CUISINE Cook’s Tour of Mexico

when I was a little kid during the war years after 1941, I dreaded the moment every fall when our teacher would ask us to tell the class how we’d spent our summer vacation. We were living in Cuba, Illinois, a small town in the coal-mining district, where my father helped the war effort somehow on the seat of a huge dragline. I was very proud of him, but 1 did wish he’d be a little more resourceful about our summer vacations. About the only thing we ever did, summer after summer, was to save our gas stamps till August and then drive 50 miles an hour for fourteen hours in our 1940 Indian Sunset Chevrolet to visit my grandparents in Mississippi for a week.

By about the third year I had run out of ways to glorify those trips. We had taken the dangerous ferry at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. We had scaled the dizzying heights of the Mississippi River Bridge in Memphis. My teacher that fall was the beautiful red-haired Miss George, for whom I was to draw the entire Coliseum in India ink. I adored her, but what could I tell about my summer vacation? How my brother and I fought over the back seat of the Chevy and the loser had to sleep on the floorboard? How my grandmother hoarded illicit sugar to make us divinity fudge and Lady Baltimore cakes? The class yawned, scratched, jeered, and Miss George made me sit down. For over 30 years I’ve longed to get even, and now I can. I spent my summer vacation last year on a food tour of Central Mexico and the Yucatan, so there. I have the ticket stubs, travel folders, native dolls and dresses, postcards, photos, and for a while even had five extra pounds, to prove it. Miss George and Class 4B, wherever you are, I hope you’re listening.

Sponsored by the Mexican government and choreographed by a spiffy Manhattan public relations firm, La Fiesta Elegante, as the tour was called, was a food lover’s dream – ten luxurious days last June spent exploring Mexico and sampling typical dishes from her spectrum of regional cuisines. Some of those dishes, such as the fried maguey worms we ate in Puebla, the baby eels sautéed in olive oil in Mexico City, or the squid served in its own ink in Oaxaca, would have made fourth graders shudder in delighted horror, though it’s doubtful they could have been any more squeamish than several of the food writers 1 traveled with.

There were ten of us in all, two men and eight women, gathered from Connecticut to Texas to California to make this pilgrimage to the shrine of chiles and tortillas. We pilgrims obligingly fell into representative types. The three Eastern Seaboard ladies, middle-aged, with some 100 years of food and travel experience among them, were nevertheless hell on hygiene and dietary laws. A rotund married couple from the Midwest had appetites for everything and medicine for the consequences. We had our requisite bachelor, tall, dark, and eager to please the three younger women: Jerry, a cool California beauty, Margaret, a bubbly blonde from Detroit, and Stephanie, a sexy, tough New York photographer who insisted on carrying her own heavy cameras. Right out of Airport or the Canterbury Tales – all we needed was a nun.

In this worldly Chaucerian group I was, I suppose, the Chaucer figure – unsophisticated, a little slow and gullible. Not a world traveler, as you may have guessed, I’d already disgraced myself by arriving in Mexico City sans luggage. Intimidated by the letter of invitation from our public relations Contact and guide, Linda Ayares:



“As you can see, our itinerary ranges from informal beach barbecues to elegant dinners in private homes. While you should bring primarily casual attire, ladies should pack a few dresses or long skirts for dinner, and men a jacket and tie for Mexico City . . .,”



I had packed all my favorite clothes in two large bags, which the airline had then very scrupulously lost. I didn’t know the wisdom of hand luggage, though I do now. So for my first three days of La Fiesta Elegante, I wore, to the informal beach barbecues and the elegant dinners and everywhere else, the white linen suit I’d flown six hours from Dallas in. The suit gradually came to resemble a napkin, as it acquired splashes of squash flower soup, dribbles of mole sauce, smears of olive oil, and a generous dash of tomato. Fortunately, my bags caught up with me before we left Mexico City on our grand tour – to Puebla, Veracruz, Tlacotalpan, Oaxaca, Mitla, Merida, Chichen Itza, and Uxmal.

For me, native Mexican food began with lunch at La Bola Roja in Puebla, a two-hour drive from Mexico City. There we walked to the Convent of Santa Rosa, where legend has it Dominican nuns in the 16th century created the Mexican national dish, Mole poblano de guajalote, or turkey in mole sauce. The story goes that the Archbishop was coming for a visit, and the poor order of nuns wanted to honor him. Long on piety but short on food, they combined the two by praying fervently as they ground and chopped every edible item in their coci-na: chiles, tomatoes, almonds, onions, garlic, bread, tortillas, bananas, sesame seeds, sugar, raisins, lard, avocado, herbs, spices, and chocolate. The sauce thus concocted they served over their only turkey, braised to tenderness. So prayer and pragmatism saved the day, and mole poblano was born.

The convent is now the Museum de Arte Poblano, and the original cocina where the dish was created 400 years ago still stands, a retreat of arched stone doorways and roofs adorned with brightly colored tiles.

Leaving the museum, we trailed through blocks of tiny sweet shops, sampling jellied fruits, candied sweet potato, meringue crepes, caramel, vanilla, and pumpkin fudge, lime candy filled with coconut, toasted coconut bars, creams with walnuts and pine nuts.

