Work by US-based journalist and writer Jeff Gordinier has appeared in wide-ranging media such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Details, GQ and Esquire, among others. He is the author of X Saves the World, and his writing has appeared in anthologies such as Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Food Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction. —

Ana Elena Mallet, Curator Independent curator Ana Elena Mallet specializes in modern and contemporary design. She studied Latin American literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana and holds an MA in art history from the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Department of Philosophy and Letters. She has directed Mexico City’s popular Corredor Cultural Roma Condesa program since 2009. —

Jaime Ramos Méndez, Cultural Liaison Professor Jaime Ramos Méndez received his undergraduate degree in communications from iteso and holds an MA in tradition studies from the Colegio de Michoacán. He is an instructor at the Centro Universitario Juana de Asbaje as well as the Universidad de Zamora and also works as a promoter at the Casa de la Cultura de Zamora. His blog on Michoacán and its traditions has received over one million visits. —

Elena Reygadas, Chef Este producto fue impreso en papel Domtar Lynx White FSC de 118 g, 100% sustentable. Cuenta con el certificado del Forest Stewardship Council, lo que garantiza el uso responsable de los recursos naturales con que se fabrica.

Chef Elena Reygadas studied English literature at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and moved to New York upon graduation, where she enrolled at that city’s French Culinary Institute. She later journeyed to London, where she worked at Locanda Locatelli before founding Rosetta restaurant when she returned to Mexico City in 2010.

Contents 6˜7 News |

8 ˜ 13 The Flavors of Michoacán By Jaime Ramos Méndez

14˜ 17 Carnitas: Their Yummy Origins By Alejandro Escalante

18 ˜ 23 The Mexican Table and Contemporary Design By Ana Elena Mallet

24 ˜ 31 In Search of the Perfect Taco By Jeff Gordinier

32 ˜ 37 The Pleasures of Authenticity By Elena Reygadas

38 ˜ 41 Getting Started with Your Molcajete By Alejandro Escalante

42 ˜ 43 From the Taco to the Sandwich, with a Stop-in at the Torta By Salvador Novo

44 ˜ 47 Every Tortilla’s Secret Staff Writers

48 The Piñata

N ew s

FRESH OFF THE PRESS

Mexico The Cookbook — Phaidon

Mexico’s sum-total of regions, indigenous roots and foreign influences has made its cuisine into an art whose full sophistication requires more than just a recipe book to reflect it. author. It features more than 650 recipes, ordered by food type and complemented by a wealth of contextual and historical information. Released by Phaidon Press, Mexico: The Cookbook is a celebration of limitless culinary art that takes readers everywhere from Baja to the Yucatán.

Convinced that the nation’s traditional gastronomy is defined not only by its ingredients, preparations or utensils, but as well by its cultural heritage, Chef Margarita Carrillo Arronte has written Mexico: The Cookbook, the first English-language title on the country’s cuisine by a Mexican

O penings

Cosme

— Enrique Olvera, New York Following his success at Pujol, Maíz de mar and his eno gourmet shops, Enrique Olvera is taking on the United States with the opening of Cosme in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. The name evokes Mexico City’s San Cosme Market (and subway station), a place where the iconic flavors of Olvera’s cooking all come together. Cosme in New York is a Mexican restaurant centered on two star elements: south-of-the-border ingredients (corn, chile and beans) as well as strictly seasonal products from the Hudson River Valley—a combination of both countries’ very best, all subject to Olvera’s masterful touch. The bar is a standout, too, liberally stocked with artisanal spirits, beers and seventy wine varieties.

Photo by Fiamma Piacentini

Oaxaca en Barcelona — Joan Bagur, Barcelona

At mid-year 2014, Menorca-born chef Joan Bagur opened his restaurant Oaxaca Cuina Mexicana Mezcalería in Barcelona. It was quite a bit of news, heralding classic Mexican cuisine’s arrival to the Catalonian capital. Bagur, a true Mexico aficionado, maintains close ties to two landmark figures on the nation’s traditional food scene: the world famous Diana Kennedy, as well as Carmen “Titita” Ramírez Degollado, who created Mexico City’s El Bajío, one of the most celebrated restaurants of its type. For tortilla dough, Oaxaca features an enormous nixtamal grinder that Chef Bagur personally imported. The same painstaking attention to detail informed his corn, chocolate and chile selection; he oversees every process with a spirit of respect and conservation when it comes to the nation’s traditional recipes. What’s more, the restaurant bar boasts a selection of more than 200 original and old-school mescals.

Photo: Courtesy of Oaxaca Cuina Mexicana

Photo by Getty Images / Aurora

Fishermen on Lake Pรกtzcuaro.

Four centuries of Purépecha, Spanish and Filipino cultural heritage find a place on the tables of today’s Michoacán. Eating there means experiencing a scrumptious, mixed tradition that led unesco to declare traditional Mexican food Intangible World Heritage.

The Flavors of

Michoacán By Jaime Ramos Méndez Photos by Fernando Figueroa

Food in Michoacán is abundant, multi-faceted and flavorful, and the product of a culinary tradition that taps into the signature foods of three continents: corn, beans, chile, cactus and avocado from the Americas; wheat, beef and honey from Europe; rice and other condiments from Asia. It also enjoys a wide array of raw ingredients related to its tripartite cultural heritage: the indigenous Purépecha, Spaniards and Filipinos. The dishes known as antojitos are native; cometungas hearken

back to Europe and exotic recipes hail from Asia. The pre-Hispanic trinity—corn, beans and chile—still predominate the “must-eat” menu. It was a search for the secrets of Michoacán cooking, along with lots of investigation and documentation, that cemented traditional Mexican food’s successful bid for unesco “Intangible World Heritage” status. As Dr. Martín González de la Vara explains, “…a deeper knowledge of our state’s culinary practices was already in place as a demonstration of the fact that

Michoacán cooking met continuity and identity-based social significance criteria, among others, that were requisite to receiving the designation.” It is that documentation—and personal food memories—that let us take the present culinary tour. The Purépechas were well fed on curinda, corunda and uchepo tamales, ciabatta-style breads, corn atole beverages, chile-seasoned beans, a bit of fish and a lot of fruit. Even these days in most rural households there’s a family garden that provides roots, stalks, flowers and fruits to the rustic table. Fondness for that Purépecha gastronomic tradition contributes to the everyday diet the people of Michoacán consume in vegetarian delicacies whose base is corn, squash, zucchini, prickly-pear paddles, beans, chayote and verdolaga, native ingredients that are added to rice and wheat, now treated as if they’d always grown in these parts. The avocado—also autochthonous produce, considered “Michoacán’s green gold”—merits special mention for its rich flavor and nutritional properties as well as for the windfall its cultivation and international commercialization afford. Guacamole, prepared with mashed avocado and combined with salsa mexicana (aka pico de gallo) has become a world renowned appetizer but is also the base for soups and salsas in various corners of the planet. The Indians’ and the Spaniards’ culinary customs always played nice together. In fact, Luis González y González wrote, the racial mixing denominated mestizaje was as quick and enthusiastic at the table as it was in the bedroom. Numerous Purépecha foods interbred with those of the Spaniards. European colonists did not worship fire but rarely went without it when preparing and heating food. Essentially carnivorous, they were more given to cooked food than the relatively vegetarian natives, but soon enough beef, pork and chicken ended up becoming one with the chile and the xoconostle cactus in the churipo stew. Hispanic foods incorporated the flavor of chile and corn tortilla as mestizo heritage handed over its mole and pipián sauces, impressing the Michoacán hallmark on all flavors. Thus a journey through the state’s gastronomic history always begins by gathering the natural blessings found in highlands and lowlands; those that grow beneath a sky generous in its delivery of rain and sun, aired by fresh, clean winds and dressed in a crazy-quilt of colors whose blossoms celebrate fertility itself.

