Krazy Kioti - The Gene Anderson Website

Developing Mexican Food:

Globalization Early On

E. N. Anderson

University of California, Riverside

 

Abstract

Mexican food today is extremely diverse, and has a complicated background.  My view is that of a Mayanist who has worked in southeast Mexico and traveled widely in the country.  Already long before Columbus, Native American foodways were spreading widely; the Maya were powerfully influenced by South American foods from chocolate to manioc.  The Spanish Colonial period brought not only Spanish foods but also Arab and African foodways, all diverse in themselves.  Modern influences have not been less complex.  This all tests current theories of “culture” and “appropriation,” and makes a world-systems approach to anthropology more useful and predictive.  Some comparative notes on folk music are added to show the extent of cultural borrowings, since they track foodways closely.

 

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My work in Mexico has largely been with the Yucatec Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, but I have traveled all over Mexico, visiting every state and major region.  I am a food anthropologist, so I have sampled everything from ant pupae at a fine upscale restaurant in Guanajuato to wasp larvae on a remote rainforest back road in Quintana Roo.  In two years of living and traveling in Mexico, spread over 40 years of my life, the only bad meals I recall were in United States-type restaurants.

Much of what follows is sourced from K’oben, forthcoming book by Amber O’Connor and myself (2017; see also Anderson 2010).  Much is from, or in, Jeffrey Pilcher’s classic Que vivan los tamales! (1998), which is by far the best, most thorough, and most authoritative work in English on Mexican food.  There are other good histories in Spanish.

The incredible richness and variety of Mexican folk culture never ceases to amaze me, and food is not the least of its manifestations.  Mexican culture today is a product of many Native American cultures interacting with Spanish culture.  It is much more than that, however.  Three things are not often appreciated about Mexican culture.  First, Mexican Indigenous cultures were extremely varied and were constantly influencing each other.  Second, Spain in the 1500s and 1600s was itself a region of cultural mixing.  Third, Spain was by no means the only Old World country that influenced Mexico.  Mexico has had very substantial immigration from Africa, Ireland, Lebanon, Syria, Philippines, China, France, Germany, and elsewhere, to say nothing of the United States and most parts of Latin America.  All these areas contributed to foodways.

The Native American heritage is the really basic one.  Mexico still depends on the classic maize, beans, chiles, and squash.  The commonest species of these are all Mexican domesticates.  Maize (Zeo mays) was domesticated about 7000 years ago in the Balsas River drainage; geneticists have run it down to an origin in the wild teosinte grass of middle elevations in that drainage area.  At least three species of beans were domesticated in central Mexico; these are frijol beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), teparies (P. acutifolius), and scarlet runner beans (P. coccineus).  The tepary bean is famously drought-resistant and has been used in drought-prone parts of Africa as well as Mexico.  The fourth common species, the lima bean (P. lunatus), was certainly domesticated in Peru, but a different form, the sieva bean, may have been independently domesticated in Mexico.  The sieva bean is now rare and little known, but my Maya friends in Quintana Roo grow several delicious varieties that seriously need saving and propagating.

Squash also come in many species.  Pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo) were domesticated in Mexico and probably independently in what is now the southern United States.  Winter sqush (C. maxima, C. moschata), chayote (Sechium edule) and spaghetti squash (C. ficifolia) also occur; C. maxima is probably South American, but got to Mexico early.  With bottle gourd (Lagenaria vulgaris), of uncertain origin, these gave Mexican Indigenous people plenty of choices.  I should point out that the tender leaves, vine tips, and flowers of the squash are also eaten and are incredibly good as well as vitamin-rich.

Chiles also come in multiple forms.  The common, ordinary varieties of chile, from which the non-hot bell pepper was recently developed, is Capsicum annuum and is native to Mexico.  It is a small annual plant.  The Tabasco chile (C. frutescens), by contrast, is a large perennial bush.  It is known by its Maya name of maax in southern Mexico, including Tabasco.  The habanero (C. chinense), as its name shows, came from Cuba to Mexico; it is originally South American. Yet another species, the most flavorful and meaty of all and one of the hottest, is the rocoto or manzano (C. pubescens), another South American.  It somehow got from Peru to Oaxaca and around there, probably after the Spanish conquest.  There are other species of chile in South America.  It is highly interesting that so many species were separately domesticated in different areas.  The reason is not just their delightful warmth; they are also highly antibiotic and antifungal.  They may have been domesticated for medicine or for use in preserving food—chile powder or crushed chile is a good preservative.

With these four species, you can live a happy life.  Maize provides basic calories, beans provide good protein, squash and chiles provide vitamins, and chiles in particular provide incredible quantities of vitamin C and the B complex.  One problem is that maize contains phytic acid, which bonds with mineral nutrients and with niacin (vitamin B3) making them unavailable to digestion.  So the Mexican people learned very early to process maize with limewater—not from limes, but CaO made by burning calcium carbonate—thus producing nixtamal.  The lime neutralizes the phytic acid.  The limewater processing was probably originally used to tenderize the maize, but then seen to help nutrition (Katz et al. 1974). The maize needs tenderizing in the first place because soft kernels get eaten by bruchid weevils.  So weevils cause civilization: they made people select for hard corn, but then the people had to tenderize it, which made it nutritionally adequate to support cities.

These many species were only the beginning.  Mexican Indigenous people domesticated so many plants that it would take me much of this hour just to read off the names.  One triumph was the avocado, a fantastic source of oil, protein and vitamins that grows like a weed in central Mexican mountain conditions.  The poverty diet of the central Mexican people at the time of Spanish conquest was noted as tortillas and guacamole, then made of just avocado, chile, and salt.  This is a perfect diet—it has all the essentials—and I think it’s the tastiest poverty diet I ever found.  (It beats the European equivalent of stale bread and water.)  Among the hundreds of other species are amaranth, chia sage, and millets.  Amaranth, chia, and chenopod species provided seed crops that were much more nutritious than maize.  They grow easily and were essential staples to many Indigenous groups.  In addition, chocolate, sweet potatoes, and manioc came up very early from South America.  There are proto-Maya words for them—at least the last two—which means the Maya had them 5000 years ago.

Domestic animals were few.  The dog came over the Bering Straits with the humans.  It was eaten by some groups.  The turkey was domesticated in Mexico.  The muscovy duck (Cairinia moschata), native from Mexico south but domesticated in Peru, seems to have come up fairly early.  Why Mexico never domesticated mountain sheep remains a mystery.  Javalis (known in English as peccaries) are locally tamed and farmed on a small scale, but they compete with humans for food—unlike pigs, they can’t eat garbage; they have to have maize and other quality fare.  So they were not domesticated, which is sad, because they are delightful pets (at least as smart as dogs) as well as very good eating.  If I were young I’d go domesticate them.

All this was only the beginning.  The Indigenous people developed great cuisines from the many domesticated and wild foods they had.  Early Maya paintings show vast amounts of tamales, evidently baked in earth ovens, as they still often are in Mayaland.  Also shown are fish, deer, and many other animal foods.  Chocolate was an elite drink; the Maya may very well be the people who developed it as a tasty drink by learning how to ferment the seeds.  The unfermented pulp and ground seeds are very pleasant, but fermenting is necessary to bring out the actual chocolate flavor.  It is fitting that our word “cacao” is taken straight from Maya.  Around many Classic Maya cups is written a line of Maya hieroglyphics.  When I was a student, we learned that the Maya were deeply religious, and this line must have been a powerful spell or sacred prayer.  Well, we can now read Maya writing, and that line turned out to mean “This is so-and-so’s chocolate cup.”  So much for romance.

The Aztecs and other central Mexican Indigenous people spoke Nahuatl, a beautiful and expressive language.  It is not related to Maya, but is related to the Indigenous languages of southern California.  Many of our familiar food words today are “Nahuatlismos”:  Chile, tamale, chocolate, tomato, chayote, achiote, camote (sweet potato), chia, jicama, and more.  In Nahuatl, there was a three-part division of the major foods:  tamalli (tamales), tlaxcalli (tortillas), and taballi (food to eat with the tortillas, such as beans and guacamole).  Other Indigenous languages of the Mexican realm gave us abalone (California Costanoan), and many more.

