It’s Not Just English Speakers: Culinary Newsletters and More in Spain and Mexico

Almost exactly a month ago, I posted about The Culinary Newsletter’s Golden Age in the 1980s and 1990s.  It focussed on culinary newsletters but the underlying theme was an upsurge of interest in informed discussion about the culture of food generally, not just gastronomy, in those decades.

Although I had a wonderful response, only one reader, Vicky Hayward, responded to my plea for information about what was happening outside the English-speaking world. I am honored to post what she says here. Vicky has a long-standing interest in food and for more than twenty years has lived in Madrid.

Her latest major accomplishment is a splendid translation and interpretation of one of the great Spanish cookbooks, the friar Juan Altamiras’s Nuevo arte de cocina, sacado de la escuela de la experiencia económica (1745). I won’t say more about it here because I am hoping to blog about it before long.

Two Spanish Culinary Magazines/Newsletters

Here, then, is her commentary about what was going on in Spain in the 1980s and 90s.

I’d run with Rachel’s view that the 80s and 90s were a golden age for newsletters, and I don’t think that’s because we’re looking back with nostalgia from the age of the internet. Each of these publications was written and designed with such personality. People launched fearlessly into essays exploring arcane interests and they felt free enough to do so with a wink or two of humour.

I’ve got two Spanish examples here to hand.

One is “Cuadernos de Gastronomía”, launched in 1992 by La Val de Onsera editions, based in Huesca, Aragón, and sold by subscription. Its covers were usually cartoon-like and the contents ranged from interviews to anthropologists’ musings and restaurant reviews. Food history was bubbling under here in Spain at the time and many researchers from other academic disciplines contributed articles.

The second eminently collectible example, from Madrid, was a compilation of restaurant reviews entitled “Donde Va La Burguesía Cuando No Paga la Compañia”, in other words, where the bourgeoisie go to eat when they have to pay the bill. By the time I discovered it in the 1990s the earlier thin news.sheets recommending eating places for friends had grown into a thickish annual booklet.

In general the author, Anselmo Santos, a madrileño of great wit and wisdom, sent his readers to little known tascas or taverns where they could eat dishes like tripe, morcilla and boiled Galician ham, but his reviews included all kind musings along the way. For example, his 1997 take on one tavern in the old town was based on a Madrid proverb, “Calle, Calle Quiero, Que En Casa Me Muero” – and in it he riffed on madrileños passion for strolling and eating. Along the way he quoted Unamuno, various historic city byelaws and friends.

As Anselmo had studied sociology he dropped a few insights into the everyday workings of the food world too. For example, he ended that particular review, “El ‘jefe’ lleva el comedor; la ‘jefa’, la cocina, y el hijo, la barra. Eso explica los precios.”

Mexican Interest in Culinary Culture (But No Newsletters)

In Mexico, where I lived from the 1990s on, there was a similar surge of interest in the country’s culinary culture. Given the then unreliability of the Mexican mail service, I don’t think the idea of a newsletter crossed anyone’s mind.

The interest expressed itself in other ways. I was lucky enough to be on the outer fringes of the core groups. I wrote about my understanding of what was going on on egullet on October 8th 2004. This is a mildly edited version with apologies for errors and oversights.

Many of us on this list are used to seeing Mexican food through the eyes of those who interpret it for the United Status: Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayliss, Zarela Martínez, and so on. Wonderful interpreters, all of them. But their focus is cooking, not the culinary scene.

And since the culinary scene is fascinating, very different from the US, and essential to understanding Mexican food, I thought a series of observations might be of interest.

And where better to start than with the Mexico City Culinary Establishment? I don’t think there’s any US equivalent. Mexico City is a world unto itself in highly centralized Mexico. For those who live there, it’s the only place in the country that matters (think Paris for a comparison).

Within Mexico City, a core circle of thirty or forty people make up the Culinary Establishment. Among them, in no particular order, are:

Cristina Barros, who for two decades wrote a column on traditional Mexican food in the prestigious newspaper, La Jornada, with her husband Marco Buenrostro

José Iturriaga de la Fuente, widely recognized author of many books, many of them on Mexican food, particularly the classic La cultura del antojito (1987), an early exploration of the tacos, tamales and tortas sold on the streets of Mexico City.