It’s key to remember that Michoacán was the Ancient Aztec Empire’s “fishing hole.” A land of rivers and lakes, it is home to Lake Pátzcuaro’s whitefish and to trout, bream, and other species that ply springs, creeks, rivers and seas. As wilderness comes under cultivation and scurrying beasts are trapped or domesticated, the tour continues with processes that transformed these riches, that squeezed out the very best juices, with help from utensils that populate kitchens to this day: clay pots and casseroles, smutty from having taught so many to cook, from preparing corn, beans and fried delights; stone metate and molcajete mortars to grind nixtamal cornmeal or muddle salsas; copper pots and pans to fry and stew vegetables as well as animals; big wooden spoons and grinders to whip atoles and beat chocolate; palm fans to stoke the flames beneath ocote pine, mesquite and other woods, in clay ovens, sheet-metal burners and earthen griddles. In a union of art and nature, wheat fields and milpa cultivations produced what was transformed and shaped into bread and tortillas; meat stews, soups and preparations were made of what once swam, flew, ran or crawled; desserts emerged from honeycombs and sugarcane. And to help these delicacies “go down,” brews were distilled: cane sugar charandas; mescals made from agave leaves; liqueurs fruity and sweet. Because of that journey, today you can experience unexpected flavors, aromas, colors and textures, the fruits of a well-fed mestizo tradition four centuries old. The chúscuta (tortilla in the language of the Purépecha) is the daily bread atop a Michoacán table. Served at every meal, it functions at once as edible plate and spoon, a cone, taco or tostada topped with a thousand ingredients. Even today the pleasure of a freshly grilled, handmade tortilla eaten as a taco, with beans and a molcajete-mulled salsa is the most flavorful expression of Michoacán’s cuisine. Amid varied tamale offerings, uchepos and corundas are standouts that deploy the ancestral flavor pre-Hispanic people cultivated and cooked. Uchepos are made with young, recently harvested corn whose sweet flavor generally comes straight from the kernels. Polyhedral corundas are served alone or with chile slices, refried beans, jocoqui yoghurt or pork. In traditional Purépecha cooking, churipo stew is the festival dish par excellence, an offering that confers identity since no two recipes are alike. Though it is

Churipo and cornudas (at rear).

A Michoacรกn-style uchepo.

The Michoacán dessert menu is famed for candied apricot, bananas in syrup, coconut clusters, Lenten capirotada bread puddings, candied guava rolls, honeyed tejocote fruit, tamarind pulp, caramelized pumpkin, candied yams, brandied egg sweets, black zapodilla in orange juice, sugared figs, milk balls and all manner of fruit pastes…another standout treat from this constellation are chongos zamoranos, sweet cheeses made of curdled milk, molasses and seasoned with cinnamon. We’ll close this brief gastronomic review with a mention of its felicitous symbiosis with another intangible world heritage: Day of the Dead as celebrated in Michoacán. The people of Michoacán have a date with the saintly departed every November first and second. To get ready, they set tables atop the graves of the souls who’ll attend a feast featuring all the goodies they loved in life. Cemeteries become a refectory of two worlds—the earthly dining room, plus a banquet hall for guests from the beyond. Amid candles that light the souls’ way, a variegated spread is laid out and grows cold beneath a nocturnal vigil that presages winter, alongside potations for bracing the chill. The dead sample culinary comforts as they relive the magic of a Michoacán night, on earth as it is in heaven. Wide swaths of the Michoacán gastronomic landscape have been left unexplored. So the next step is to ramble the flavorful, aromatic and gaily-colored paths of an ancestral tradition that resides in every Michoacán home—always served with a hope of being the finest possible host.

always a “beef dish with red chile,” every locality adds its parochial touch and declares “it’s not churipo without hoja santa” or “it’s not churipo without cabbage.” Freshwater seafood like fried charal and michi stew, made with a catfish that does not fit on the plate, are welcome guests at any regional table. The state’s larger cities take pride in dishes that establish their place in Michoacán’s culinary concert: Zitácuaro is famed for fried pork and tripe; Tlalpujahua, for barbecued mutton; Tajimaroa, for pozole; mountain towns for güilota pigeon, partridge and venison; lake town like Pátzcuaro and Chapala serve michi stew; on the Pacific coast, there’s langoustine and yet other fishes; in Morelia, placera-style enchiladas and sweet ate pastes; Zamora is known for pickled specialties as well as dulce de leche and fruit-flavored sweets; San José de Gracia has its cheeses and minguiche “dip,” and there are torta sandwiches in every village and city when you’re in a hurry. Among gastronomic products that have brought honor and renown to Michoacán, cotija cheese is a special case; Cotija-region designation of origin status was conferred in March 2005. Dr. Esteban Barragán López has recorded the arguments in favor of its certification: it is artisanal, 100% naturally aged and only elaborated on ranches in the mountains between Jalisco and Michoacán. Its production is limited to the rainy season and the raw, whole milk from which it is made comes from freely-pastured, health-certified cows. The milk must curdle naturally and the salt must be Colima artisanal. It is to be aged a minimum of three months. For slaking thirst and general refreshment, Michoacán cuisine serves up a selection of fresh fruit-and-vegetable ades made from leaves, fruits and petals that often wash down everyday meals. For celebrations there are atoles: tamarind flavored, black atole with cocoa-bean husk, agave-nectar atole, or the corn variety, dyed green with anisette and pumpkin leaves, flavored with red árbol chile. To paraphrase Ramón López Velarde, the odor of sanctity that surrounds Michoacán’s peoples emanates from bakeries in an all-but-infinite repertoire of breads, rolls, biscuits, pastries and cakes, sweet and salty, that go by names like roscas, cocoles, rodeos, muéganos, ponteduros, molletes, virginias, ojos de pancha, hojaldres, volcanes, conchas, bizcotelas, violines, trancas, cemitas, encanelados, pellizcos, polvorones, besos, mordidas and marías.

N.B: The present essay called for extraordinary authorial aid. Dr. Luis González y González’s book Michoacán a la Mesa provided a great deal of the menu. Dr. Brigitte Bohem de Lameiras’s introductory text also provided sustenance and sazón, as did the introduction to its updated edition, written fifteen years later by Dr. Martín Gonzáles de la Vara.

When Spanish-imported pigs met native corn, a true culinary romance was born.

Carnitas: Their Yummy Origins

(and All the Juicy Details) By Alejandro Escalante Photos by Fernando Figueroa

swine reached the Western Hemisphere with Columbus who, on his second voyage, left eight hogs on the isle of Hispaniola; Hernán Cortés brought them to Mexico alongside soldiers, dogs, horses, hens, sheep and sundry other European imports. Today there are several types of criollo or native hog, like the pelón mexicano, the cuino, casco de mula, istmeño, etc., that are protected, raised and fattened with local foods, in order to cultivate the pigs’ singular contribution to regional dishes. To make carnitas you need fresh pork, which can be the entirety of the animal, entrails included. Once the meat has been thoroughly cleaned, aired and dried, it should be fried, confit-style, in a great deal of pork fat over very low heat (there should not even be

bubbles) and for quite a long time, until the desired tender-to-cooked ratio is achieved. This technique is not just for Mexican carnitas. Meats like pork, duck, goose and even chicken are cooked the same way in many countries. In other times it was a way to preserve food, which, once fried according to the confit technique, was stored in its own fat and did not spoil. These days the goal is for the meat to cook without getting dry, brown and crisp on the outside, fresh and delicious on the inside. It’s a fact that this technique cooks all the fat out of the meat itself and is therefore the healthiest way to eat pork. In the search for flavor, richness and the elusive, emotional quality that Spanish-speaking chefs call sazón, there are those who add exotic ingredients to

A carnitas taco featuring maciza and cuerito cuts plus pork tripe.

An avocado from Uruapan, Michoacรกn.