The Aztecs loved good food.  One story says it all.  Fray Diego Duran compiled a history in the mid-16^th century, based on Azec accounts.  They told him of a war with a city named Coyoacan, which means “coyote place.”  The Aztecs besieged it but it would not yield, and had fierce warriors.  So the Aztec monarch said: “’Let the guards take ducks, waterfowl, fish, and other creatures from the lagoon that cannot be obtained in Coyoacan.  Let them be…cooked or toasted in such a way that their rich odor and the smoke that rises from these delicacies will penetrate the city….  Old men and old women will become feeble and die of longing for the food they cannot have.’  The king’s orders were carried out: they prepared many loaves of ezcahuitli, a type of small red worm….together with ducks, fish, and frogs….” They cooked these upwind of Coyoacan, and the scent drove the people there to distraction.  They made a desperate sally, were defeated, and their city was taken (Duran 1994:92).

Other sources tell of equally mouthwatering dishes made from acociles (crustaceans), axolotls (salamanders; the name literally means “water monsters”), and other aquatic foods.  The Aztecs grew all sorts of fruit, from all over Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, and had large botanical gardens (Duran 1994:205).  Duran also tells of Motecuhzoma (“Montezuma” to moderns) feasting on game, fish, chocolate, and so on, including flesh from human sacrifices, and then ending the feast with hallucinogenic mushrooms, which put them “out of their minds and…in a worse state than if they had drunk a great quantity of wine” (Duran 1994;407; take note and stick to wine and forget those Psilocybe mushrooms).  Bernardino de Sahagun and other early chroniclers also describe Aztec food.  Sahagun describes merchants feasting on turkey, dog, tomatoes, chiles, chocolate, and occasionally human sacrifices (Sahagun 1979:48, 67, 75).  However, it is clear that very little human flesh was eaten; it was not a significant protein source.  Sahagun also went into detail on all the incredible variety of foods available in markets and elite kitchens (1979:69) and on varieties of maize, beans, and other crops (1963:279-290; see also Sahagun 1959, 1961).   They all agree that it was an incredibly rich, varied diet, even for the relatively poor.  Some of the dishes described by Sahagun are “turkey with a sauce of small chilis, tomatoes, and ground squash seeds” (patzcalmolli, what we would now in Nahuatl call mole pipian); “white fish with yellow chili…newt with yellow chili…winged ants with savory herbs; locusts with chia; maguey grubs with a sauce of small chilis…a sauce of unripened plums with white fish….tamales stuffed with amaranth greens…small tuna cactus fruit with fish eggs…” and on for many pages (Sahagun 1979:37-38).  A major aspect Indigenous Mexican cuisine is the use of insects and other invertebrates.  Over 300 kinds of insects are eaten (Ramos-Elorduy 1991, 1998; Ramos Elorduy and Pino Moreno 1989).

Drinks, besides water, consisted largely of atoles of various sorts.  Atole (Nahuatl atolli) is finely ground seed meal beaten up in water.  It was usually made from maize, but also from beans, fruit, and so on.  Pinole (pinolli) was another seed meal drink, often made from wild seeds.  Atole could be flavored with chocolate, chile, honey, and other substances (Sahagun 1961:93).  It is still common.  Pozole (pozolli) was, in those days, probably just nixtamal beaten up in water, as it still is in Maya Mexico.  That wonderful pozole you get in restaurants now, with pork and hominy and chiles and more, is probably a recent invention from west Mexico, especially Jalisco.

It is said that a true civilization has to have its alcohol, and Mexico had various types of maize beers, as well as honey mead and combinations of the two.  Central Mexico had pulque, the fermented sap of the flower stalks of agaves (Agave spp. which are not cacti).  There is some chance that they had learned to distill alcohol.  Very simple stills are found in remote areas of west Mexico.  Some Mexican ethnobotanist friends of mine argue that the stills go back to pre-Columbian times.  However, they resemble Philippine stills, and most of us think they probably came over on the Manila galleon in the early days.  Sailors early learned in the Philippines to make these simple stills, and probably brought the technology with them.  Mezcal is distilled not from pulque, but from the juice extracted by slow-cooking the flowering stem bases of agave and related plants, and then fermenting and distilling that.  Tequila is mezcal made from the blue agave (Agave tequilana), originally from the Tequila area of Jalisco, but now widely planted, to the annoyance of residents of the actual Tequila area.  Incidentally, a word of warning:  Don’t try to drive in the town of Tequila.  The old, steep, cobblestone streets are filled with drivers who have been sampling pretty freely at the many distilleries in town.

Other parts of Mexico had their own Indigenous foods.  Heavy seafood dependence along the coast of the Gulf of California lives on in Sinaloa’s incomparable seafood cuisine.  Similar pre-Columbian traditions give us excellent seafood in Campeche and Veracruz.  In northeast Mexico, the Teenek Maya—called Huastec by the Nahuatl—baked very large tamales (as some Yucatec Maya do).  These Huasteca tamales were known as zacahuil, and still exist.  In this age of Guinness records, towns vie to produce ever larger ones, and some now weigh a hundred pounds.  They are one of the few dishes in the world to be immortalized in folksong; every traditional Huastecan singer can perform “Zacahuil,” often in the wonderful folk style of the region, influenced by Scots-Irish fiddling styles learned from nearby Texas.

A final Native American influence came from the Antilles, but it appeared mostly with the Spanish.  Outside of habanero peppers, the Spanish introduced few if any foods from the Antilles, but they brought several words from the Arawak language there: maize for corn, yuca for manioc, and a few others.  Our word “barbecue” comes from Arawak barbacoa, the frame on which meat was smoked for preserving it.  Hammock, tobacco, and cigar are also Arawak.

The Spanish were amazed at the productive maize fields.  They had read in the Bible about grain that returned a hundredfold on seed; they had never seen such a thing—Spanish wheat in the middle ages returned about three or four for one.  So when they saw maize literally returning a hundredfold, they were duly impressed.  Their diet back home had often been limited to bread, olives, wine, and cheese; now they could have game, fish, vegetables, spices, everything.  They soon began bringing the best New World foods back home.

Merchants in Spain tried hard to keep wheat, almonds, olives, wine, and other specialties from being produced in Mexico.  Wheat soon got away from them, since it grows extremely well in northern Mexico and in the Bajío (the high, beautiful center of Mexico).  In northwest Mexico, the Indigenous people either died out or mounted heroic resistance to the Spanish.  The Seri and Yaqui resistance movements against genocide stand as some of the most amazingly heroic stories in the entire history of humanity.  Maize was thus hard to get, so wheat became the staple.  In these areas the wheat tortilla—which, unlike the maize one, requires shortening—became staple food.

Olives, grapes, and almonds were hard to grow in central and south Mexico, and remained Spanish monopolies for a long time.  The main contribution of the Old World, in most of Mexico, was domestic livestock.  This proved a very mixed blessing.  It provided cheap and abundant meat and cheese, but the flocks multiplied, overran Indigenous cultivation, ate crops, caused horrific erosion, led to massive deforestation, and generally ruined much of the landscape, causing untold misery and environmental damage that is still getting worse all the time (Melville 1997; Painter and Durham 1995).  Those who deplore Native America’s lack of domestic livestock (e.g. Diamond 1997) need to explain why enormously reducing the food production and potential of Mexico is somehow a good thing.

Bread and domestic-animal meat soon became core parts of the Mexican diet, and grapes in the dried form of raisins became rather common.  Olives, almonds, capers, wine, and so on remained luxuries for the Spanish rich.  However, the real excitement came when converted Jews and Muslims were sent to Mexico.  The Spanish spent 800 years fighitng the Moors—Muslims of Arab and Berber ancestry—for control of Spain.  (“Moor” and “Morocco” both derive from Arabic maghrib, “sunset” or “far west,” because the area in question is the farthest west of the Arab lands.)  The Moors had developed an exceedingly elaborate and sophisticated cuisine.  They had also introduced oranges, sugar, dates, rice, and many other foods to Spain (Watson 2008).  The Romans had begun introducing spices, but the Moors really popularized them, especially the Arabic signature mix of cumin, coriander, black pepper, and (often) cinnamon.  Sesame seeds are also a Moorish item.  Also Moorish are the limes that are now so totally basic to Mexican food, and the bitter oranges that partially replace limes in Yucatan.

