No Mexico, no ice cream

  

When I was a student at Northgate Grammar School for boys in Ipswich one of my friends, Roderick Strutt, lived nearby in Brunswick Road. His home had a large garden in which there was no space for two young boys to play. The reason was simple Roderick’s father was a dahlia enthusiast and almost the entire garden was dedicated to cultivation of the flowers. So was the garden of his brother next door.

 

What might this have to do with ice cream? The answer – Mexico.

 

Dahlias originated from Mexico and Central America. For ancient Mexicans they were a food crop (they ate the tubers), not blooms for display at Suffolk village shows.

 

Here in Puerto Vallarta Jan and I met another flower enthusiast, T J Hartung, a retired computer systems specialist and former US navy sonar operator. TJ’s love is orchids – Mexico has 1,383 varieties and 609 of them exist only in Mexico.

 

Having made the Mexico connection with my boyhood friend, the next question is what has all this to do with ice cream? Well, what is your favourite flavour? If it is vanilla, then if Hernán Cortés had never drunk chocolate with Emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin you would be disappointed to find your beloved flavour missing from the fridge.

Vanilla beans.

Vanilla, TJ told us, is made from the beans of orchids, more specifically from one of three types of vanilla orchid (the remaining 132 species do not produce beans useful for commercial purposes) and all three originate from Mexico. The combined flavours of cacao and vanilla beans in the drink that the Aztec ruler offered him so captivated Cortés that he sent vanilla beans to the King of Spain. Later he sent the vines that produce the beans, hoping to produce vanilla back home. However, Spanish growers were unable to persuade the vines to produce beans. As TJ told us, had they asked the Totonac people of modern Veracruz state, who had produced vanilla for 10,000 years, the Spaniards might have saved a lot of wasted time and expense. But they did not ask, so for 300 years Mexico had a de facto monopoly on vanilla. Incidentally, the derivation of vanilla is the Spanish word meaning “little scabbard” – the Spaniards thought that the dried bean resembled a scabbard.

Vanilla planifolia.

Vanilla is a vine that grows up trees, or on farms on concrete posts. Vines can be as much as 100 feet long. The East coast variety, Vanilla planifolia produces beans that are 6-9 inches long; the west coast Vanilla Pompona 4-6 inches. Cultivation is laborious since the vines must be hand pollinated daily, the life span of a flower. Then begins the really hard work, using the Mexican method (as opposed to the Bourbon method, which is much quicker).

In Mexico, mature pods are dried in the sun, then wrapped in wool blankets, placed in a wooden chest covered with another wool blanket to keep the pods warm. This process continues for about six weeks. Beans are then stored in open air sheds to dry. The curing process can take up to a year. The Bourbon method is much faster: beans are steeped in hot water for several minutes. This alters the flavour slightly, so Bourbon vanilla is not the same as Mexican vanilla.

Killing and sweating of vanilla beans.

Storing and inspecting vanilla beans.

In a world obsessed with the spice trade, many powerful people wanted to get their hands on vanilla plants to control its source. A British apothecary, Hugh Morgan, introduced Queen Elizabeth I to vanilla – she loved it. Thomas Jefferson ordered the US ambassador in France to send him 50 vanilla beans. It became popular in America as a flavouring, a medicine – and an aphrodisiac.

 

And in 1830, 300 years after Cortés drank vanilla-flavoured chocolate with Moctezuma, Charles Morren, a French botanist discovered that the vanilla flowers had to be hand pollinated, but he did not publish his method, so Mexico remained the only source. But then in 1841 Edmund Albias, an illiterate slave on the island of Bourbon (now Réunion) discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers by hand. That ended the Mexican monopoly.

 

Cultivation and processing make vanilla expensive – only saffron costs more. However, in the 19^th century, a method was devised to produce artificial vanilla flavour from waste wood pulp.

 

As for ice cream, its history goes back to the Phoenicians, and from then until the mid-19^th century it was usually served as frozen cream with fruits and berries. Then in 1847, a Pennsylvania lady, Nancy Johnson, invented a hand-cranked machine for making ice cream. This expanded the market, made room for new flavours and demand for vanilla boomed.

 Information and photos courtesy of T J Hartung. 

Imprisonment of the innocent in New Jersey

  

My friend in New Jersey sent me a new report from a vigil outside Delaney Hall, the ICE prison in New Jersey:

 

“I was at Delaney Hall again last night — it appears that New Jersey is becoming a revolving door. ICE agents are taking anyone they can find just to meet their increasing quotas, and then releasing them when there are no legitimate charges against them and the prison is becoming overcrowded. Yesterday they released over 20, and we found rides home for all. But now, if the detainees post a $7500 bond, they are released with ankle bracelets. One man had only been there 4 days, I don’t even think that is time enough to have a hearing. And now the prisoners are not complaining about the food as much because if their family puts money into a commissary fund, they can spend $5 or $10 and get a “better” microwaveable meal. And where is this money going? Back to ICE. It is really dispicable. People are getting snatched from the courthouses when they arrive for their hearings, so there really is no good end to this.”

 

This appalling abuse of human rights in the former Land of the Free, is surely unconstitutional. It is certainly wantonly cruel and now financially corrupt. You seize people without due legal cause, imprison them and then demand money with menaces to rerelease them.

