Truly Mexican

Now the move from Mexico City to Austin, Texas is largely behind me and there’s a whole month before the move back, I’ve had time to browse Roberto Santibañez’s Truly Mexican.  It’s the Mexican cookbook I’ve been wanting for a long time (and I don’t say that just because Roberto is kind enough to mention me in the acknowledgments or because I am friends with his mother, a fine anthropologist who just also happens to be strikingly beautiful).

Why is it worth having another English-language Mexican cookbook given the ones I already cherish by Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, Marilyn Tausend, Zarela Martinez, and Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz among others?  The answer.  Apart from clear and easy-to-follow instructions, Roberto nails it on the head about three important issues.

A few years back I was teaching a cooking class and I had roasted a few trays of tomatillos in preparation. As I was hauling them to the classroom, a student walked by and stopped me. “Uh oh chef,” he said, noticing that the tomatillos were blackened. “Looks like you burned those.” That I actually had not burned them illustrates an important point. Learning to cook an unfamiliar cuisine often means unlearning many of the principles you once thought were universal.

Dead right.

Dead right, too, to chose sauces as the way into Mexican cooking.  Sauces are the defining characteristics of all high cuisines. Get the sauces right and you are a long way to having the cuisine mastered. Mexican saucemaking techniques are radically different from (say) those of France and of the English-speaking world.  Roberto breaks Mexican sauces down into salsas (a much larger category than the salsa that goes with chips in the US), guacamoles, adobos, and moles and pipianes.  Get a sense of their structure and you won’t need to refer to cookbooks when you make Mexican food, you won’t be tied to one sauce, one dish. If anything, I wish Roberto would go even further systematizing and explaining the structure.

And dead right too to explain this about the almond sauces (almendrados).

Because almonds came from abroad and were very expensive, they became a high status nut, a staple in sauces in upper class households.  . . You are more likely to find this array of fragrant sauces in central urban areas and people’s homes rather than the local comida corrida [quick lunch place].

Roberto gives plenty of the everyday sauces that everyone associates with Mexican street food and taquerias.  Much of the great Mexican food, though, is in private houses and to this day very hard for travelers to Mexico to sample, almost impossible outside Mexico (with a few shining exceptions).  That would have been true of most of the world’s high cuisines until very recently.  The well to do with fine cooks in their homes and the homes of their friends and relatives did not frequent restaurants.

So forget French techniques, learn a few basic sauces from each group, and think of long, leisurely meals in the great haciendas and town houses of Mexico and you’ll get new insight into high Mexican cuisine.

And right now I am relishing a lovely, simple salsa of chopped pineapple, cilantro, serrano chiles, onion and a touch of salt. And as soon as I get back to Mexico and have a blender, I’ll add more varieties of salsa roja and verde to my repertoire, and the pipian of pistachios though not, I think with lamb, and the red estofado de almendras with chicken which will bring the cooking full circle since Roberto borrowed this from our mutual friend, Iliana de la Vega.

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