Pleasant as all this was, at La Bola Roja we discovered the reason we had come to Puebla. We were seated at a long table and plied with round after round of cerveza – Mexicans drink little wine but much beer and endless amounts of Coca-Cola. Slipping off our shoes, listening to the music of a marimba band, we sampled course after course of rainy season delicacies that led up to the piece de resistance, mole poblano. First came gusanos de maguey, the crisp little maguey worms complete with tiny heads, with guacamole to dip them in. I ate a worm or two, then slyly switched to tosta-das. Beside me one of the Eastern Seaboard ladies was as green as the guacamole, and I didn’t feel too good. For all the subtle taste and light crunchy texture, these, friends, were worms.

But the sopa de hongos restored me. Big moisture-filled mushrooms found during the rainy season floated in a delicate broth. The mole, with its steaming spice-laden brown sauce, came next – a huge platter of it, I noticed, for about 45 pesos or a little over two dollars.

We took our siesta driving back to Mexico City. That night we met again to sample more rainy season dishes, this time in one of Mexico City’s finest restaurants, La Cava.

The dinner at La Cava was our first big bash. I borrowed a bright pink sundress from Stephanie and draped the white linen jacket over my shoulders. The numerous Margaritas with which we began warmed us all to each other, and like Chaucer’s pilgrims, we told our tales. We became a sort of temporary family, mutually tolerant and helpful, an attitude that was to last through the week of hangovers and digestive outbursts to come. I for one established an eating pattern that would help me survive: sampling. The complusive clean-your-plate attitude from childhood gave way to a Roman emperor syndrome. What a luxury to order, taste, then wave away endless courses of exotica.

First came three kinds of crepes, one filled with flor de calabaza (squash flowers), one with the giant mushrooms again, one with a kind of fungus that grows on corn during the spring rains.

When the baby eels arrived, angulas a la bilbaina, I remember sighing tipsily to Stephanie, “Oh, no, how can they kill baby eels?”

“Don’t be silly,” she answered. “They club them with toothpicks.”

We ate the tiny brown bodies of spit-roasted doves, shrimp and squid al ajillo (in heavy garlic sauce), and finished with mangoes flamed in tequila and a round of Mexican liqueurs. Then another round, and music, and somehow I was back at the hotel promising to come right down for a midnight walk before the bed came up to consume me.

Our itinerary the next morning called for “breakfast at hotel on one’s own, pack and check out, 10:00 a.m. tour of the San Juan market, guided by Diana Kennedy.” Having nothing to pack, I settled for several cups of hot black coffee and a quick cold shower, and came down eagerly to meet the author of three Mexican cookbooks, including Cuisines of Mexico, designated by Time as one of the 12 best cookbooks ever written.

Diana, a resident of Mexico for almost 30 years, has served as an apprentice in a Mexican bakery, and has traveled all over the country, staying with peasants and aristocrats, in search of the secrets of Mexican cooking. I was delighted with her open manner: dressed in khaki pants, a Mexican blouse, and a farmer’s straw hat and bandanna, she looked like a rustic version of Coco Chanel.

Talking rapidly in her husky, slightly British voice, she led us on a lightning tour of the huge market, showing us hundreds of kinds of sea food; incomprehensible herbs, some of them sacred or medicinal; fruits like surrealist art – my favorite was the pitahaya, a beautiful pinkish-red color.

From the market we went directly to the Arroyo Restaurant for lunch, where dozens of dishes were laid out in an open patio.

Many of them anticipated our hangovers; sopa de medula (marrow soup) and menudo de carnero (tripe in green broth) are believed to work miracles, and salsa borracha (“drunk sauce,” made with chile pasilla and onion) would bring anyone around. For the rest, there were several kinds of meal steamed in maguey leaves, huautzontles (a Mexican green vegetable) cooked in various ways, green enchiladas, chicharones and carnitas (fried pig skin and pork), squash flower and cheese tacos, ensalada de nopal-es (cactus paddle salad), and melon-flavored pulque. By the time we drove to the airport to take MEX #629 to Veracruz, we were all wondering how we could ever eat again.

And indeed I don’t remember much about the food in Veracruz. What I mostly remember is the coffee our first morning there at La Parroquia, the famous gathering place on the square in this seaport town. The waiter poured a thimbleful of heavy hot black syrup, then startled me awake by banging on the tall mug with a spoon.

Another waiter dashed over with a pitcher of hot milk, which he poured into my cup from a height of four feet or so without spilling a drop. I gasped – and they beamed, pleased to have surprised the turista. The coffee was great, but their routine was even better.

Later that morning we drove up into the hills behind Veracruz to Tlacotalpan, a small, unspoiled village that houses La Flecha, a tiny restaurant Diana Kennedy told us about. The country was green and tropical, like a gentle Amazon basin; little houses nestled in valleys or perched incongruously on the tops of hills.