The Spanish finally conquered the last Moorish stronghold in 1492.  Yes, the date is significant, because it was the loot from conquest that financed Columbus, and the luxury of having finished the Reconquista that made possible a new conquest on a far larger scale.  But after the conquest the conquered Muslims and Jews persisted in rebelling, since they were subject to appalling oppression, brutality, and exploitation.  They were forced to become nominally Christian, but many held out in secret.  Those that would not convert were killed or forced to flee, finding refuge in Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.  Even conversos were not trusted, and vast numbers of them were sent to Mexico to get rid of them.  Here they were often sent to the more isolated areas, at first Puebla (it was isolated then!) and later New Mexico, where Moorish culture persisted until very recently.  Some years ago I noted a classic Mesopotamian Arab recipe in a traditional New Mexican cookbook by Cleofas Jaramillo (1981).  Gary Nabhan, an authority on these connections, found that the Jaramillo family did indeed have a Moorish converso background (Nabhan 2014).  As so often, foodways are mirrored in musical styles; New Mexico is a living museum of Moorish songs, even today after many centuries.  Older Hispanic singing styles are pure Moorish, and all the Hispanic traditions of the southwest are at least somewhat influenced, however indirectly, by that part of the heritage (see Robb 1980, but writing in the mid-20^th century Robb did not realize the extent of Moorish influence in New Mexico, which was established largely in the 1980-2010 period).

One product of this was classic Puebla cooking.  The famous mole poblano is the perfect fusion of Aztec and Moorish haute cuisine.  It is basically a Moorish chicken dish fused with an Aztec turkey dish.  From the Moorish side we get the spices, sesame seeds, onions, and basic overall technique.  From the Aztec side we get the chocolate, tomato, and chile.  Stuffed chiles and stuffed squash simply classic Moorish stuffed vegetable dishes that use Mexican instead of Near Eastern vegetables.  They have gone home to Spain; you find them especially in Estremadura, the source of a large percentage of the original conquistadores and settlers.  Countless other Mexican dishes, including essentially all the ways of cooking lamb and mutton, are Moorish.

Another interesting Moorish dish is migas, basically stale bread soaked in broth, the tharid of Arab cuisine.  This is commoner in Spain than in Mexico, but it has found a home in Tepito, a rough working-class area of Mexico City.  The people there took to making cheap migas by salvaging bones from butchers and restaurants and cooking them into stock, then making migas with stale bread and tortillas.  With the inevitable Mexican (and especially Chilango) pride in making do, this got idealized as a marker of the tough, resourceful Tepitan, and thus called “vita-migas,” from vitaminas, Spanish for “vitamins” (Hernández 2009; he cites a wonderful Tepito saying that cannot be repeated in polite company but is all the better a life guide for that).

Another important derivative of Spanish and Moorish culture fusing with Native American culture was the belief that certain foods are heating to the body while others are cooling and still others are neutral.  Heating foods include high-calorie and spicy ones; cooling foods are low-calorie, often green vegetables, and tend to seem cool to the touch; neutral foods are basic starch staples.  This idea comes largely from ancient Greek medicine, but was developed largely by the Arab and Persian doctors in the early medieval period.  In Mexico it fused with similar Indigenous ideas.  One interesting and still locally important Indigenous idea is that wild areas, being cooler and moister than the hot sunny villages and fields, are cooling to the body and to foods produced there, while people and foods in the hot, dusty villages become hot.  Either way, chiles, strong alcohol, and fried foods are heating; green vegetables are cooling; tortillas and rice are neutral.  Many of you have encountered this belief.  It is fossilized in the English language in the term “to catch a cold.”  Within my lifetime, Americans almost all believed that colds came from experiencing cooling foods or from getting a chill or from similar cooling influences, not from catching a virus.  This is only one of many Mexican and New World beliefs that come from fusion of Spanish and Indigenous worldviews (or ontologies, as anthropologists say).

The Spanish favorite animal was the pig.  This stems from Celtic and Roman traditions.  The pig also found a happy home in Puebla, to the point where I heard there a bit of lousy poetry:  “Cuatro cosas come el Poblano:  Cerdo, cochinito, puerco, y marrano.”  “Pueblans eat four things: hog, pig, pork and boar.”  Notably exaggerated, but too good to leave out of this talk.

Anyway, the Spanish became the world’s master sausage makers (along with the Portuguese and Italians), and they introduced a pretty full range of it to the New World, where it thrives best in rather dry highland areas like Mexico City and the Altos de Chiapas.

Another influence at this time was African.  The Spanish imported an all too large number of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and its coasts and shores, because the Native Americans died out from disease and overwork.  The entire Antilles were virtually depopulated within 50 years.  The biggest reasons included smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever, to which the Africans had some resistance.  The dreadful toll of disease hit Mexico more slowly and with less horrific effect, but by 1700 the Indigenous population had been reduced 90 to 95%, locally to 100%, and replaced in large party by people of African origin.   Unlike the situation in the United States and in Brazil, Africans did not enormously influence the actual dishes, but they introduced a range of foods: black-eyed peas, yams, okra, African rice, watermelons, and many more.  They made important foods out of the Native American peanut and sweet potato (both South American but introduced to Mexico before Columbus), which resemble African indigenous foods.  The most African-influenced regions are the area around Veracruz and the Costa Chica of Guerrero, both of which preserve highly African-influenced musical styles, including the amazing Jarocho music of Veracruz.  (“Jarocho,” originally a “racial” term for mixed African-Indigenous-Spanish locals, has become a general term of pride for Veracruzanos.)  Both areas preserve some minor but interesting African foodways, including a fondness for fried foods.             Meanwhile, the Manila Galleon kept Mexico in constant touch with the Philippines.  The galleon ran every year, going east on the trade winds in the tropics, then coming back on the westerlies, taking something like a great circle route through the north Pacific.  It coasted California on this run, and occasionally paused briefly.  It ran to Acapulco, which thus was influenced by Filipino culture.  Everything from distilling (see above) to the local names of some dishes (including black beans mixed with rice) came thus to Acapulco.  Chinese immigrants occasionally appeared.

Thus by the 18^th century, Mexican food was, quite literally, a total melting pot.  Moving away from food a minute, we can learn from the story of Santiago de Murcia.  He was a musician to the Queen of Spain at the start of the 1700s, playing French and Spanish guitar music, but she died, and the new queen liked only Italian music.  So Santiago went to Mexico to seek his fortune, and there became fascinated with the local folk music, setting down many Native American and African dances (O’Dette 1998).  The African dances included the world’s first recorded cumbias (or “cumbas’)—predating the 1990s cumbia boom by 250 years.  All these were getting more and more Spanish-influenced, and vice versa.  Spain and Mexico were musical melting pots as well as literal ones.

The 19^th century brought yet more influences.  The French arrived and briefly conquered Mexico before being expelled again (part of the process being the actually inconclusive battle celebrated on Cinco de Mayo—not a holiday in Mexico, which is much more concerned with its actual independence day, Sept. 16).  Even before French rule, the prestige of French food had influenced Mexico.  With French rule, it took the urban areas by storm, and the elites consumed little else for years.  French bread influenced the Mexican bolillo and other wheat flour items.  French cakes and pastries, French ways with meat and fish, French menus, and French table manners were general (Pilcher 1998).  Meanwhile, other European influences accumulated; beer, more German and United States-style than French or Spanish, slowly replaced pulque and other home brews as the alcoholic drink of choice, and now Mexico is one of the world’s major brewers and consumers of that beverage.  Otherwise, heavy German and Irish immigration in the 19^th century has had surprisingly little obvious influence, but it certainly colors Mexican food and consumption habits.