 

A few days before we left the UK a Channel 4 reporter interviewed people on Miami Beach about their opinion of immigrants. The general view of these seemingly well-to-do, retirement age American was that “they” come here, take from us and do no contribute. Even if this were true (it is not: undocumented immigrants pay taxes and subsidize the people on Mami Beach) does it justify illegal, cruel and arbitrary detention?

 

What adjectives can we apply to the man who has authorized? Tyrannical, cruel, corrupt … Any other suitable terms?

Evading the Laws of Juárez in Tlalpan

“Dios mediante” (God willing) said the nun at the end of our friend Chris West’s phone call. He had reserved two places for us on a tour of her convent’s chapel in Tlalpan, designed by Luis Barragán (1902-2988), probably modern Mexico’s finest architect, and blessed (not finished as the nun leading our tour explained) in 1963.

 

Tlalpan is an ancient district of Mexico City, rather off the main tourist itineraries and relatively untouched since Spanish colonial times by the concrete of developers. Its narrow streets are lined by the walls of many old buildings pierced by just a few windows behind sturdy metal bars, for the light is all interior, hidden from those of us on the streets. The entrance to the convent is an unprepossessing wall and a large wooden door.

The entrance to the convent on Calle Miguel Hidalgo.

 

The nun who led the tour, explained that the convent was originally located in a private home rented from a Spanish family, where the closed order could avoid “the laws of Juárez.”

Juárez, an “Indian” from Oaxaca in southern Mexico, as any school student will know is the hero of Mexican history who doggedly resisted the invasion of the forces of Napoleon III in 1862, and who fought conservative Mexican monarchists in the civil war provoked by the Laws of the Reform. Juárez’s laws decisively separated church and state, confiscated many church properties and restricted the liberties of the Catholic clergy. He may be a hero in school textbooks, but not in convents, monasteries and seminaries.

 

The legacy of the Reform could still be felt in the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in western Mexico where a cruel civil war between followers of Christ the King and the federal government was fought. Barragán was born in Guadalajara in western Mexico and was profoundly Catholic. In 1955 he offered to convert the convent of the Clarisas Capuchinas into a modern complex, at the heart of which is the chapel and its associated spaces.

The altar and the santísimo. To the right the latticework separating the main chapel from the chapel of the faithful.

 

The chapel itself is a small, spare space quite adequate for the 60 nuns who then occupied the convent – there are now only 12, all of advanced years. Barragán designed the spaces, the colours of the walls, the latticework work and stained-glass that admit plentiful natural light, and the furniture. The altar is unusually simple for a Mexican religious space, pride of place given to El Santísimo (the Holy Sacrament). There is but one side chapel, to the left of the altar and shaped like the prow of a boat, a tall stained-glass window at its front, and a huge wooden cross at the rear. The. cross is lit directly on only one day of the year at Easter, when the nuns worship in the side chapel. On an upper level at the rear of the main chapel is the choir, no longer used because too few nuns are able to walk up the stairs, where more latticework work admits more natural light. There are only two small electric lights set in the ceiling to supplement the natural light, used only for vespers, which the remaining nuns no longer celebrate. In fact, there are probably no more than half a dozen electric lights in all the spaces designed for the nuns by Barragán. They must have the smallest electric bill in all of Mexico.

 

The side chapel, shaped like a prow, its stained glass and the cross.

 

Our tour took us to a corridor through which the priest enters for daily mass. Here there is a small wooden opening through which the nuns confess to the priest, who is seated in the confessional in the Chapel of the Faithful. The corridor leads to the sacristy where a mother superior ordered that a full-length mirror be installed because priests came to mass with their robes in disorder (Barragán made provision for no mirror). The Capuchins are the second order of the Franciscans (the first being the male friars/priests, the third the secular faithful). Technically, mass should be conducted by a Franciscan priest, but there are now so few that only one of the four priests who preside in the chapel is a member of the order. The remainder come from the Pontifical University in Tlalpan.

The altar seen from the side chapel.

 

Next came the Chapel of the Faithful, where the nuns’ family members and the public can gather on only two days a year (Christmas and Easter). The faithful have a full view of the altar and cross, but cannot see the nuns. The last two rooms visited were provided for family visits (one permitted every three months). The room for the nuns is small with sturdy wooden furnishings and two starkly modern paintings by Chucho Reyes (1880-1977). On one side is yet more latticework and behind it a solid wooden door that closes off a much larger room, again with one or two of Chucho Reyes’ paintings, which is opened to allow conversation between visitor and nun. Because there are now so few nuns, visits are no longer conducted in these rooms.

 

Barragan also designed a refectory (not open to the public tours).

 

After the tour, the nuns offer for sale a variety of items: some religious charms, bookmarks featuring Santa Clara (the patron saint of the order – hence Clarisas Capuchinas), assorted sweets, and a very Mexican drink, rompope (a sort of egg and cinnamon punch). The bottles had no labels, so I assume that they were made (and consumed?) by the nuns. A Japanese couple who took the tour and understood very little (they spoke no Spanish and understood only a little English) asked me to find out for them what was the mysterious liquid in the bottle.

 

The oratorio de Amaxalco.

Our next visit in Tlalpan was much less successful. The Oratorio de Amaxalco is an 18^th century chapel saved from demolition by the citizens of Tlalpan, but as we discovered, not open to the public. We could view it only through the iron of the gates.