Home-cooked, delicious, and inexpensive main meals in Mexico
I was recently in on a conversation between a group of food writers, most of them English, about what kinds of delicious, inexpensive main meals for four people could be made at home. Their target budget was $10.
Well, I thought, why don’t I ask my walking companions, all of them expert cooks, all of them Mexican, what they would do? So last week I explained the challenge. Here are their off-the-cuff answers. Realize they are in shorthand with glowing descriptions, seasonings, etc. left out.
To start
A vegetable soup. For example a julienne Mexican-style. Finely slice inexpensive vegetables, chayote, calabaza (zucchini), carrots, and lightly fry in oil (for economy). Blend tomatoes, onion and garlic (standard start to all sorts of dishes). Pour over vegetables, add water, simmer until done, salt to taste.
Or a crema, the same kinds of vegetables whizzed in a blender to a cream (though no actual cream added).
Or a “dry soup” of fideos. Fry fideos (short cut vermicelli) until golden, pour over tomato-garlic-onion mixture, simmer until done.
Or of spaghetti.
For a main dish
Everyone voted for chicken as the main possibility being not only cheap but universally acceptable.
So chicken spread with mustard and mayonnaise, topped with rounds of potato and onion and baked in the oven
Or fried chicken pieces with the spaghetti.
Or albondigas (beef and pork meatballs) with a tomato chipotle sauce
Or bistek (small, thin-sliced beef, roughly US minute steak)
Or milanesa (breaded thin-sliced steak).
On the side
Overwhelmingly the favorite accompaniment was a green salad (lettuce, probably iceberg, or de-phlegmed cucumber).
Dessert
Overwhelmingly gelatina (jello in the US, jelly in the UK).
Not mentioned but probably taken for granted
A salsa of some sort with the main course.
Beans after the main course. Perhaps tortillas on the side depending on the menu.
An agua fresca (fruit water made by blending fresh fruit with lots of water and sugar to taste–think lemonade) to drink.
Commentary
1. To many, this may not look very Mexican. Where are the enchiladas, the tacos, the tostadas, etc? Well, those are not usually for the main meal among the middle class.
2. The vegetable soups. These come in wondrous and amazing variety in Mexico and are a favorite way of having vegetables.
3. The multi-course pattern. Still standard. You have much of your filler before you reach the meat course.
4. Salad has become standard, perhaps because so much lettuce is now grown for the export market.
5. Gelatina. Not to be sniffed at. It may come from a packet. But it may be made with fresh juices. Too bad it’s gone downmarket in the US and UK because it can be delicious.
And your comments?
It would be interesting to compare the responses to the same question to people from different social classes and from different countries.
I wonder if the poor of wealthy countries eat offal for instance?
Yes. One reason I posted this is that although it’s easy to find all kinds of books and articles in many countries suggesting what people could or should eat that would be economical, I don’t see nearly as many accounts of what they actually do eat.
I have seen poor country families in Mexico preparing chicken hearts and gizzards for a weekend meal.
I was surprised when I read the store items requested by my working class ancestor in the mid-19th century. Actually more expensive items then I would have guessed given their background (bricklayer from a mill town).
It is also very easy to find articles/books by well meaning >middle-class people on what poor people should eat. I have a small collection of such books from the 19th century, which make for interesting reading. I believe that one modern version of this debate is conventional V free-range chicken.
In the UK there is a huge push by well meaning (most celeb.) chefs/cooks/TV personalities for “working families” to eat free-range chickens. OK in itself a reasonable aim. As far as I can determine there is little nutrional difference between the two, in terms of taste, there is a difference, but also a spread in this difference. Some free-range chicken just doesn’t taste that different to conventionally raised birds (most likely because they are not really “”free-range”, except by legal definition). So it comes down to animal welfare.
This last point I find interesting. Many people that say “eat free-range chicken for animal welfare reasons” seem to have no problem with eating quail (rarely free-range) or wild game which has been shot. In the latter case not all game is killed outright and it is a luxury item not a staple. The very thing that makes a poor persons staple protein “wrong””, gives caché to a luxury protein.
Yet the cry is “Free-range chicken or death”, not “No thanks I won’t have any grouse”. I find this bi-polar position really interesting, in effect these people taking in the communal information on “how to live right” and are projecting their own rationalisations of this onto a third party. A third party that they feel they have some sort of authority over, moral or otherwise.
As an aside, I really like duck and chicken hearts. But only because I am aspirational middle-class I guess…