Learning to Cook, Mexico 1900
Every once in a while someone says something and it just rattles around in your head. That happened a few days ago with my friend M-E. “You know,” she said, “When my grandmother was fifteen and the family was thinking about her marriage, she went to study cooking in Mexico City for two months.”
Grandmother came from a prominent family in Saltillo, the northernmost of the chain of dignified, cultured Spanish colonial cities. It did, however, happen to be 500 miles north of Mexico City. So the fifteen year old and her mother set off for Mexico City in their carriage. I can hardly imagine the jolting over dirt roads, the huge distances between stops, the two of them looking out at the white earth, the acacia, Joshua trees, and cactus of the high plains of Mexico. The journey took three weeks each way.
Among the thoughts that crowd my mind, two stand out.
(1) What was she off to learn? Cosmopolitan cooking of course, French inspired cooking so that in her house in Saltillo she could offer the same sophisticated meals that were served in the capital. In a period when tensions between provinces and capitals were pronounced in many, many countries, here we see one mechanism for resolving them.
(2) What was she actually going to do in the kitchen? I’m guessing of course. But in those last few years before the Mexican Revolution, she would have chosen menus, held the keys to the pantry, trained the kitchen staff, made the final seasoning adjustments to the dishes, and perhaps made the desserts and confectionary.