After the French were expelled, but mostly in the 20^th century, Indigenous Mexican food slowly came back into style.  However, in the meantime, another huge influence had appeared.  Chinese immigrants flooded into Mexico in the late 19^th century, brought in as cheap labor on railroads, in mines, in new agribusiness plantations, and so on.  They formed local Chinatowns, where typical foods of the poorer rural parts of coastal Guangdong Province were found: chop suey, chow mein, egg fuyong, noodle soups, white rice, soy sauce, pickled vegetables, preserved eggs and fish, Chinese sausage, and stir-fried dishes using small bits of boneless chicken or pork stir-fried with vegetables cut into small cubes.  My generation remembers this well from California Chinatowns as well as from Chinatowns in Mexicali, Mexico City, and elsewhere.  The Chinatown in Mexicali, now about gone, was a fascinating time machine when I was young; you could visit it and go back to the early 1900s.  The Chinese had been brought in as laborers on the new fields created with large-scale irrigation, or had come as tradespeople and urban workers, and had remained fairly conservative in foods and other ways.  Chinese food is now widespread in Mexico, and has slowly diversified, so one can now find Sichuan food and other non-Cantonese specialties in the bigger cities.  One Chinese introduction that has become widely known in ordinary Mexican society are the little salted plums or apricots called saladitos in Mexican Spanish.

A bigger influence was a renewed burst of Arab food borrowing.  This was due to the sudden tide of repression that swept the previously tolerant Turkish Empire in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  The empire was dying, and looking for ways to shore up power; also, German advisors counseled more firm and culturally homogenizing policies.  The results included savage repression and local massacres of Christian Arabs and full-scale genocide of Armenians.  Today we think of Arabs as Muslims, but in 1900 about 10% were Christian, with a huge concentration in Syria (then including Lebanon) and Palestine.  Thousands of them fled to Latin America, especially if they were Catholic—whether Roman rite or Syrian rite.  They introduced the foods of their home region.  Possibly the most widely known now is the semita (Arabic simit), a ring-shaped bread covered with sesame seeds.  It is widely sold in Mexico as a street vendor snack.  Another food that caught on was kibi, ground meat and bulgur wheat combined in a pointed-ended meatball and fried.  These have now become a “traditional Maya” food, having spread from the Merida city market area.  A new boom in stuffed vegetables was also apparent.  Baklava, raw onions, Greek-type salads, and other foods became known.  Perhaps most interesting was the new form of tacos al pastor.  Previously probably just made with meat hung up to roast over a fire (the carne al pastor of old-time cookbooks), this now became the Greek- and Turkish-style gyro:  meat is sliced, marinated, and impaled on a vertical spit; bits are shaved off from the turning mass of meat and wrapped in a soft tortilla.  Many cities had Arab restaurants.  Merida used to have a range of incredibly wonderful Lebanese-style restaurants, ranging from very cheap to very expensive and luxurious, but I think only one is left now.  Gary Nabhan, who is Lebanese-American, has been increasingly involved in documenting Arab foods in New World folk traditions (Nabhan 2014).  Another huge influence came from the Arab immigrants starting supermarkets.  The two major Mexican supermarket chains, Chedraui and San Francisco de Asís, were both started by Christian Arab immigrants from the old Turkish Empire.  Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, is also descended from Arab immigrants.

Smaller groups of immigrants had more local influence.  The extent to which Mexico is a melting pot, like the United States, is not always appreciated.  Huge numbers of Irish and large numbers of Germans went to Mexico in the 19^th century.  The Irish left little trace, but the Germans included many Mennonites, from the German-Dutch border country, speaking a different language somewhere between German and Dutch.  They set up farming colonies in remote areas, and often live by selling cheese, including a high-fat white cheese that has come to be known as menonita.  Another fascinating group was made up of mascogos, descended from escaped African-American enslaved persons from Texas, who maintained a strikingly traditional lifestyle in remote parts of north Mexico well into the 20^th century, combining Mexican rural foods with African and African-American foods like soski bread and tetapun, a Mexicanized spelling of ‘tater pone—sweet potato pie (del Moral and Siller 2000).  More generally, southern US cooking influenced other parts of Mexico.  Yucatan state, especially Merida, is fond of strictly southern-US-style pecan pies and cheese pies, called pie de nuez and pie de queso respectively; this leads to some puns, since pai is Maya for “skunk.”

 

As of 1900, and even 1950, village Mexico was still Indigenous as far as foodways went.  Maize, beans, squash and chiles remained the staples.  Tortillas, tamales, tacos, moles, and other pre—Colombian dishes were the norm.  Pulque and tepache or tiswin (homemade beers) were the alcoholic drinks.  All sorts of domestic and wild greens were eaten, under the old Nahuatl name of quelites (Nahuatl quilitl).  Most of them are very healthful, and they have been studied in detail by ethnobotanists recently.  An interesting case is verdolagas (purslane in English; Portulaca oleracea).  It is a domesticated crop with selected varieties in central Mexico, an enthusiastically consumed weed in the rest of Mexico, and a mere weed—pulled out when seen—in the United States.  Several other crops show this pattern of being appreciated in Mexico but ignored elsewhere.  Mexican culture is much more appreciative of the plant world than are many others.  A large percentage of our favorite domestic flowers were domesticated by Indigenous Mexicans, from marigolds and dahlias to zinnias and cosmos.

Many foodways are extremely health-promoting; many foods have medicinal values, and many herbal medicines have come from Mexico.  The most dramatic finding was the birth control pill, which was developed from wild yams used in local medicine.  The story of how the pill was developed, and how Mexico lost out on the financial bonanza, has been told in a superb book, Jungle Laboratories by Gabriela Soto Laveaga (2010).  Since then, Mexico has been very careful about letting anyone patent its plant medicines—far too careful, from a humanitarian point of view, since it will not allow much research.

 

My own experiences with Mexican food have been largely in Maya lands of southeastern Mexico.  I have done food ethnography in Yucatan and Quintana Roo, and fairly extensively in Tabasco, Campeche, and Chiapas.  They are culturally very different indeed from the Nahuatl-dominated center.  Tortillas are now basic, but they are a fairly recent introduction, probably becoming staple food within the last few centuries.  Before that, the Maya ate tamales, pit-roasted meats, and large maize breads baked in the pit oven (pib).  Also baked in the pit oven are whole pigs, cochinita pibil.  Many soups and stews were made.  They also ate manioc, sweet potatoes, and other root crops.  They eat an enormous range of tropical fruits and vegetables.  I piublished a long article on my work (Anderson 2010) and self-published a book of recipes (Anderson 2008, recipes available online at www.krazykioti.com under the title “Mayaland Cuisine”), and I am currently finishing up a book with food ethnographer Amber O’Connor on Maya foodways (O’Connor and Anderson 2017).

Maya food also includes a range of ceremonial dishes for the many ceremonies to worship and thank spirits and gods for rain, harvests, game, and other blessings.  These would traditionally be based on the sacred maize, and include squash seed meal.  Humans were made of maize by the gods, and then animated by blood that the gods shed to give life to the maze dough.  The squash seed meal symbolizes the blood (at least to some traditional ritualists).  Turkey was the traditional meat; chicken is now used.  One set of stews made of turkey and maize (with vegtetables and chiles) is colored according to the four directions.  North is considered to associated with white, and the stew is colored with white maize flour.  South is yellow, colored with yellow maize and with a little achiote.  East is red, colored with more achiote.  West is black, and is colored with burned chiles.  The chiles are toasted black and then ground.  The center is green, the color of vegetation and life, symbolized on the traditional altars by green leaves rather than food.  Homemade cigarettes of native tobacco are also offered to the deities.  Many deities have been equated with Catholic saints, and in particular the all-important Maize God was early equated with Jesus.

Maya food was probably always influenced from central Mexico, but after the Spanish conquest there was more influence, including Nahuatl dishes like chilmole and pipian as well as tortillas.  Later, the usual Caribbean and Arab influences found their way in.