Patricia Quintana, author and proprietor of the pioneering high end Mexican restaurant, El Izote.

Jorge De’Angeli (deceased) and his wife Alicia Gironelli, author of many cookbooks, and proprietors of El Tajín restaurant.

Silvia Kurczyn, director of gastronomy for the Festival of Mexico City Historic Center

Maria Dolores Torres Yzabal, author, including of El Gourmet Mexicano (1987).

Lila Lomelí, Victor Nava, Janet Long, Sonia Corcuera de Mancera, Graciela Flores, Luis Alberto Vargas, Margarita Carrillo, Paco Ignacio Taibo I, María Orsini, Martha Chapa, Carmen Titita Ramírez Degollado, Mónica Patiño, José Luis Curiel, Laura Caraza, etc.

So who are these people? These are people whose first second language is as likely to be fluent French as English, who have a parent or grandparent from Catalonia, Poland, England, France or Italy, who grew up eating a Mexican version of French or Spanish food. (“What you must understand, Rachel, is that we never ate Mexican food at home,” said María Dolores Torres to me once, a statement that actually needs some teasing out). They are part and parcel of the rest of the Mexican establishment.

To get some sense of this, imagine if in the US, the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, a few Harvard faculty, a fifth-generation Rockefeller, the wife of Alan Greenspan, and assorted poets and novelists were all involved in researching, cooking, and promoting American food.

Given their international connections, it is not surprising that this is the group that represents Mexican food internationally. They are the people who sit on Slow Food Committees, try to find chefs for “internal” Mexican restaurants in the US, shepherd around and/or cook for a lot of the visiting tours from the US, in many cases provide contacts for US cookbook writers, go to the conventions of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, sit on Premios de Gourmand committees, and are promoting Mexican food as a UNESCO Patrimonio de la Humanidad.

Ironically, they have probably had much less impact on the Mexican provinces, except perhaps Puebla which is reachable in a day trip from Mexico City. Given that essentially no newspaper food pages reach the provinces, that there are no nationally distributed Mexican culinary magazines with a half life of more than a year or so, no major chains of bookstores, much of their impact is at present restricted to Mexico City.

But what an impact!

This group has done an amazing job promoting Mexican cuisine. Among their accomplishments:

• a series of stunning (and often stunningly expensive) Mexican cookbooks, many or most of them unavailable in English
• opening of high end Mexican restaurants (traditionally high end Mexican food was found in clubs, corporate dining rooms, or homes)
• the investigation and publication of scholarly studies of middle class and “popular” Mexican food across Mexico
• scholarly culinary histories and anthropologies at a world class level
• excellent glossy illustrated culinary histories, studies of individual foodstuffs, foreign influences on Mexican cooking written in understandable ways at affordable prices for a more general audience
• incorporation of a serious culinary component in the Mexico City Festival and lots of other public events
• reprints of classic Mexican cookbooks and manuscript cookbooks at affordable prices
• cooperation between high end restaurant and university academics to offer hands on training in Mexico’s culinary heritage
• support and training for mayoras (traditional female cooks in Mexican restaurants)

Takeaway

Pondering this and the previous post on English-language culinary newsletters, what seems to be going on is a turn away from French cuisine as the touchstone of all things culinary.

One manifestation of this is investigations into the culture of other cuisines. In the English-speaking world, culinary newsletters are an important way to share this new enthusiasm. In Spain, there are also new forms of publication, perhaps closer to small magazines like PPC than to newsletters. In Mexico, a rush of books on Mexican cuisine are published by prestigious outlets such as Fondo de Cultura Económica, Larousse, Clío, and Conaculta.

Another manifestation, with Spain at the forefront, is a high end restaurant cuisine that retains the structure of French high end restaurants but that offer dishes prepared using the techniques of industrial food processing while employing local ingredients.

 

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