I recently spent part
of a week cooking Mexican takeaway dinners for some of our neighbours to raise
funds for the charity where our eldest son Chris works in Mexico. One of the
glories of Mexico is its cuisine, which varies considerably by region. Cooking
for my neighbours made me think about the ingredients I was using and the
origins of the dishes I served. I recall a friend who is an historian of Indian
art remarking that Indian food originally relied on spices for its flavours.
The chiles that make some Indian dishes so hot cannot have been used in India
until after the contact between Spain and Mexico in 1519, since only ancient
Mexicans had the pleasure of eating chiles until that date. In fact, the
relevant date was probably 1565 when a friar by the name of Andrés de Urdaneta
succeeded in finding a route from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila in the
Philippines and back. Andrés’ feat of navigation launched the annual Manila
Galleon, through which Mexico traded with all of Asia for 250 years. Foods
travelled from Mexico to Asia and from Asia to Mexico and shaped the cuisines
of both continents.
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| Acapulco Bay in 1852 |
When I was a graduate
student in Mexico I spent a few weeks in Chilpancingo, independent Mexico’s
first capital, but by the 1970s an unprepossessing provincial town (it had two
cinemas, one “with rats”, the other “without rats”) and seat of the government
of the state of Guerrero. I was researching the career of a family of
revolutionaries from Guerrero by the name of Figueroa. One of their descendants
was the state governor and I had been trying to track him down. I followed him
to Acapulco, from where the galleons used to leave for Manila, but he was
fishing with the Shah of Iran and seemed not to have time to see me. So, I left
the luxurious resort city for Chilpancingo to consult the state archives and
try again to meet governor Rubén Figueroa Figueroa.
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| Acapulco bay. In the foreground is the Fort of San Diego, built to deter pirates |
My first move was to
visit the rector of the Autonomous University of Guerrero (UAG), who kindly
allowed me to use the student canteen and assigned a senior member of staff to
make sure I was looked after. This gentleman invited me to the dining event of
the week in Chilpancingo. This was a restaurant that opened only for Thursday
lunch and served only one dish, pozole verde. Pozole is a stew of
pork and hominy seasoned with various ingredients according to its colour
(white, red, green), and served with accompaniments such as oregano, onion and
radishes. I could get the white version any day at a pozolería (pozole
restaurant) near my hotel, but the green pozole was special and anybody
who was anybody in Chilpancingo set aside Thursday lunch for it. As we got
started with a few glasses of mezcal (a spirit made from agave cactus)
we noticed the general in charge of the military district, Enrique Cervantes
Aguirre, at the next table. His troops had been busy lately, rescuing governor
Figueroa from the guerrilla band led by a local schoolteacher, Lucio Cabañas.
They had also, recent scholarship has discovered, murdered and tortured their
way through the mountains in the search for the governor. Let’s return to that
black page of Guerrero’s history later.
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| Pozole verde |
The ingredient that
makes pozole green is what Mexicans call tomates and Americans
tomatillos. In fact, these are not tomatoes at all, but they are delicious and
one of many foods that have come to us from ancient Mexico and its cuisine. The
tomato proper also comes from Mexico, where in the Náhuatl tongue it was called
a xitomatl, which the Spanish could not pronounce, so they called it a jitomate
in Mexico and a tomate in Spain. Another all-Mexican food whose name in
English comes from the Náhuatl is chocolate (xocolatl). Before 1519,
cacao beans had two functions. One variety was used as coinage (there was no
metal or paper currency), but above all cacao was used to make a luxury drink
that could be afforded only by the aristocracy, who drank it out of colourfully
painted gourd cups. The āhuacatl (Spanish aguacate, our avocado)
also originated in Mexico. The staples of the diet of ancient Mexicans were
maize, first cultivated by a lake in the northern part of the state of Guerrero
around 7,000 B.C., and beans.
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| A modern painted gourd cup similar to those used by ancient Mexican lords |
Other ingredients
arrived in Mexico with the Spanish. The Mexicans had no large domesticated
animals (the turkey was the largest) but the Spanish introduced cows, sheep, pigs
and goats. A decade or two after the defeat of the Aztecs in 1521 great herds
of these animals wandered over Mexico’s plains and valleys, no doubt to the
initial amazement of the locals. So, beef and pork arrived, and chickens (for a
time an expensive luxury). Sugar cane was introduced very quickly (before 1521
honey was the main sweetener). The Spaniards also imported wheat, orange and
lemon trees, and brought wine and vinegar from Europe in barrels. The wine came
in handy if water supplies ran out during the sea voyage.
Foodstuffs also
arrived from Asia by a long and dangerous sea voyage of several months. Rice
was soon growing on the Pacific coast, along with coconut palms. The mango,
found in profusion in Mexican markets, came from the Philippines as did
cinnamon and other spices. And in return Mexico sent to Manila tropical fruits
and vegetables that are now favourites in the Philippines.
As in Spain, lunch is
the big meal of the day. It usually starts with two “soups”: a sopa aguada,
literally “watery soup”, and a sopa seca, or “dry soup”. Last year the
daughter of my former landlady in Mexico City made us a splendid tortilla soup,
made with stale maize tortillas, tomato, chile, chicken stock and epazote,
a native Mexican herb also known as Jesuit’s tea. A dry soup might be a small
plate of tomato-flavoured rice or pasta. Next might be a quickly fried or
grilled steak with a sauce of tomato, onion and chile, turkey in a sauce of mole
poblano (featuring sesame, chile and chocolate) or a green pepper stuffed
with cheese. Lunch will finish with some fruit or a small sweet dish. Our
favourite last year in Michoacán was jericalla, an egg custard flavoured
with cinnamon.
A short time after my
lunch of pozole verde I succeeded in meeting governor Figueroa. His
cousin Arturo introduced me to him at a meet-the-public session. I was taken to
the front of the queue, where I found the governor flanked by two elderly men,
all three wearing guayaberas, an elegant loose-fitting shirt that
originated in the Philippines. Governor Figueroa introduced his two companions
as Guerrero’s greatest living poets. Given the governor’s reputation as a
gun-toting politician, it struck me as curious that he felt the need to be
accompanied by literary men. We discussed his rescue from the band of Lucio Cabañas
and he invited me to attend a seminar of the treasurers of the state’s largest
municipalities the next day. I recall the governor saying that some
municipalities were so poor that they could barely afford pencils and paper for
the mayor’s office. The truth of this statement was vividly illustrated when I
visited the mayor (presidente municipal) of Buenavista de Cuéllar. I
found the presidente sitting alone in the modest town hall in an office
with a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. His desk was bare. He seemed to
have nothing to do except wait for an occasional visitor. The fact that his
(only?) visitor that day was a young student from Cambridge did not seem to
surprise him.
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| Governor Figueroa with two of his captors |
I was reminded
recently of my lunch of pozole verde, and of governor Figueroa when
reading a PhD thesis about Lucio Cabañas’ group. Figueroa had tried to persuade
the guerrillas to abandon their struggle in return for cash and a guarantee of
political office. Instead, the band held him for ransom. Figueroa escaped twice
only to be recaptured. Eventually the army tracked down the fighters who were
guarding him and in the ensuing gun battle Figueroa walked to the army’s side
unharmed. He demanded that the soldiers give him a gun so that he could shoot at
his captors. Mexicans came to refer to their traditional politicians who tried
to block democratic reforms as dinosaurs. Governor Figueroa was, without doubt,
one of the fiercest of the Mexican dinosaurs – perhaps a tyrannosaurus.
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| Lucio Cabañas during his guerrilla campaign and (right) soldiers posing with his body |
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