• Pajarilla: pancreas. • Bofe: lung. • Redaño: fatty membrane surrounding the stomach. • Perilla: throat. • Viril: penis. • Pera: rectum and anus. Other cuts take the customary names: • Viscera (liver, heart, kidneys). • Parts taken from the head: brains, ears, snout, cheeks…and we already covered the nenepil, i.e., the tongue. • Miscellaneous cuts such as ribs, dewlap, tail, and the delicacy known as barriga—that can also be defined as the bacon or the skirt—a rare but delicious cut that’s used to make the tasty breakfast strips. Then you have your go-alongs… The traditional way these tacos are dressed attests to their perfect synthesis of culinary mixing: • Cilantro: originally from North Africa and the Mediterranean basin. • Onions: whose origins trace back to Asia. • Lime: originally from Asia but brought to Spain by the Arabs. Several other ingredients are likely to be found on—or near—the table: • Nopalitos (i.e., chopped cactus paddle) prepared in a variety of ways, or pápaloquelite herb, cucumber, radish, avocado or green chiles. • Some like their carnitas with a bit of cheese such as panela, ranch-made queso fresco, cincho, sierra, etc. • And you’ve got to have salsas: verde cruda, taquera mixta (with green and red tomatoes, fresh from the molcajete), chile de árbol and guacamole, just to mention a few. There are other elements that are always present, made from the same hog, like brain quesadillas, always served with pickled chiles, and chicharrón rind. Finally, we ought to mention that once cooked, carnitas lend themselves to other recipes, particularly carnitas guisadas in salsa, deep-fried tacos, fruited loin… etc. It’s impossible not to think that from the first moment that pigs and corn met, a true romance was born. It would be tedious to go into the history of the corncob and nixtamal cornmeal here; suffice to say that in the case of carnitas, if the tortilla is prepared as the gods demand, the resultant taco will be absolutely divine.

the cauldron, like fruit, chiles, sugar, milk or even soft drinks. Purists may call it “Michoacán style,” but it’s well known that they make them elsewhere, while in Michoacán they say they don’t… In conclusion, every house has its secret. Below we’re reprinting what is considered carnitas’ birth certificate (from 492 years ago!) always cited in cases like these. It comes from conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Chapter 87: “Having apprehended [last Aztec emperor] Cuauhtémoc and his family on thirteen August 1521, Hernán Cortés […] ordered a banquet at Coyoacán to rejoice in having taken [the city of Tenochtitlan] and for this there was abundant wine from a ship that had reached the port of Villa Rica, from Castile, and there were swine they brought from Cuba…” It was understood that if the wine was really something, the pigs were something even better. The image sticks: a classic Coyoacán fiesta, carnitas and lots of wine… With carnitas, class distinctions fall away since, taco in hand, rich and poor regard each other straight in the eye, burn from eating the same salsa, and maybe—at a certain point—come to feel the same guilty pleasure.

From Tip to Tail, Your Happiness Bears My Name… In carnitas circles, every part of the pig has a name and there’s always plenty of maciza, cuerito, costilla and nana to go around. There are taco joints that serve only those varieties. But we suggest a true aficionado do his homework, bone up on the terminology and take a deep dive into the full spectrum of varieties, textures and flavors that emerge from the various cuts: • Maciza: lean pork from the leg, shoulder or lion. • Chamorro: the full leg joint. • Cuero or cuerito: Pork rind, not to be confused with chicharrón, which is prepared differently. • Buche: pork belly. • Nana: uterus. • Nenepil: tongue; and it can also refer to a buche-nana combo. • Chiquita, chicalada, achicalada or cochinada: assorted, golden-fried morsels rescued from the bottom of the cauldron. • Moño, trenza or tripa: tripe.

Traditional Mexican kitchen utensils and implements work for living, even in the most contemporary households. Today’s designers are performing a reinterpretation that hearkens to traditional form, yet in all-new materials.

By Ana Elena Mallet

The Mexican Table and Contemporary Design tion and re-purposing in pots, plates, platters and cooking utensils that are still a part of most Mexicans’ lives. Below we take a closer look at some of those designers, workshops and collectives who—in addition to anchoring design in roots and tradition—are seeking to make the discipline a social practice that creates solidarity and spurs economic development in artisanal communities throughout Mexico.

In recent years, a great many Mexican designers have started to look at artisanal practices, traditional materials, manual technique and collaborative projects to enrich their work and develop new languages that generate both identity and innovation. In Mexico, this seems to focus principally on design that includes a social component inserted into and concerned with the local, hand in hand with the search for sustainability. It has led to a reinterpreta-

Diario Shop Tequila cup in pewter Moisés Hernández graduated with a degree in industrial design from the Tecnológico de Monterrey in 2007. Three years later, conscious of the wide variety of popular industrial design produced in twentieth-century Mexico, he founded Diario Shop, a social design project that engages traditional workmanship, and forms, from different parts of Mexico to create utensils that play with the artisanal-industrial as well as the modern-ancient binomial. His first piece was a small cup made at one of the nation’s oldest pewter workshops.

Taller Lu’um Wire fruit bowl Taller Lu’um unveiled its first collection in April 2013: housewares that combine tradition with good design. Founded by Santiago Cosío and Alan Favero (who has served as creative director for five years) Taller Lu’um does not merely work closely with rural artisans but also gets involved marketing their work as part of a rigorous fair-trade agreement. More than just a design project, Taller Lu’um is a social development platform that is able to produce while respecting sustainable development parameters.

Lagos del Mundo

Karla Sotres

Lagos del Mundo promotes itself as a brand for basic objects that take inspiration from the rustic and that blend the functional with the decorative. Kitchen utensils are an important part of their line: clay vessels, jugs, table linens, cutting boards, etc., all evince an artisanal spirit. The first twelve pieces that Mexican designers Leonel López and Rigel Durán created wear a sober palette that reveals the materials’ original traits— veins and textures that endow solid character on the objects.

A gifted industrial designer and ceramicist, Karla focuses her research on creative methods. She approaches materials using gentle, natural processes to construct functional objects that are intimately related to everyday life and establish a subtle dialogue with context and resources. She believes in evolution of technique provided this is original and related to culture as well as territory and uses design to build platforms for sustainable, anthropological development.

Ceramic jug

Progreso stoneware

Colectivo 1050

ď&#x2DC;š Irol Irol pitcher in red clay

Oaxacaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colored clays, autochthonous enamels, ancient culture and hand manufacture are Colectivo 1050Âş hallmarks. Over the course of nearly seven years this group of designers and artisans has traveled the world presenting pieces that encapsulate tradition, the contemporary and collaborative effort. These are functional objects that adapt to the needs of the modern world, produced using sustainable, lead-free energies as they reinterpret and re-value local forms and materials.

Julio Martínez Barnetche

Cambodiano plate in wood and carved stone As an industrial designer trained at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Xochimilco campus), Julio Martínez Barnetche inclined to stone-carving and painting. In 1999 he founded Taller C. Tlasahuates, a teaching, design and production center for artworks and practical objects in stone and wood, located in the town of Zacualpan de Amilpas, Morelos. There he has developed a series of carved-stone objects that are heating systems—diminutive ovens in extravagant form that can be placed directly over flame or coals.

In Search of the Perfect Taco By Jeff Gordinier ÂŠ 2014 The New York Times Illustration by Holly Exley

René Redzepi ignited an international culinary revolution with Noma, his restaurant focused on wildly innovative Nordic cuisine. Now, believing that Mexican food is the next big thing, the Scandinavian wunderkind eats his way across the country to deconstruct its secrets.