 

The 20^th and 21^st centuries have seen the floodgates open, in so far as they were not open already.  Most obvious has been the spectacular increase in Italian restaurants, especially since about 1960.  Pizza joints, spaghetti houses, sub sandwich spots, and more upscale Italian restaurants are now as common in Mexico as in the US.  The quality of food at these places is generally very low, I am sorry to say, but they provide cheap, quick, easy-to-eat meals for hurried working-class and middle-class people.

The United States has inevitably had an enormous influence, much of it highly negative from the point of view of health and food quality.   Mass production of low-nutrient breads and snack foods came early, and has only increased over the years.  Soft drinks are the most universal borrowing.  Coca-cola® is so universal that the Mexican idiom for utter remoteness is “where even the Coca truck doesn’t go.”  United States food companies have bought many Mexican ones.  United States soybeans, maize, and other bulk crops flood the market. NAFTA ensured that protected, heavily subsidized US agribusiness could flood the Mexican markets; less subsidized, the Mexican producers cannot compete.  This has ruined many dairy, maize, and bean farms.  More recently, United States chains, from McDonald’s to Pizza Hut, have become universal; even US pseudo-Mexican-food chains like Taco Bell are widespread, especially in tourist areas.

Not all the influence is bad (though finding the exceptions takes searching).  United States innovations in agricultural production have been largely beneficial to farmers, though with important recent problems.  US investment, especially in agricultural research and development, has often been valuable and sometimes decisive.  US culinary trends have spilled over into Mexico, leading to renewed interest in traditional, regional, and folk dishes and ingredients, and renewed interest in freshness and quality of ingredients.  Returning migrants to el norte, as well as tourists and other visitors, have made sure that any new styles in New York or Los Angeles or other centers are quickly tried out in Mexico

Meanwhile, not only has Mexican food continued to be popular in the United States, but also Mexicans have become the backbone of the US restaurant industry.  Fans of Anthony Bourdain will know that even in New York the kitchen staffs of fancy French restaurants are heavily immigrant Mexican (see e.g. Bourdain 2000).   There is a Chinese type of noodle that is stretched by swinging it out like a skipping rope, which really develops the gluten and makes a very chewy noodle.  The technique is incredibly difficult to master, but I have seen it done in Los Angeles by a Mexican cook.  Zacatecas in particular is the source for a slarge percentage of Los Angeles’ greatest chefs.

A food event worth major attention is the development of high-yield varieties of wheat and other grains at CIMMYT, the international research center in Texcoco, now celebrating its 50^th birthday.  This center was set up by the Mexican government and Rockefeller Foundation, later getting help from various governments and foundations during the 1960s, when food shortages were common and world famine loomed.  Crash programs of research at CIMMYT and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines produced high-yield, easy-to-grow grains that saved the world.  Other centers dealing with other crops have arisen since.  The resulting “Green Revolution” has had a bad reputation with scholars, because it tended to encourage overuse of pesticides and fertilizers, but that need not happen.  Recent varieties use much less chemical input.  About the only downside, really, is that the new wheats don’t taste as good as the old ones.  We used to stock up on bolillos when we went to Mexico, back when I was young, because the wheat (and therefore the bolillos) was so much better tasting than wheat in the US.  No longer.  It would be easy to breed back the taste into modern wheats, but no one seems to care.

CIMMYT did not make dramatic breakthroughs with maize, for the very good reason that the Mexican people had bred such incredibly tough, diverse, and high-yielding maizes that there was little they could do.  (I have this on direct authority from former CIMMYT personnel I have interviewed, notably Edgar Niederhouser, to whom thanks.)  In any case, the great success of CIMMYT was the high-yield, short-straw wheats developed by Norman Borlaug and his team; he won the Nobel Prize for this.  These wheats have the additional advantage of growing well in Mexico’s hot climate, unlike most high-yield wheats.  They totally revolutionized wheat-raising not only in Mexico, but in India and Pakistan.  Borlaug, in his Nobel Prize speech in 1970, warned that he and his colleagues had only bought the world some time to get population growth under control:  “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.” (Nobel Peace Prize speech, as quoted by Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2009, “Transgressing Planetary Boundaries,” Scientific American, Dec., p. 36.)

Alas, the world did not listen, and now is food-short again.  Worse, agricultural research has been run down and often left to pesticide companies (Pardey 2016).  The traditional, hardy, disease-resistant varieties and species of crops and animals are rapidly going extinct, though CIMMYT and other centers are desperately trying to save at least the seeds.  Recent GMO crops and other highly disruptive influences are coming into Mexico.  Mexico has banned GMO maize, but it has come via returning migrants to the US, and is now not uncommon.  This presents a huge danger to traditional varieties.  They could be genetically swamped by hybridization.  Some hybrids of wild and local maize with GMO varieties have turned up, but fortunately farmers have become more careful, and this is no longer being reported (information from my colleagues and students, especially Norman Ellstrand).  GMO’s also require more (and more, and more) chemical and mechanical inputs, thus getting increasingly out of range of local less affluent farmers, who are driven off the farm.  The ironic result of these new, very inferior “improved” crops is rural decline and the abandonment of millions of acres that were fertile and productive until recently. Once abaindoned, they do not even return to wilderness.  In fact, they often erode away, leaving a moonscape.  Or they become cattle range, increasing erosion and biological degradation as well as rural inequality.

Fortunately, Mexican farmers are tough and independent people, and this process of rural decline has not progressed so far as it has in many areas of the world.  Many parts of Mexico, including Quintana Roo where I do research, are strongholds of independent small farming by local families.  These and other traditional Indigenous farmers are very skill-intensive, and we really need to document the skills and knowledge before they are lost to modernization.

Even so, Mexico’s curse since the Spanish introduced giant estates has been huge-scale farms, either cattle ranches or agribusinesses, with landless laborers reduced to starvation wages and horrible living conditions.  This plantation-style agriculture came to Spain with the Romans.  It was later imposed by the Spanish on the Moors.  Then the Spanish from heavily Moorish parts of Spain used the same institutions to reduce the Indigenous population to serfdom.  This large-scale, landlord-dominated type of agriculture is increasingly a curse to rural Mexico, and now many of the plantations are owned by giant international agribusiness firms.  Dvera Saxton here can tell you more about it; she is one of the leading experts on this problem.

Today, unless there is a new effort comparable to CIMMYT’s, but dedicated to saving small farms and traditional varieties and to farming without deadly chemicals, you will probably all live to see mass starvation worldwide. 

All too predictably, another main event of the 21^st century has been the swamping of Mexico by fast-food chains and giant food corporations.  Most are US-based, of course.  Even the iconic Bimbo bakery company has been taken over.

The result of this is horribly predictable.  Besides cutting the pleasure of eating, it has the more tangible and measurable effect of sending diabetes and other diet-related disease rates to unprecedented heights.  Native Americans are particularly susceptible genetically to diabetes and metabolic syndrome (see e.g. SIGMA Type 2 Diabetes Consortium 2014), but anyone would succumb to the mix of bleached white flour, refined white sugar, and soybean oil that is now the standard diet in much of Mexico.  Sugar in commercial soft drinks is now actually the main source of calories for Mexican children.  Worldwide, diabetes rates are soaring, and 422 million people now have this condition (Sonnenburg and Bāckhed 2016).

Traditional diets are protective.  In Mexico, nopales (cactus pads from Platyopuntia spp.) are known to reduce blood sugar and inflammation and alleviate diabetes, and buds of Cecropia spp. appear to, also.  Many other folk remedies are used, with varying effectiveness.  Certainly several Maya people I know have sent their diabetes into remission by using traditional remedies.  Diet is the best cure, though.  Refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, are notorious risk factotrs, but so is soybean oil, because the body quickly converts much of it into prostaglandins, which are inflammatory.  Obesity also causes diabetes directly, through inflammatory mechanisms.  It would be hard to imagine a better diet than the traditional Mexican one of whole grains, wild greens, seed atoles, nopales, avocados, fruit, beans, vegetables, and some lean meat and fish.  Unfortunately, contemporary supply chains and food marketing venues are set up to maximize the marketing of comida chatarra—“junk food.”  It would be perfectly easy to develop supply and marketing chains that would do the opposite; all it would take is going back to the old open markets, still flourishing in many areas.  (Don’t miss the one in Oaxaca.  It’s worth a special trip to the city.)