Tlacotalpan is not a tourist spot, perhaps because of the climate. It was about 110° that June day, and the humidity was scarifying. But inside the small yellow and white 16th-century church it was still and cool. The intricate hand-painted designs in azule and old rose were faded into subtlety by centuries. The saints were dressed up in fabric costumes, and at the sacristy a figure of Christ, bloody and human, rested in a gold coffin. We sat quietly for a few minutes, breathing in 400 years of fear and love.

Outside in the merciless sun the other buildings on the square, in dazzling shades of blue, pink, green, looked like the rows of Mexican candy in Puebla. We walked through a white-fenced park, where a marker stood in honor of a local doctor who died at the age of 77:”Vivesen nuestro corazon,” the inscription read.

“What would it be like to spend 77 years in Tlacotalpan?” I asked Jerry, the Califor-nian. She didn’t answer.

But a little later, as we sat eating the sopa de mariscos (shellfish soup) at La Flecha, she looked over at me from under her straw hat. “Not 77 years,” she said. “But I could take six months or so and like it.” Small wonder. After the soup came shrimp and conch cocktails, then fried shrimp served in a butter and garlic sauce, shrimp stewed in a tomato, pepper, and onion sauce, jaiba a la Tlacotalpena (crab in a tomato sauce). We also ate sea bass, and octopus in a marvelous marinara sauce. The restaurant was hot and crowded with working men in shirt sleeves who looked curiously at the bevy of Anglos; we were the only women in the place. We drank a vat of bottled water, another vat of the ubiquituous Coke, and ate till our eyes popped out. Sane sampling be damned, I thought.

That night, back in Veracruz, we went on strike. “No food,” we insisted to the guide. Instead we sat in the cool night air in the open Portales, surveying the harbor life in the square. Sailors swaggered through, heads up, shoulders back. Children ran through, street-savvy, offering favors for dos pesos.

A crazy old woman named Pearl entertained informally, as we learned she did every night. Dressed in a white mini-skirt trimmed with rhinestones, wearing a white hat with dove feathers, tap shoes with fancy bows, and, for some reason, decoratively arranged bandages on her legs, Pearl, who must have been over 70, sang and danced her way from table to table, tormented by the laughing street urchins.

Finally she sat down with some sailors, and when I went up to bed about three they were urging her to sing for them. As I fell asleep, 1 heard her cracked old voice below my window begin “La Cama de Piedra.”

The next morning, entirely too early, we flew to Oaxaca. Our official culinary purpose there was to sample the famous Oaxa-can queso, a mozzarella-like cheese often baked with sausage or with tomatoes or with sautéed mushrooms. I had a private purpose also, however: I planned to go on a rug-buying binge in Oaxaca, which is famous for its weaving. As soon as we arrived there and checked into the hotel, I ventured into the open-air market across the street. Stephanie, who wanted to take photographs, came with me.

It was still early when we stood on the cobbled street eating sweet rolls and drinking fresh jicama juice. All around us men in white cotton pants and shirts hung hand-loomed rugs on high lines, dark women in embroidered smocks set out rows of heavy, highly glossed black pottery, and small dusty children peeked shy black eyes from behind pyramids of baskets.

But it was the plastics that got Stephanie – mounds of junk in red, green, blue, yellow. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she said. “I just must get that display of combs, Jo. Turn that blanket this way. No, here, hold this carton up toward the camera.” And I held the plastic up under the suspicious eye of the merchant.

The plastic immortalized, we turned to the rugs, and through careful haggling I acquired an all-wool, hand-woven beauty, about 5 x 7 feet, in an orange and yellow sun design, for 600 pesos or about $30, only a little more money than a similar rug would have cost in Yalalag, the big store next to our hotel, where the prices were fixed and the clerks spoke English. But I didn’t realize that until the next day. For now I was very happy. Stephanie and I raced back to the hotel proudly lugging my purchase and found our bus already loaded and everyone waiting for us for the trip to the archaeological site of Mitla, the City of the Dead.

I have to confess that I have a mental blank about the ruins at Mitla, and that 1 remember only a little more clearly the much larger, more impressive ruins we saw later at Chichen Itza and Uxmal.

What I do remember is the sopa de espi-naca (spinach soup), so creamy and un-Mexican seeming, at La Sorpresa Restaurant in Mitla, and the chicken marinated and wrapped in maguey leaves, then roasted for hours in a pit, and the Oaxacan black mole sauce, completely unlike the mole we’d had in Puebla. And when 1 think of the Yucatan peninsula, I don’t remember the giant pyramid at Chichen Itza celebrating the descent of Kukulcan, the plumed serpent, or the sound and light show on the Mayan site at Uxmal. I’d like to, but I don’t.

Instead I see, in my mind’s eye, our happy band of pilgrims sitting on the flagged and roofed terrace at the Hotel Mayaland. Waiters laden with trays are bringing us scores of Yucatecan delicacies – cochinito pibil (suckling pig and sauce wrapped in banana leaves and roasted in a pit), or polio a la naranja (chicken in a sauce of sweet orange juice and Cointreau), or caballeros pobres (“poor gentlemen” – slices of French bread covered with honey, cinnamon, and raisins).

Pilgrims of this earth, not the next, we toast our joy with anise-flavored draughts of Ixtalbentun, and feel as certain as Chaucer did that here is God’s plenty.