‘‘Closing my eyes I open them inside your eyes.’’ — Octavio Paz, ‘‘Across’’

It happens on a Thursday morning in Oaxaca, and everyone at the table can see it. René Redzepi takes a bite of a breakfast dish that has been placed in front of him, and something passes across his face like a wave of light. Over the years there have been pilgrims who have traveled to Mexico to experience mind alteration with buttons of peyote, but for Redzepi, a man who is often referred to as the greatest chef in the world, transcendence comes in the form of enfrijoladas. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like the food of the gods. Enfrijoladas consist of little more than soft

handmade corn tortillas that have been blanketed with a sauce made out of pulverized black beans. It’s classic peasant food — simple and satisfying, with an aesthetic that suggests a big smudge on a plate. But what ferries Redzepi through the portals of illumination is a leaf. The trailblazing Oaxacan chef Alejandro Ruiz, who is beaming at the head of the table at his Casa Oaxaca Café with his wife and son, has spiked this black-bean sauce with a hidden depth charge of flavor: patches of foliage from a local avocado tree. The leaves electrify the sauce with an

unexpected thrum of black licorice. Suddenly it’s clear that simplicity is only what we see on the surface. With one bite, layers begin to reveal themselves. ‘‘You think you know what it’s going to taste like,’’ Redzepi says. ‘‘This to me is the best mouthful I’ve had in Mexico. I can’t believe the flavor of this leaf. Wow. I’m getting chills.’’ ‘‘I never take pictures of food, but I have to,’’ mutters Danny Bowien, an American chef who has come along for the ride. ‘‘I have to, man.’’ Redzepi has traveled to Oaxaca on something of a crusade. People who know about the chef’s cooking at Noma, in Copenhagen, might be surprised to learn that the man who is cast as the charismatic godfather of the New Nordic movement that has transformed the global restaurant landscape has a gastronomic infatuation that’s as far from the forests and fjords of Scandinavia as you can get. Redzepi is truly, madly, deeply in love with Mexico. I learned about this one cold afternoon when I met the 36-year-old Dane at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan. I figured we’d spend an hour or so murmuring in solemn Ingmar Bergmanish tones about the chilly wonders of the wind-blasted Scandinavian shore. Much to my surprise, Redzepi carried himself with a bright, self-effacing, surfer-like casualness. He seemed practically Californian. After a few minutes, he stopped talking about the New Nordic thing altogether. Instead, he drifted into a trance state about the flavors of Mexico and the great, game-changing chefs he had befriended all over the country. He mentioned Ruiz, Enrique Olvera, Roberto Solís. He got a faraway look in his eyes. He assured me that Mexico was the Next Place in the evolution of global gastronomy — a ‘‘sleeping giant’’ about to wake up with a roar. He liked to say that for decades — centuries, really — the indigenous spirit of Mexican cooking had been muffled, like the ruins of a Mayan temple buried beneath a Catholic church put up by Spanish

conquerors: ‘‘For many years in fine dining in Mexico, you had the cathedral on top of the pyramid. With chefs like Enrique Olvera, the pyramid starts to become visible again.’’ After the innovations of Ferran Adrià’s experimental cuisine in Spain and the New Nordic movement in Scandinavia, gastronomes have been amping up their interest in Mexico and Central and South America. In the United States, chefs like Roy Choi, April Bloomfield, Alex Stupak, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Wesley Avila and Bowien are finding ways to reinterpret the taco, and around the world there’s a burgeoning sense that the culinary spotlight might be shifting to Mexico. Cloudberries and lumpfish roe? What Redzepi was really craving was a taco. And so, for nearly a week, he planned to eat, talk and swoon his way through Mexico City, Oaxaca, Tulum and Mérida. The most influential chef on the planet was about to embark on the ultimate taco quest. These days Noma occupies the top spot on the most attention-getting international ranking of elite kitchens: the annual list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. It first landed there in 2010, propelled by Redzepi’s aptitude for wresting deliciousness and color from the austerity of the surrounding landscape. Noma’s cookbooks overflow with a bounty of nourishments that many of us didn’t even know we could eat: musk ox and milk skin, sea buckthorn and beach mustard, bulrushes and birch sorbet, ramson leaves and rowan shoots, Cladonia lichen and Icelandic dulse, pig’s blood and ants and hay. Somehow Redzepi brings out the stark beauty in his foraged, fermented, smoked and salvaged ingredients, and, perhaps even more impressively, he makes you want to pick them up with your fingers and place them on your tongue. He comes across as a man with a mission, and his overriding manifesto might boil down to this: Look more deeply. There is so much around us to relish. On the surface, the cuisine of Mexico might seem like the New Nordic movement’s chile-peppered

After a few minutes, he stopped talking about the New Nordic. Instead, he drifted into a trance state about the flavors of Mexico.

Redzepi had never seen such tacos before. He winced. Pineapple? he thought. Like on a bad pizza? Then he took a bite and his worldview trembled and reeled. ‘‘That first mouthful,’’ he says. ‘‘Soft. Tasty. Acidic. Spicy. It’s like when you have sushi and it’s great for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. My virginity was taken. In the best possible way.’’ From then on, Redzepi couldn’t stop himself. It was as though he was caught up in an intoxicating affair. Even as he polished and perfected the New Nordic cuisine that would make him famous, he started slipping away for pilgrimages to Mexico. Back in Denmark he had to uproot flavor by yanking at tufts of sea grass and burrowing his fingers into the dirt, but here, in the massive open-air markets of Oaxaca and Mexico City, the bounty overwhelmed him. Walking through these markets was like spinning through an aromatic fun house. Look more deeply, the country seemed to say to him. There is so much around us to relish. In street carts as well as in high-end restaurants, Mexicans were cooking with ant eggs and fried grasshoppers and seeds and sprigs and pods and powders and more varieties of chiles than he could count. Every village and roadside stall felt like a new world. Redzepi might try to make enfrijoladas outside of Mexico, but even he would probably fail. ‘‘You have to have an avocado leaf,’’ he says. ‘‘From that little tree. On a hill. Near Oaxaca.’’ ‘‘It’s like a whole new energy enters your body when you come out to these parts,’’ says Eric Werner, the chef and co-owner of the Tulum restaurant Hartwood. As he says this, that energy is being delivered in the form of thunderous jolts to the spinal column. We’re in a Jeep heading into the humid thickets of the Yucatán jungle, and the red-dirt road is turning into a thumping riot of dips and jags. ‘‘This is where it gets worse,’’ Werner says. ‘‘This is where it flips over,’’ Redzepi says. The vehicle keeps tossing back and forth like a

antithesis. You don’t find a lot of jalapeños in Denmark. What you do find there is the same thing you can scarf down in college towns around the United States: fat, bland burritos, watery salsa made with half-white tomatoes and cheap, cheese-gooey nachos that are about as far from the true flavor of Mexican food as Speedy Gonzales is from Emiliano Zapata. For most of his life, that’s what Redzepi assumed Mexican food was. ‘‘I’ll be honest with you,’’ he says. ‘‘Back then, my idea of Mexican food was what we have in Europe, which is like a bastardized version of Tex-Mex. Everything’s terrible. It’s grease, it’s fat, it’s big portions. That was my impression.’’ But in the summer of 2006, Solís, a cook who had interned in the kitchen at Noma, invited his former boss to the Yucatán Peninsula for a few days of cooking at Nectar, his pioneering restaurant in the sleepily mesmerizing city of Mérida. Redzepi soon found himself on a draining daisy chain of flights from Copenhagen to Mexico. ‘‘It was one of those stupid trips,’’ he remembers. ‘‘I was just so tired and bummed out.’’ He arrived in Mérida in a sour, foggy mood, and much to his annoyance, Solís immediately escorted him to Los Taquitos de PM, an open-air taco stand on a desolate thoroughfare. This is what Redzepi found: ‘‘Coca-Cola. Plastic chairs everywhere. Mexican music out of a loudspeaker.’’ Not exactly the French Laundry. Solís ordered three plates of tacos al pastor. In the dish, chunks of pork, stained scarlet after first being bathed in a chile sauce with achiote and other spices, are shaved off a spinning vertical skewer and placed on a bed of corn tortillas with strips of pineapple on top. It is said that Lebanese immigrants helped create the dish when they brought shawarma to Mexico, which means that tacos al pastor qualifies as a weird example of Mayan-Caribbean-Middle-Eastern fusion. But all you need to know is that when the gods find themselves hunting for drunk food after a bender on Mount Olympus, these tacos are what they want. They’re that satisfying.

Redzepi had never seen such tacos before. He winced. Pineapple? he thought. Like on a bad pizza?