 

Mexican food may be especially complex and diverse in its origins, but it is fairly typical of food systems worldwide.  No food system developed without massive borrowing from others.  Borrowing goes on all the time.  No food system remains static for more than a generation or two.  Foods fall out of favor, come in from outside, get modified, get substituted.  Fads rise and decline.  The idea of stable, long-continued folkways is nonsense.  Mexico has had some astonishingly long-running food traditions, notably the ever-wonderful tortilla and its frequent accompaniment of boiled beans and chile sauce.  However, little else remains unchanged.

Even after 150 years of cultural anthropology, many people believe that “cultures” and “ethnicities” are steel-walled spheres that are completely independent of each other and do not affect each other except through aggression.  No.  Culture and ethnicity are abstract concepts that cover a realty of constantly shifting, changing practices.  People constantly borrow, negotiate and renegotiate (Bourdieu 1977), and decide to change.

This puts in a rather ironic light the recent protests against “white men,” meaning Anglo-American yanquis, cooking Mexican food.  I occuasionally have nightmares of trying to sort out the mess if we carried this principle to its logical conclusion.  Only Nahuatl speakers would be allowed to make tortillas.  Only Maya would be allowed to make chocolate.  And so on….

There is a huge difference between normal cultural borrowing and actual offensive appropriation.  If cultural appropriation is deliberately insulting (like stereotypic caricatures) or is outright ripoff for profit, it is as bad as any other insult or ripoff.  If it is done more creditable reasons, it’s not only normal, it’s inevitable and necessary.  Think if Norman Borlaug had refused to share those wheat varieties—as, in fact, modern seed companies do refuse to share theirs, insisting on purchase at very high profit rates.  Instead, the wheat was made freely available worldwide, saving tens of millions of lives.  Mexico today has thousands of species and varieties of useful plants and animals.  They could revolutionize farming worldwide.  We need to be able to get them into circulation and feed the world.  But abuse by giant firms and outdated, poorly formulated patent laws make this impossible at the present time.  Reform is seriously needed.

When Western medical researchers were looking for quinine in the forests of the Amazon Basin, they explained they needed it as a cure for malaria, a disease from the Old World.  One local assistant commented:  “God put the fever in Europe and the quinine in America in order to teadch us the solidarty that should prevail among all the peoples of the earth.”  (Quoted Whitaker 1954:58).  Whether God did it or it happened naturally, the point is made.  We all need each other’s knowledge.  We all need each other’s foods and foodways.  We all need each other.

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a talk given at California State University-Fresno, Oct. 19, 2016.  Thanks to Jen Banh and Dvera Saxton for initially seeking me out to give this talk.  Thanks to my coworkers in Mexico, especially Felix Medina Tzuc and Aurora Dzib Xihum de Cen, as well as colleagues and students too numerous to mention.

 

Anderson, E. N.  2008.  Mayaland Cuisine: The Food of Maya Mexico.  Self-published.

—  2010.  “Food and Feasting in the Zona Maya of Quintana Roo.”  In John Staller and Michael Carrasco (eds.), Pre-Columbian Foodways:  Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica.  New York:  Springer.  Pp. 441-465.

 

Bourdain, Anthony.  2000 .  Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  New York: Ecco/HarperCollins.

 

Bourdieu, Pierre.  1977.  Outline of a Theory of Practice.  Tr. Richard Nice.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Del Moral, Paulina, and Alicia Siller V.  2000.  Recetario Mascogo de Coahuila.  Mexico City: Conaculta.

 

Diamond, Jared.  1997.  Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

 

Duran, Fray Diego.  1994.  The History of the Indies of New Spain.  Tr. Doris Heyden [Spanish orig. ca. 1570].  Norman, OK:  University of Oklahoma Press.

 

Hernández, Alfonso.  2009.  “The Vita-migas of Tepito.”  Tr. Laura Roush.  Ethnology 47:89-93.

 

Jaramillo, Cleofas M.  1981.  The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes.  Orig. 1942.  Santa Fe: Ancient City Press.

 

Katz, S. H.; M. L. Hediger; L. A. Valleroy.  1974.  “Traditional Maize Processing Techniques in the New World.”  Sci 148:765-773.

Melville, Elinor G. K.  1997.  A Plague of Sheep:  Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Nabhan, Gary.  2014.  Cumin, Camels and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

O’Connor, Amber, and E. N. Anderson.  2017.  K’oben.  Lanahm, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

 

O’Dette, Paul.  1998.  Jácaras!  18^th Century Spanish Baroque Guitar Miusic of Santiago de Murcia.  (Liner notes to CD recording.)  Harmonia Mundi (recording company).

 

Pardey, Philip G.  2016.  “Agricultural R&D Is on the Move.”  Nature 537:301-303.

 

Painter, Michael, and William Durham (eds.).  1995.  The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America.  Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan.

Pilcher, Jeffrey.  1998.  Que vivan los tamales!  Food and the Making of Mexican Identity.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

 

Ramos-Elorduy, Julieta.  1998.  Creepy Dcrawly Cuisine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects.  Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.

 

Ramos Elorduy de Conconi, Julieta.  1991.  Los insectos como fuente de proteínas en el futuro.  Mexico: Limusa.

 

Ramos Elorduy de Conconi, Julieta, and José Manuel Pino Moreno.  1989.  Los insectos comestibles en el Mexico antiguo.  Mexico: AGT Editor.

 

Robb, John Donald.  1980.  Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self-Portrait of a People.  Norman, OK:  University of Oklahoma Press.

 

Sahagun, Bernardino de.  1959.  Florentine Codex.  Book 9: The Merchants. Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

—  1961.  Florentine Codex. Book 10: The People.  Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

—  1963.  Florentine Codex.  Book 11: Earthly Things.  Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

—  1979.  Florentine Codex.  Book 8:  Kings and Lords.  Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

SIGMA Type 2 Diabetes Consortium.  2014.  “Sequence Variants in SLC16A11 Are a Common Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Mexico.”  Nature 506:97-101.

 

Sonnenburg, Justin L., and Fredrik Bāckhed.  2016.  “Diet-microbiota Interactions as Moderators of Human Metabolism.”  Nature 535:56-64.

Soto Laveaga, Gabriela.  2010.  Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 

Watson, Andrew.  2008.  Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World:  The Diffusion of Crops and Techniques, 700-1100. 2^nd edn.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Whitaker, A.  1954.  The Western Hemisphere Idea.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CAMPECHE

 

Recados, sauces, and minor snacks and market foods in Campeche are generally the same as in Yucatan, so refer to recipes in the previous chapter.

 

 

SEAFOOD

 

Black Rice Soup (a “dry soup”)

 

1/2 lb. rice

1 oz. lard or vegetable oil

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 quarts stock from cooking black beans (one could use the liquid from a few cans of black beans)

2 serrano chiles or other good green chiles

4 epazote leaves or a small branch of epazote

Salt to taste

 

Soak the rice; drain; fry in the lard or oil.  Add the garlic, onion and chiles (chopped), the bean stock, the epazote and the salt.  Cook over a very low flame.

Alternative method (not traditional but good): fry the onion and garlic first, then add the rice.  This requires more lard or oil.

This can be made with seafood—crab meat, shrimp, squid—in which case one can leave out the black bean liquid.

Compare the similar recipe in the Yucatan chapter.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:24)

 

 

Bricklayer’s Dogfish (cazón de albañil)

 

1 roast dogfish

3 sprigs epazote

Salt

4 tomatoes

1 onion

2 xkatik chiles

Oil for frying

 

Boil the dogfish with the epazote.  Bone and shred.  Fry up the shreds with the vegetables (chopped).  Add the stock in which the dogfish was cooked–enough to make a sauce rather than a soup.

I admit I included this dish only because the name is irresistible.  Still, it’s great if you use a more palatable fish.  Actually, it is a version of a common Caribbean dish using salt cod (presoaked and washed to remove the salt), and I recommend cod—salted or not—for it.

