Variety, Discrimination, and Mexican Breads
For a long time I’ve been interested in how perceptions of variety in food have shifted as countries have become more prosperous. In particular, variety comes to be seen as a matter of diverse ingredients, diverse dishes, or even diverse cuisines. The shifting fashions that Sylvia Lovegren detailed over twenty years ago in the still-worth-reading Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads have only accelerated.
Garlic, broccoli, and avocado; crepes, quiches, tiramisu, molten chocolate cake; French, Italian, Chinese, Thai, and Indian restaurants have all had their moment. Home cooks have gone from preparing a daily variant on a stew heavy in beans and vegetables, to a weekly pattern of repeated meals, to an ever changing medley of dishes with distant antecedents in different parts of the world.
The milkmaid. The craftmanship of Mexican bakers and . . . our daily bread.
I was thinking of this as I yet again tried to throw away a freebie handed out by Nestlé at some event in Mexico years ago. It is a memory game played with cards depicting different bakery products in the country. The eighteen cards here show only a small proportion of what is on sale in bakeries there. All are made with three or four basic recipes: yeast bread, lightly sweet bread, flaky pastry, and plain cake. Minor changes in shape and flavoring conjure up new tastes and textures.
The same would have been true in English bakeries in the 1950s: many shapes of bread, of lightly sweetened bread, dozens of different kinds of buns.
In short, there is a tradeoff. As we gain access to more and more foods of an ever greater variety of tastes and textures, so our ability to discriminate between simple staple foods diminishes. They become mere background, filler or wrapping for the real deal–the fat, sugar, meat and vegetables of the modern diet.
Or that’s an idea I have been playing with.
Reminds me of conversations with my mom, who often commented on how things were changing — like sour cream not being something widely consumed until after WW II. I can remember when bagels first started to go mainstream and the night my dad came home from work and announced that Chicago now had a Greek restaurant (which we soon visited, dad having become a great food explorer during his time in North Africa and the Middle East during WW II). So growing up, sampling new foods was common in our family. But today, trying new foods seems to be almost competitive.
Enjoyed looking at all the photos of breads. Interesting to think about how the history of Mexico shaped those. Easy to see French influence, but hard for me to know which of the others might be introduced by the many groups who came to Mexico (Jewish, Lebanese, Spanish in particular) and which might be the inventions of clever indigenous cooks who adopted this flexible new food form. I’ve read a bit about Mexican reactions to the introduction of oranges, but one wonders how home cooks initially reacted to wheat breads. Looking at the variety, I can easily imagine a certain amount of enthusiasm — especially easy to imagine when walking among the massive bread displays in the mercados.
Makes me realize that people don’t change that much, even as available foods do. There will always be those who are excited about new foods — who will seek them out — and those who want to know that Monday means beans and rice. I’d say that today, there are more people seeking new foods, just because it has become trendy. Fun, because it means new places are more likely to survive. Sad, too, however, because it means the places that have long depended on faithful, repeat customers are often dying out, as their traditional client base is not being replaced. But such is life.
I’m not sure that people always did seek new foods. I have the feeling that this is connected to affluence. I need to think about this. On the breads, I think the bread, the non-fluffy cake and the flaky pastries probably came with the Spanish, even though they are often attributed to the French. All the breads with “royal” underneath refer to baking powder and hence are late nineteenth century.
Definitely — people rarely seek new foods, until it becomes a trend — but not just affluence is involved, but also personality. My mom’s family was wealthy, my dad’s family was very much not (in fact, when dad’s father died, dad was 10 years old and became the family bread winner — was “rescued” by WW II). And yet dad was the adventurer — would and did try everything (not just limited to food — dog sledding, Middle Eastern archeology, whatever could be done). Mom would never stray beyond what she knew growing up, until led to it by dad. But money certainly helps. When dad worked in advertising, he said that research showed that people need money to be comfortable with taking chances — you don’t want to spend limited funds on something you might not like. So actually a fairly practical tendency.
As for the bread origins, I’ll bow to your expertise in that area. Simply knowing that “mariachi” was a corruption of the French “marriage,” because the French, while in Mexico, hired local bands for their weddings, suggested to me the possible connection — so leap of logic rather than actual knowledge in this case. Your knowledge in this case goes far beyond mine.
Of course, in the Middle Ages, royalty all over Europe was eating similar foods, and trading family members in marriage, so possibly the Spanish influenced the French, or vice versa. And, of course, the croissant was from Austria. Fascinating stuff, food origins — always more complicated than we suspect.
OK, we’re agree about the practical reasons for avoiding novelty. On French bread in Mexico, it’s quite true that the French influenced Mexican food in lots of ways–there’s a widespread enthusiasm for crepes, for example. And the Mexicans themselves point to the French origin of their favorite roll, the bolillo. The problem with that is that there are Spanish still lives that show breads identical to bolillos. Another subject that needs more work!
When I came to Greece in late 60s there were NO foreign restaurants in Athens or anywhere. Only fancy hotels served foreign i.e. French cuisine. A hamburger could be found only at the Hilton. That gradually changed in the late 70s and early 80s with influx of Lebanese and also migrant wprkers from Phillippenes and Poland. Now there are more exotic food venues than traditional Greek places and Greek food as such has been transformed by the so called fusion trend. Now Greek and Mediterranean fare is more popular abroad than in Greece! Meat was once consumed only on Sundays and holidays feast days etc is now everyday fare but still with lots of vegs and sauces. With the crisis people have reversed to more traditional diet. All this in space of 50 years!