He got a faraway look in his eyes. He assured me that Mexico was the Next Place in the evolution of global gastronomy —a ‘‘sleeping giant’’ about to wake up with a roar.

dinosaur’s plaything. Redzepi is holding a Ziploc bag with an aloe vera leaf jutting out of it. Yesterday, on the beach in Tulum, he fell asleep on a lounge chair and ended up with a stinging sunburn. Every now and then he squeezes the spiny leaf and applies a dab of fresh goop to his face. The aloe fills the Jeep with a gamey scent. Flanking the road are thousands of teeming anthills. Redzepi starts wondering whether the ants are edible. Werner, a 36-year-old with the tangly beard and piercingly bright eyes of an Old Testament prophet, is an American, but in 2009 he and his wife, Mya Henry, uprooted their lives in a gentrifying New York City and headed for the shaggy-drifty refuge of Tulum. A year later, they opened Hartwood, which has quickly gained a reputation for the elemental beauty and purity of its food. Many of Hartwood’s chief ingredients come straight from a milpa, a rural organic farm a couple of hours away from Tulum where the ‘‘crops’’ seem to sprout straight out of the surrounding wilderness. It’s that milpa that we’re bouncing into now. When we get there, Redzepi enters another state of rapture. He darts around the rocky, weedy expanse with Werner and Antonio May Balan, the 54-year-old father of 10 whose family has tended this land for many years. (Balan and his wife, who come here a couple days per week, sleep in hammocks that hang from the ceiling of a tin-roofed shed in the middle of the milpa; they speak to each other not in Spanish but

in a Mayan language.) Redzepi approaches this land and its produce with the same voracious curiosity that he might bring to a sylvan glade back in Scandinavia, except that for him, being here is akin to being on Mars. There are dwarfish lime trees. There are pineapples that seem to be popping up from the ground like ‘‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’’ pods. There are chiles the size of Tic Tacs that, when plucked from a branch and placed on your tongue, unleash an instant conflagration of capsaicin. ‘‘I burrow into the rare ingredients,’’ Werner says. ‘‘I try to find what’s most rare.’’ ‘‘And how excited does that make a chef?’’ Redzepi says. ‘‘It’s like a present. A new flavor.’’ After a tour of the milpa and lunch in the shed, Werner presents Redzepi with a gift: a machete. ‘‘Look, I’m walking out of the jungle with a bag of mangoes and a machete,’’ Redzepi says. As we steel ourselves for the ride back out, Redzepi spots a long, green, Seussian fruit dangling from the branch of a tree. ‘‘This is the weirdest fruit I’ve seen,’’ he says. ‘‘This is like something from a Tim Burton movie.’’ Werner says he doesn’t even know what to call it. Redzepi suggests ‘‘torpedo fruit.’’ (I later learn that it is bonete, which is papaya-ish and native to the region.) If Redzepi were to shimmy up the trunk of the tree and lop off the torpedo fruit with his newfound

Everyone moves in for a taste. The table falls silent. ‘‘Guys, let’s think of what’s happening here,’’ Redzepi finally says. ‘‘You’re taking a pancake. And you’re dipping it into a sauce. If you went to Per Se and you dipped a pancake into a sauce? There’s something going on here.’’

blade, none of us would be the least bit surprised. His hunger for those new flavors borders on the pathological. On the way back to Tulum, we drop into a market and take a whiff of a sphere of flora that appears to be some kind of evolutionary prank: On the outside it looks like a pumpkin, but when you smell it, you realize it’s as sweet as a cantaloupe. (Werner refers to it as a melón de milpa.) When top chefs get hold of these ingredients, the results can be consciousness-shifting. In Mexico City we sit for a tasting-menu feast at Pujol, the Enrique Olvera atelier that some gastronomes consider the best restaurant in the country. (Olvera has been gearing up to open Cosme, his first restaurant in New York.) At Pujol, what tips Redzepi over into euphoria is mole. A lot of Americans assume that mole is a sauce made with chocolate, but there are scores of moles around Mexico, many conjured up with marathon lists of ingredients. Olvera does something unusual with his mole: He keeps feeding it. For months. ‘‘When I tried it the first time, I had goose bumps,’’ Redzepi says as Olvera sidles up to our table. ‘‘Enrique, how old is the mole?’’ ‘‘Three hundred and seventy days,’’ Olvera says. Like a sourdough starter, Olvera’s mole has been steeping in its own funky lagoon of flavor for, yes, over a year. But Olvera does another bold thing with his mole: He serves it by itself, on a plate, spooned into a mahogany circle. On top of that year-old mole is a smaller circle of rust-colored mole. That’s it. There’s no chicken or fish underneath the two moles. All you get is sauce on

a plate, accompanied by a basket of warm tortillas for sopping it all up. When the mole arrives, Redzepi gazes at it, rapt, and compares it to the Eye of Sauron. ‘‘There isn’t a Danish designer from the ’50s who wouldn’t have an orgasm looking at this,’’ he says. Everyone moves in for a taste. The table falls silent. ‘‘Guys, let’s think of what’s happening here,’’ Redzepi finally says. ‘‘You’re taking a pancake. And you’re dipping it into a sauce. If you went to Per Se and you dipped a pancake into a sauce? There’s something going on here.’’ Two days later, in Oaxaca, with Ruiz as his guide and Bowien as his sidekick, Redzepi steps into a market that seems to stretch on for miles. He plows through it like Bugs Bunny on a carrot bender, nibbling into tacos and plums and tamarinds and densely fatty corozo nuts, spitting out seeds and shells as he walks. He picks up a sheaf of green leaves and gasps. ‘‘Look at the quality of this epazote,’’ he says. We meet two women standing next to a vat of liquid. ‘‘You have to try this,’’ Ruiz says. The drink is tejate, a pre-Columbian elixir that is made with corn, fermented cacao, the pit of the mamey fruit and a tree-borne flower known as rosita de cacao. Its gray-brown hue calls to mind the bubbling runoff from a storm drain. Crowning the drink is a beige froth that hovers ethereally, like the meringue in île flottante, the French dessert. We buy a few scoopfuls of it and take deep slurps. It tastes like primeval Yoo-hoo. ‘‘Wow, it’s amazing,’’ Bowien says. ‘‘The stuff on the top is like cream.’’

A hot orange light radiates from the wood-fired oven. ‘‘Look at that heat in that kitchen — heat and smoke,’’ Redzepi says, admiringly. The place has a kind of wild, primitive elegance.

Redzepi and Bowien make a fascinating duo. Redzepi is the New Nordic pioneer who is not entirely Nordic: His father, of Albanian heritage, moved to Denmark after growing up in Macedonia. Bowien has specialized in giving a souped-up vroom to Sichuan and Mexican cuisine, but he was raised on neither: He was born in South Korea but adopted by a white couple in Oklahoma. Both chefs carry themselves with the confidence and wariness of the perpetual outsider. And both of them had a lousy go of it last year: Bowien saw his molten-hot Manhattan flagship, Mission Chinese Food, shut down because of violations of the city’s health code, while 63 diners at Noma came down with norovirus just a couple of months before the restaurant temporarily lost its top spot on the World’s 50 Best list. Because of all this, perhaps, they’ve bonded — and Redzepi appears to have taken Bowien under his wing. As we amble and devour our way through Oaxaca, Bowien starts to fret about whether he’s going to be able to come along for the Tulum leg of the journey. His wife and their new baby son are stuck back in Mexico City. He feels guilty being apart from them. Redzepi, whose own wife is due to give birth to his third child in a matter of weeks, shifts into life-coach mode. ‘‘Tell your wife,’’ he says. ‘‘You’re coming to Tulum.’’ ‘‘I could go, yeah,’’ Bowien says. ‘‘That would be insane, though.’’ ‘‘Chef, this is your future here we’re talking about,’’ Redzepi argues. ‘‘You have a Mexican restaurant.’’ Although Bowien gained fame with his psychotropic spin on Sichuan cuisine in San Francisco and

New York, his latest enterprise is a Lower East Side taco-and-burrito shop called Mission Cantina. ‘‘See if you can get there by three,’’ Redzepi goes on. ‘‘You’ll have a swim in the Caribbean sea. That’s better than 15,000 Xanax.’’ ‘‘I just had a baby,’’ Bowien protests. But resistance is futile; he’s already faltering. Bowien materializes in Tulum the next afternoon. He looks simultaneously fired up and dazed. As the sun goes down, he joins us as we wander up the road to get a taste of Werner’s cooking. Hartwood, at night, glows in the coastal blackness. Torches flicker. A hot orange light radiates from the wood-fired oven. ‘‘Look at that heat in that kitchen — heat and smoke,’’ Redzepi says, admiringly. The place has a kind of wild, primitive elegance: If Keith McNally had existed back in the Stone Age, this is the restaurant he would have dreamed up. Werner and his team take local proteins — octopus, grouper collar, pork ribs slathered in jungle honey — and roast them to a point of breathtaking tenderness and char. With each platter that comes to the table, Redzepi and Bowien pretty much wilt with pleasure. Everyone is full, everyone is exhausted. But Redzepi has one last command. ‘‘One thing we have to do?’’ he says. ‘‘We have to go to the beach. We have to go look at the stars now.’’ Moments later we’re huddled silently on the shore, scanning the Mexican night sky and scouting out the rim of the waves for sea turtles. Naturally, it is Redzepi who sees the racing flare that the rest of us manage to miss. ‘‘Did you see that shooting star?’’ he asks. ‘‘It was like the brightest I’ve ever seen.’’