 

 

Campeche Caviare

 

Roes from one esmedregal, a large mackerel-like fish with very good, large roe sacs

1 tbsp. oregano

8 garlic cloves, mashed

1/2 tsp. ground pepper

Salt to taste

2 onions

1 head of garlic

4 large tomatoes

1/2 cup olive oil

 

Boil the roes with some oregano, garlic and salt.  Chill.  Peel the membrane off the roes.  Roast the onion, garlic head, and tomatoes, blend them, and fry them in the olive oil.  Season.  Add the roes and boil 15-20 minutes.

Fish roes are widely used in mixed seafood dishes in eastern Mexico.

 

 

Fried Flaked Dogfish

If you are not into the cult of cazón, try this with any firm white-fleshed fish, such as cod.  It is then really excellent.

 

2 lb. fresh dogfish, in pieces

1 tbsp. salt

1/2 green onion

Epazote

Lime

1 lb. tomatoes

1 chile habanero

1/2 regular onion

oil

 

Cook the dogfish in water to cover, with the salt, green onion and epazote.

Bone and skin the dogfish.  Rinse and break up into small pieces.  Season with the lime, and with more salt and epazote.

Roast the tomatoes, chile and onion.  Blend up.  Fry this salsa in oil.

Add the dogfish to the salsa and fry till this sauce thickens.

 

 

Dogfish Bread (pan de cazón)

This universal Campeche delicacy is even more an acquired taste than its main ingredient.  I present a recipe purely for ethnographic interest.

 

2 lb. roasted dogfish

1 tbsp. salt

Epazote to taste

½ -1 lb. lard

1/2 onion

2 lb. tomatoes

About 1 cup refried black beans (boil the beans; mash; fry in lard)

Tortillas

4 habaneros

½ c bitter orange or lime juice

 

Wash and cut up the dogfish.  Boil with salt for thirty minutes, adding some epazote.  Remove skin and bones and fry.

Stir-fry the onion and the rest of the epazote, chopped, in lard.  Add the tomatoes, cut up, and the pieces of dogfish.

Cover and cook for fifteen minutes.  Retire from the flame.  Break up the fish into flakes and mix all ingredients thoroughly.

Heat the tortillas and the beans.  Moisten the tortillas in the dogfish sauce.  Cover with a layer of beans.  Cover this with the dogfish mix.  Then add another layer (tortilla, beans, sauce).  Keep building, by layers, as much as desired.  (About six layers is typical.)  Serve with the salsa.

Make habanero salsa:  chop up the habaneros, preferably with some onion or garlic, and marinate in the citrus juice.

Variants abound, but the basic model above is pretty standard.

This is more or less the national dish of Campeche.  If it is made (as it usually is) with the dogfish that has been sitting in the marketplace for a while, outsiders may find it reminiscent of school-cafeteria tuna casserole.

 

 

Esmedregal in Orange Juice

Esmedregal is a term for various large fish with firm white flesh.  Anything from albacore to red snapper works well for this one.

 

2 lb. esmedregal fillets, or other firm, juicy, white-fleshed fish

Parsley, 1 bunch

Garlic, 2-3 cloves

Oregano, about 1 tsp dried

Cumin seeds

Black pepper

Salt

1 cup bitter orange juice

1 cup olive oil

1/2 white onion

1 sweet chile

1 lb. tomatoes, sliced

1 hot chile

Juice of two sweet oranges

 

Cut the fish in small pieces.  Wash in water with a bit of lime juice added.

Blend the herbs and spices into a paste with the bitter orange juice (see substitutions in introduction).  Marinate the fish in half of this, for an hour or so.

Fry lightly.

Separately fry the vegetables, cut up.  Add the fish.  Cook, adding the rest of the herb paste, and finally the sweet orange juice.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:36)

 

 

Fish casserole

 

2 lb. white, firm-fleshed fish

Juice of 2 limes

1/2 cup oil

1 onion, in thin slices

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1/4 lb. bell pepper, chopped

1 lb. tomato, blended

2 peppercorns, crushed

1 tsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tbsp. fresh oregano (dried oregano can be substituted, in which case use less, about 1 tsp.)

1 tbsp. parsley, chopped

1 tsp. nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Wash the fish, cut in medium-sized pieces, and marinate in the lime juice for 15 minutes.  Heat the oil.  Fry in it the onion and garlic.  Then add the bell pepper, blended tomato, pepper, cumin seeds, oregano, nutmeg, parsley and salt.  When this has cooked a short time, add the fish and cook till done.

 

 

Fish Makum

A classic favorite, also very popular in Yucatan.

Cherry Hamman explains:  “The words mak, ‘to close’ and kum ‘cooking pot,’ explain the title of this ancient hearthrite.”  (Hamman 1998:251; her recipe is for a meat makum, also an excellent dish).

 

6 garlic cloves

2 roasted onions

1/2 tbsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tsp. or more of oregano

1 tbsp. achiote paste

5 cloves

8 black peppercorns

1/2 cup vinegar

1/2 cup oil

Juice of 2 limes

Salt to taste

Oil for oiling the dish

1 banana leaf

2 lb. fish fillets (snapper, pompano or the like)

3 tomatoes, sliced

4 whole güero chiles (medium-sized, hot, yellow chiles) or comparable chiles

1 red bell pepper or 1-2 fresh red chiles, roasted, peeled and sliced

 

Blend the garlic, one of the onions, and the cumin seeds, oregano, achiotes, cloves, and peppercorns.  Mix with the vinegar, some oil, and the salt and lime juice.  Alternatively, you can just use a cube of red recado dissolved in lime or bitter orange juice.

Oil a casserole dish and line with the banana leaf.  Put on some of the sauce (above), then the fish, then the rest of the sauce, well rubbed onto all the fish.

Decorate with the tomatoes and the other onion, sliced; the whole chiles; and the strips of bell peppers or chiles.

Bend the banana leaf around to cover all.  Bake, or cook over slow fire, till done.

Parsley or cilantro for garnish is allowed.

Serve with white rice and black beans.

Variant: Nutmeg (pinch) and bay leaves are sometimes added.  More tomatoes can be used.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:34 on the basis of a good deal of field experience)

 

 

Pampano in Escabeche

Pampano is a medium-sized, roundish fish with firm white flesh and a very delicate flavor.  Red snapper would work (but the real thing is better). I  can even imagine doing this dish with trout.

 

1 grilled or fried pampano

1 large onion

1 carrot

1 jalapeno pepper

2 bay leaves

1 tsp. cumin seeds

Few black peppercorns

1/2 cup vinegar

Salt and other spices to taste

Oil

 

Chop and fry the onion.  Add the other vegetables and spices.  Cook briefly (a few minutes).  Pour this sauce over the pampano.

 

 

Pampano in Green Sauce

The medieval Arab-Andalusian green sauce appears yet again.  This is a particularly good form of it.

 

2 lb. pampano fillets

Lime

1 bunch parsley

1 bunch cilantro

1 green chile (xkatik preferable)

Black pepper

Oregano to taste (about 1 tsp.)

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

Salt

Vinegar to taste (a small amount)

6 cloves garlic

Lard for frying

1 small onion

2 tomatoes

2 mild yellow chiles

 

Wash the fish and rub with lime.

Blend the parsley, cilantro, green chile, oregano, pepper, cumin seeds, salt, vinegar and garlic.

Marinate the fish in this sauce.

Fry all in lard (or oil).  One way to do this is to put the fish in, then cover with the sauce.  Another way is to fry the sauce first, then put the fish in (this works only with quite thin fish, or fillets).

Then add the onion and tomatoes, chopped, and the chiles, chopped or whole.  When all has fried somewhat, add water and cook till sauce is thick.

Variants:  One can dispense with either the parsley or the cilantro, or even the green chile, and use instead hojasanta leaves, or tomatillos (green husk-tomatoes).  In fact, any combination of green, flavorful herbs is good.

 

 

Pampano Pohchuk

 

1 pampano, ca. 1 lb.