Photo by Nuria Lagarde

Chef Elena Reygadas

Elena Reygadas—who started Mexico City’s famed Rosetta and won the Veuve Clicquot 2014 award as Latin America’s Best Woman Chef—shares her outlook on cooking and cuisine.

The Pleasures of Authenticity By Elena Reygadas

food that’s comforting and frank, alongside permanent search and experimentation. With me, artisanal work—and by that I mean specifically using your hands—is the priority. I don’t reject technology, it just doesn’t interest me much. Could I use it? Sure, but I prefer other methods that make me feel better while I work. It’s not a judgment;

I’ve been asked several times what kind of cooking I do. After thinking about it, I respond that I do “personal cooking”—I think my proposal is the result of thousands of influences as well as an exploration and learning process. If I had to enumerate the main elements that come into play, I’d say I’m after artisanal cooking,

“I’m after artisanal cooking, food that’s comforting, frank, alongside permanent search and experimentation.”

I’m just going with what interests me more. Besides which, artisanal work helps give Rosetta a personal touch: we make the pasta in the restaurant, and the ice cream, too; the jams, the granola, the cookies and the charcuterie. Everything has our signature and our clients perceive they’re trying something that’s entirely handmade—that has a flavor like nothing else. I like food that is comforting, where there are clearly people behind what you’re eating, yet full of uncommon flavors. I’m attracted to food that isn’t too heavy and I like braising as a technique. I prefer frank, clear flavor—and don’t like saturating dishes. I’m in favor of cooking that uses spices; that’s comforting but not greasy or heavy, not necessarily sweet. Something that appeals more to curiosity, to daring; that’s not looking to please based on a commonplace or something that’s easily predictable.

The Search As Identity

When I’m asked what’s “Mexican” in what I cook, the answer is quite simple: context and ingredients. I do food that wants to work with seasonality. So the “Mexican” part resides in the products I use.

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s “politically incorrect” to use things that are not Mexican. I’m dubious of fundamentalisms and convinced that Mexican food isn’t just one cuisine, but many, and it’s alive and it changes. One great example is what’s happening in Baja California: open, unprejudiced cooking, and maybe it’s because of this that Baja cuisine is also some of the most interesting and promising these days. When I was a girl and we’d go out to eat, my father always pushed us to go past our limits; to not hang back with flavors we already knew, but to try other things, to explore. That’s what I grew up with, and it’s one of the elements I’ve taken on and that defines my cooking. For me it was a natural. I’m interested, for instance, in looking for new, unknown flavors, or recuperating flavors from the past that we’ve lost. Exploring the possibilities that lie within the ingredients. Endowing them with something that’s not so conventional. Like using fruit not just for dessert, but putting it into the salty realm (or the opposite: putting vegetables into desserts). Looking for creativity in breaking things down, at the limits. Setting up challenges for yourself opens up a possibility for discovery.

Photo by Ana Hop

Agave worms, nasturtium, avocado and chicatana ants.

Photo by Ana Hop

Grilled squid with arugula, cuaresme単o chile and mizuna greens.

“When I cook, I think about pleasing and provoking emotions.”

One of those challenges as a chef, for example, is using entrails—they’re delicious. Using them in a restaurant is ideal because diners don’t eat there every day, so they authorize themselves to give them a try. Viscera are a creative challenge for me, a chance to see ingredients differently, to provoke in the widest—and, of course, most positive—sense of the word: you provoke diners, challenging them to break with prejudices, and then you provoke pleasure. So in that sense, using entrails is also a search for qualities in ingredients or recipes that supposedly are not there. Managing to make something apparently unpleasant into something appetizing is transformation. It means an interesting change. Openness, yet again. Herbs are critical to the flavors that define a dish. And I’m not just talking about aromatics, but others, like nettle, which is edible and has a very particular taste. Or medicinal herbs and herbs that exert a positive digestive effect and bring on a highly pleasurable experience. It’s important to use plants that grow wild. And using them serves another purpose: they mark out the seasons of the year, just like rainy-season mushrooms.

Working with local ingredients creates enormous benefits. First of all there’s freshness, but also that the ingredient comes from its place of origin, where we can imagine that in many cases it grows into its optimal iteration. Consuming local offers benefits to the community and guarantees that products will go on being produced. Put another way, spurring local-product consumption guarantees their conservation, and conserving local products guarantees diversity. It’s conservation that maintains a wealth of diversity and allows you to create new flavors because you have access to the widest possible universe of ingredients.

The Pleasure of Provocation

When I cook, I think about pleasing—and provoking emotions. My goal is to offer an individual proposal based on my tastes and preferences, whether or not these line up with tradition or any edgy trend. I try to cook with what I like. I do what I enjoy doing and I believe that sooner or later, that natural evolution that we should all experience with what we do ends up creating a language of its own.

Two stones for grinding food is one of the most basic of prehistoric tools. They grind anything efficiently—whether it’s dry seeds and grains or fruits and vegetables for pastes and salsas.

Getting Started with Your Molcajete By Alejandro Escalante Photos by Fernando Figueroa

So you finally bought a molcajete mortar? Congratulations, you’re going to love it. You’ve gotten it home and it’s in your hands. You could leave it on a shelf as a decoration, because it really is adorable. Did you buy the one with the little piglet face? There are some that have carved patterns at the rim, or a thousand other touches: they’re tall, big or small, but maybe their most distinct characteristic are their three legs that kept them in constant balance—a true marvel of pre-Hispanic engineering. Consider the fact that this stone item might have been recently manufactured, yet the reality is it’s a tool that was first designed thousands of years ago. The principle of using two stones to grind foods, one stone as a mortar, or base, and another, smaller stone that works as a “hand,” or pestle, is one of the fundaments of every prehistoric tool; the base stone is like a basin or receptacle that lets you grind anything efficiently, whether it’s dry—like

seeds or grains (as a means of making meal and flour)—or fruits and vegetables that go into pastes or salsas. Every ancient culture around the world created some type of tool to perform this task and over the course of the centuries, each global region developed archetypes in materials and forms that related to their particular uses and environments. There are two well-defined types in Mexico: The metate, a raised stone platform operated with a rounded, horizontal pestle called a metlapil. Its principal function is to grind nixtamal cornmeal to make tortilla dough, but it’s also used to grind dry chiles and seeds for mole, pipián and adobo sauces. The bowl-like molcajete is used with a vertical pestle called a tejolote, temolote, temanchín or temachín to make Mexican cooking’s most traditional signature salsas. Both because of their form as well as their function, molcajetes are part of the wide-ranging family of

Rice and saltâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the ingredients for seasoning your molcajete.

A molcajete holding the tomato-based salsa called a â&#x20AC;&#x153;molcajeteada.â&#x20AC;?

mortars that exist around the world. They are generally fashioned of stone, often marble, though they can be found in the widest variety of other materials and even in metals such as bronze, copper or silver. In Mexico, these instruments are fashioned from basalt, a relatively porous volcanic stone that lets users grind any ingredient perfectly. They’re made in places like San Salvador El Seco, Puebla; San Andrés Cuexcontitlán, Mexico State; and San Lucas Evangelista, Jalisco—though you can find them in other Mexican regions as well. There are also ceramic, abrasive-bottomed molcajetes in Mexico. Their use peaked in the pre-Classical Era (around 1200 BC), and though they continue to be produced, these days their use tends to be decorative. Whether it’s made of stone, wood, ceramics or metal, mortars have maintained the same form and function throughout the centuries and are used to this day in kitchens, pharmacies, chemistry labs and even for magic tricks. It’s true that all these historical instruments have become less important with the advent of electrical appliances. You obviously save time using a blender. But if that’s the case, maybe it’s even easier to just pop open a can. Time gained, flavor lost.

• Upward and downward spiral movements. • Straight strokes, from rim to rim, like a clock: from 12 to 6, 6 to 1, 1 to 7, 7 to 2, etc. Soon enough you’ll discover that patience is essential to mastering the tool. Once you feel like you’re getting tired, add two tablespoons of oil, one chopped green chile, a garlic clove, and try your hand grinding it all together. Stay focused and repeat your movements. In the end, you should spend ten minutes grinding and beating. After you’ve done all that, discard the molcajete contents and wash the stones thoroughly with soap and water. Be sure to rinse them completely. Now your molcajete is ready to use for making any kind of salsa.

Salsa Ingredients

Chiles and tomatoes form the base of Mexican salsas. Both ingredients are native to the Americas and before Europeans reached the hemisphere they were utterly unknown in the rest of the world. But there are other products that go into salsas that are not from the Americas, like onion, garlic, cilantro, and even lime and other spices brought by Europeans immediately following the Spanish Conquest of Ancient Mexico. It’s fascinating to imagine how on journeys between the continents, ingredients were adapted to each new land so that all the world’s cuisines were ultimately expanded and their modern-day characteristics rounded out. There are three major salsa categories: those in which all ingredients are raw; those that use ingredients that have been cooked or roasted on a comal griddle; and finally, those that blend cooked and raw components. The recipe variety is all but infinite! When you use your molcajete, fresh, attractive and flavorful ingredients are a must. Proper chefs stay on top of of all the details, the quality of their raw materials, how much seasoning is needed and what goes into the sazón—the final, even emotional, flavor. It means the end product is one of a kind, freshly prepared and at the same time suffused with traditions that stretch back millennia. Ultimately, you didn’t just invest your time, dedication or even a bit of dreaming—you also added love, and that, perhaps, is the most important ingredient of all.

How to Season Your Molcajete

Before you first use a molcajete, it is indispensible to “season” it. Here is the traditional way it’s done: Pour three soupspoons’ worth of any variety of rice—raw and dry, directly from the package—into the basin, alongside a spoonful of fine or coarsely ground salt. Use the tejolote pestle to grind gently. The idea is to move the material in a circular fashion and gradually increase pressure so that the toughest nubs on the stones begin to wear down. It’s not about turning the rice into flour. Everything will turn gray after a few minutes, precisely due to the pulverized stone that has come loose. Keep up the grinding for at least five minutes. This is good practice, since the rice grains in the basin will act almost the same way as a liquid. The goal is that eventually, not a single grain will fall from the molcajete. At the same time, practice these movements: • Circular, toward the top, then in the middle, finally at the bottom.

From the Taco to the Sandwich, with a Stop-in at the Torta Salvador Novo

Excerpted from Novo’s Las locas, el sexo, los burdeles (y otros ensayos), Mexico City, Organización Editorial Novaro, 1972, pp. 60-65.

Straight off let’s look into the etymology of the word taco. The closest noun in Molina’s lexicon is tácol, shoulder. Additionally, you have tacolchimal, a dorsal bone (since we know that chimalli is shield); tacolnacayo, “fleshy part of the arm” (here there’s a clue: nácatl means flesh); tacolpan, “atop the shoulders” (pan, atop); and tacoltzonyo, “the hairs on top of the shoulders” (tzontli, hair). But there’s also tacayo, “bladder tube.” Is that the penis? Ayotl means water. The radical of this compound would read: tácol, “the shoulder of the water,” given that the beautifully metaphorical name of the male member is tototl tepulli, “dick-bird;” there is also tepulacayotl to designate that appendage, with an allusion (ayotl) to the water that it expels; and for the male seed or humor we say tepulayotl, “juice of man.” Tecaliui, “to be flayed, or scraped, by a self-inflicted injury.” Now we’re getting close. Tacapiliui, “to bear signs of rope binding on the arms or other part of the body.” Tacaxpolhuia, “to level or fill someone’s tree pit or something like that with earth;” tacaxpoloa, “fill the hole at the foot of a tree with earth.” Tacaxxotia, “dig up trees.” Combine these elements and we have—complete with the signs of being bound—a kind of penis (tacayo) that has been filled or swollen (polhuia, poloa), and not necessarily with earth. Behold the taco, in its most symbolic and Mexican etymology. The dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, naturally, does not include the above among its seventeen entries under taco. The tenth reads “snack or very light repast taken outside mealtimes,” but derives all the rest from the verb atacar and speaks of a “piece of wood, metal, or other material inserted into an empty space.” We know well that—unlike cannellonis—our taco comes not from the fact that

we stick its final contents into a non-existent void. What the tenth academic definition leads us to is echar taco—“grab a taco”—as the common expression in Mexican Spanish would have it. Now that our superficial exploration of the taco’s clearly pre-Hispanic etymologic origins has been made, let us take up its evolution since before the advent of wheat up to the time of sliced bread. The clever Aztec custom of simply hoisting the morsel one was going to eat from the bowl to the mouth after wrapping it in the also edible tortilla-spoon— that for Occidentals would be the farinaceous accompaniment they encounter in the bread scarfed separately—yes, that clever custom is the glorious antecedent to the combination of music and company simultaneously enjoyed, to be found in the taco, and that would be rearranged into the angelic torta, as well as degenerate into the sandwich’s geometric and insipid perfection. Obviously tortillas can be eaten in independent pieces, like bread; and there are those that roll them up and “smoke” them like a cigar as they slurp their soup. But in pieces, tortillas enable a maneuver upon which etiquette frowns with regard to bread: cleaning your plate, or the bowl, “sopping” with the bread. Much to their benefit, etiquette does not inhibit the Indians. Down on Espíritu Santo Alley, now called Motolinía, there was an establishment, much favored by students at the beginning of the century: Armando’s Tortería. Its young habitué, famed city chronicler Don Artemio del Valle-Arizpe, has entrancingly, evocatively and nostalgically described the creations at this precursor to the many torta stands that subsequently opened throughout the city to meet growing demand from a growing population of passers-by who stop to throw back a couple of tortas, stuffed not only of turkey (its

telera bread moistened by the juices and perhaps a bit of vinegar-pickled chile, which is quite enough) but also of pork loin with pepper slices, head cheese, fried milanesa steak, eggs, chorizo, cod; or just ham and cheese, or mixed sincronizada-style. But let us listen in as Don Artemio immortalizes Armando’s surgical-gastronomical-torta-mongering achievements: “It was an enormous pleasure to eat those magnificent tortas, but the gratification began by seeing Armando prepare them with such deft speed. He sliced a baguette—we call them teleras—lengthwise, then removed the pith of the bread from both halves; he clenched the end of one of the slices and rapidly scraped his bent fingers its length; the bread’s crumby guts would pass over the bent phalanges until falling away completely at the other end. The same operation was performed on the second slice. Then on the base half, a bed of finely chopped fresh lettuce was laid out, quickly followed by slices of pork loin, or head cheese, or as the patron requests, with ham or sardines, milanesa or chicken; with these last alone he would make a fine hash using the sharpest of curved-blade knives, with which one imagined he might also shave off a finger or two, and with whose tips, in turn, he pushed the meat slices beneath the blade as the other hand moved the knife to shred the viand at an incredible rate. “With that very knife he carved slices from an avocado, each of the same thickness. To do so he coddled the fruit in the palm of his hand and decisively stabbed point-first; upon reaching the other side he would tilt the knife such that the unctuous slice came to rest on the width of the blade, and then made an opposite movement across the bread, spreading the avocado with unrivaled mastery, yet without smothering the chicken, milanesa or whatever, covering the same in slices of queso fresco through which the same knife had coursed with a movement so rapid as not to be believed, all but impossible to follow. He would then sprinkle bits of longaniza sausage, or chorizo, and distribute between them cuts of chipotle chile; he would wet the top slice in the spicy broth in which the peppers had been pickled and in one fell swoop he left it coated in refried bean, placing it atop that stupendous, encyclopedic promontory, yet not before an economical sprinkling of salt. As a coda to the handiwork there was a thrust to amalgamate the various components and with a wide smile he presented the

torta to the customer, who began by eating what had spilled out as a result of the torta-maker’s efficient, compacting hand.” Tortas—patient tortoises resigned to death by munching—emerge wrapped in crude paper napkins to assuage an 11 o’clock craving on the part of secretaries who only had time to bolt an orange juice before running for the bus. At least for a time, they fill the baskets of orotund torta-vendors who like temptation itself amble by factories at the lunch hour; they form part of provisions for a Sunday field day in Chapultepec Park. Uninterrupted demand gives rise to small, perennially refreshed consumer clusters at corners like 16 de Septiembre and San Juan de Letrán, outisde Los Tranvías cantina; on the first block of Donceles, or at the corner of Tacuba and Xicoténcatl. Nevertheless, there are torterías where regulars, seated in moderate comfort, can sample a chicken stew served in a chipped bowl, with cilantro and chopped serrano chile, before having a turkey torta or two. The most renowned of the bunch proclaims its royal pedigree: El Rey del Pavo, on Palma Street, a lane of workingmen’s lunch counters for centuries until a lamentable urban and commercial progress began to push them out, a sad state of affairs that now threatens the Turkey King as well. For a time, night-crawler types were given to nibbling pepitos. Their difference from the torta resides in that a pepito rests not on long telera slices but instead on a bolillo roll, which can only accommodate a reasonably sized filet. Sandwiches, a US-Mexico diplomatic incident of middling gastronomy, inhabit the realm of American-style cafés. Even toasted, when ordered that way, they cannot manage to confer the telera’s crust-crunch. Untoasted, the mushy sponge upon which everything is installed can withstand no dressing beyond melted butter or a mustard smear. They serve them in vain, at the center of a pallid plate, guarded by a tomato slice and a leaf of romaine lettuce atop which bits of potato, carrot and peas, agglutinated in pseudo-mayonnaise, can be made out. They add extra stories, up to the club sandwich’s three, in vain; or skewer each of the isosceles triangles into which they are cleft for easy handling by means of hard olive-topped toothpicks. Tortas just laugh with their twin maws, jaws flapping, sticking their tongues out at sandwiches. And then there are hot dogs. But I shall not sully these pages beyond noting their inconceivable existence.

Every Tortillaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Secret 44

A lot of people out there think that everything starts with the cornmeal. They’re wrong. The plasticity of the dough used to make tortillas can only be obtained if the kernels are subjected to what is known as nixtamalization. It’s a process that explains the tortilla’s ultimate nutritional benefits.

By Cua Staff Writers Illustration by Livi Gosling Exhibited at Mestizo restaurant, London, May 2013.

There are no precise timeframes. So how do we assign a date to something that happened millennia ago? Near the town of Tehuacán, in the state of Puebla, there’s a spot called Cuevas de Maíz where some small corncobs were discovered and most likely carbon-date back 7000 years. The area is also home to the vestiges of the most ancient hydraulic engineering work in the Western Hemisphere, the so-called Purrón Dam. Both elements evince characteristics of a prehistoric agricultural landscape that’s not so different from what we can see there today: the ancient mixed-crop farming system known as the milpa. It is from that time that we also get chiles, squash, avocados, amaranth, chia and beans, but it’s critical to understand that by 6000 BC all those vegetables had already been through an extremely long domestication process that subjected them to an infinite succession of selections and cross-breeding to produce optimal fruit and arrive at the foods we know today. Truth to tell, this sort of “genetic modification” has been widespread for centuries. Millennia ago, however, corn was just one vegetable more, consumed fresh off the ear, right after harvest, cooked or roasted. We can connect with those

ancestors via a number of present-day dishes, like corn on the cob with piquín chile or sopa de flor with squash and tender kernels. Other advantages to corn would be discovered. One of the best is that dried kernels can be stored for extended time periods. They render a great many derivative foods, like cornmeal and polenta (made from broken kernels) and they can also be easily rehydrated when cooked in water. That said, corn alone is deficient in nutrients. It meant prehistoric farmers had to round out their diets with animals, and by practicing other sundry tricks to avoid death by pellagra and other malnutrition-related ills. It bears repeating: you can’t make dough with fresh or dried corn—first you’ve got to nixtamalize the kernels. Making nixtamal is a process that starts the day before, by cooking the kernels in a solution of water with lime or ash, over a low flame, and then letting the mix cool all night. The cooking and the soaking cause a number of chemical changes within the kernels, allowing proteins to be more easily assimilated, as well as enhancing the amino acidic contribution

and providing sufficient calcium, iron and zinc to those who consume the corn, as well as other virtues related to favor, aroma and texture. Kernels cooked in this fashion can be easily ground on a metate and in that way the nixtamalized dough—a cohesive and plastic substance with which tortillas and many other products can be made—is produced. This was an extremely important discovery since through this innovative technological process corn went from being just another food to the base food of nutrition itself; from being a mere ingredient to the center around which all other ingredients revolved. You can survive on a bean taco and a few bites of green chile. The most ancient evidence we have of the nixtamalization process comes from a pot and a colander

found in the south of Guatemala and containing corn and ash residue that has been dated to around 1500 BC. It is at the dawn of the Mesoamerican pre-Classic era that the same multi-ethnic cultural discovery occurs and immediately spreads across a territory that stretches from the Salvadoran coast, through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and all the way up to the Oaxaca plateau and the area around Tehuacán. These are regions closely linked to present-day Maya, Zoque and Mixe peoples. The first clay comales—i.e., griddles—date from the same time. It is through the obvious relationship between the instrument and its function that we understand the enormous diffusion this new technology underwent in Mesoamerica. The San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán archaeological zone in Veracruz was the most important urban center

in the distant era of the sixteenth century BC. Its inhabitants created the Olmec culture’s famed colossal head sculptures and it was the first culture to deify corn. Many thousands of years passed before corn’s domestication in 6000 BC. After several thousand more, in 1500 BC, the new product known as nixtamal emerged in Mesoamerica. Is it an ingredient or a technology? Why didn’t nixtamal ever reach South America? This wondrous food leaves many such questions unanswered to date. What we do know is that to the degree that knowledge and use of nixtamalization spread, societies reached new levels of wellbeing and development—this was the case with the Toltecs, the Chichimecas and the Aztecs. By the early years of the sixteenth century AD, the cornfields of the central Mexican plateau astounded newly arrived Spanish conquistadors.

It was not until the twentieth century that nixtamal came to see a change in its processing. First, mechanical mills were devised to replace the millennia-old metate; later, tortilla-making machines were invented. Even a system for making nixtamalized cornmeal was created. In less than fifty years the changes have been legion. These days, nixtamal in fresh corn dough is an ingredient on the cutting edge, yet despite—or perhaps because—of this, it bears irreversible signs of becoming a global phenomenon. It might seem exaggerated to think that when you eat a corn tortilla with a dash of salt you’re tapping into a culture whose practices have endured, uninterrupted, for thousands of years…but that is truly the case.

The Mexican Yuletide would not be complete without a pi単ata. Pi単atas originated in China; were brought to Italy and Spain: then reached colonial Mexico. Invested with religious significance, they were previously made of pottery lined with colorful paper, to which seven cones (representing the Seven Deadly Sins) were attached. Then they were to be struck with a club (as an avoidance of temptation) until they shattered and disgorged their sugary contents (a reward for being good). Today their use is more playful. While shapes may vary, pi単atas enliven any celebration.

Photo by Fernando Figueroa

The Pi単ata