1 tbsp. achiote paste

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

24 garlic cloves

2 tbsp. olive oil

 

Stuffing:

Oil, for frying

1 lb. cooked small shrimp

1 lb. chopped octopus

3 garlic cloves

2 chopped tomatoes

2 laurel leaves

Salt and pepper

Banana leaves

 

Wash the fish and marinate for two hours in a marinade of the achiote, pepper, oregano, cumin seeds, garlic and olive oil (plus enough water to make a thin paste).

For the stuffing, stir-fry the onion, chopped.  Add the shrimp and octopus.  Then add the rest and boil briefly.

Stuff the fish with this.  Wrap all in banana leaves, put in a casserole dish and bake in a moderate oven for 25 minutes.

The stuffing can be varied according to what is available; stuffing without any seafood at all is not unknown.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:33

 

 

Panuchos, Campeche style

 

2 lb. masa

4 oz. flour

Salt to taste

1 lb. cooked black beans

1 lb. fried dogfish (see above in introduction to section)

1 onion, quartered

2 bitter oranges

Habanero chile, to taste

 

Mix the masa, flour and salt with enough water to make a dough.  Make small tortillas (two for each panucho).  For a panucho, cover one tortilla with beans, one with shark meat, put them together (beans and fish inside), and seal around the edges.  Fry (either deep fat or in a bit of oil in skillet).

Chop the onion and habanero and mix into the juice of the bitter oranges.  Eat as topping for the panuchos.

 

 

Seafood Rice

 

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 tomato

1 lb. rice

2 bay leaves

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Mixed seafood: shrimps, clams or other shellfish, cut-up octopus, and bits of fish

Fish stock

2 oz. peas

Oil

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Chop the onion and garlic.  Fry in a bit of oil.  Add the tomato, chopped.  Add the rice and herbs.  Fry till rice begins to stick.  Add the seafood.  Then add enough fish stock to cover all to a depth of 1/2 to 3/4″.  Add peas and cook.

Chopped peppers can be added too.  In fact, almost anything can be added.  This dish naturally calls for improvisation and substitution.  You can use any odd bits of seafood available.  Important is to achieve a contrast of textures, such as that produced by fish, clams, and octopus bits.

 

 

Seafood Salad

 

Shrimp, conch, octopus, bits of fish, shredded carrot, chopped onion, cilantro, sliced cucumber, sliced tomato, sliced avocado, salt, and pepper, in lime juice.

 

Basically a glorified fish cocktail.  As with the foregoing, the critical thing is to achieve a contrast of textures as well as tastes.

 

 

Snook in Mole Sauce

The snook is a large silver fish of warm Caribbean and Atlantic waters.  It has white flesh and a unique, rich taste that can become addictive.  A snook cooked this way is truly unique and unsurpassed, but, lacking a snook, you can use any white-fleshed fish.  Relatively firm, oily ones work best.

 

1 snook, ca. 3 lb.

Salt

4 tbsp. lard

8 ancho chiles (dried)

2 cups water

1/2 lb. cooked potatoes, cut up

Sprig of epazote

 

Clean the fish.  Rub with lard.  Roast on a grill.

Soak the chiles to rehydrate them.  Then blend and fry in lard.  Add salt to taste.

Add in the water, the fish (cut in pieces), and the potatoes and epazote.  Cook till flavors blend.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:37)

 

 

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Pork Loin with Black-eyed Peas

A rather striking recipe with a distinctly Cuban flavor.  I suspect Campeche’s long, close trade connections with Cuba are behind this dish somewhere.

 

2 garlic cloves

10 black peppercorns

1 onion

1 tbsp. achiote seeds

1/2 lb. tomato, chopped

10 sprigs epazote

1 1/2 lb. pork loin, cut in small pieces

1 quart water

Salt to taste

3/4 lb. black-eyed peas

2 lb. masa

1 habanero chile, green (unripe)

1/3 lb. lard, melted

1 banana leaf

 

Grind the spices.  Miix with the tomato, epazote and meat.  Make a soup with the water and salt, and cook till meat is done.  Cook the peas separately.

Mix the chile (cut up) and the lard into the masa.  Add the meat stew and the beans.  Cook till it forms a solid paste.  Grease a baking dish and line with banana leaf.  Add in the paste and bake at 350o till golden.

 

 

Tamales, Campeche feast style

 

4 lb. masa

4 quarts water

Salt to taste

3/4 lb. lard

3 sprigs of epazote

10 banana leaves

 

Filling:

1 lb. jowl of pork (or other relatively firm, meaty cut)

1 1/2 lb. pork loin

1 chicken

Salt to taste

8 cloves garlic, roasted

10 black peppercorns

1/4 tsp. cumin seeds

1 tsp. achiote seeds

1 quart broth

1 1/2 lb. tomato, chopped

6 leaves or sprigs of epazote, chopped

 

Mix the masa with water.  Add salt, lard and epazote (chopped).  Simmer, stirring constantly, till thick.  Turn off flame and let stand 15 minutes.

Cook the meats in the stock, cut into small pieces, and add salt and garlic.  Grind the peppercorns, cumin seeds and achiote seeds.  Add to the stock.  Mix in the chopped meat and boil again till reduced.  Add the tomato and epazote.  Retire from the flame when cooked fairly dry.

Toast lightly the banana leaves and cut in quarters.  (Of course, you can always use foil, kitchen paper, or corn husks.)  Cover with a layer of masa dough.  Put on a chunk of stuffing and roll up.  Steam for half an hour.

 

 

 

VEGETABLES
Black Rice Soup (a “dry soup”)

 

1/2 lb. rice

1 oz. lard or vegetable oil

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 quarts stock from cooking black beans (one could use the liquid from a few cans of black beans)

2 serrano chiles

4 epazote leaves

Salt to taste

 

Soak the rice; drain; fry in the lard or oil.  Add the garlic, onion and chiles (chopped), the bean stock, the epazote and the salt.  Cook over a very low flame.

Alternative method: fry the onion and garlic first, then add the rice.  This requires more lard or oil.

This can be made with seafood—crab meat, shrimp, squid—in which case one can leave out the black bean liquid.  Chopped tomatoes, various herbs, and other vegetation can all be used.

Compare the similar recipe in the Yucatan chapter.

 

 

Campeche Salad

 

1/2 lb. chickpeas, cooked

1/2 lb. green beans

3 carrots

2 turnips

3 potatoes

2 tomatoes, chopped

1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 cup vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil the carrots and turnips.  Boil the potatoes separately.  Do not overcook–they should be firm.  Cool.  Chop and mix with the tomato and seasonings.

A very standard restaurant dish, and thus subject to infinite variation.  It is possible to add cooked rice to this.  It is also possible to add almost anything else interesting; corn kernels are particularly welcome.  The creative cook will want to experiment with herbs, chiles, and even flaked fish (this salad often accompanies fish, and there seems no reason not to add some fish in).

 

 

Vegetables in Marinade

 

 

1 cauliflower

1/2 lb. green beans

4 summer squash

4 carrots

1 red onion

4 small potatoes

Jalapeno chile (optional)

2 tbsp. olive oil

Vinegar

Herbs

Oregano, salt, and pepper to taste

 

Cut up the vegetables.  Blanch them by putting in boiling water, turning it off and leaving for 15 minutes (i.e., till the vegetables soften a bit but do not actually cook).  Wash them and put in vinegar to cover.  Add in the other ingredients and marinate at least 12 hours.

The herbs would typically be powdered thyme, marjoram and perhaps others.  One can easily use fresh herbs instead.  Be creative.  The irrepressible will no doubt want to add a habanero.

Cooked sea foods, especially shellfish and octopus, can be added.

 

 

 

DESSERTS
Preserved ciricotes

The ciricote is the small fruit of a tree (Cordia sebestina) also noted for its incredibly beautiful wood.  The value of the wood leads to cutting many a ciricote tree, and the fruit is correspondingly rare.  Tough and even woody, like small quinces, ciricotes have to be cooked.

 

4 lb. ciricotes

Juice of 4 limes

1 lb. sugar

2 quarts water

3 fig leaves

 

Cook the ciricotes.  If tough, use some baking soda–or, to be really traditional, ashes–to tenderize and sweeten.

When the ciricotes are cool, peel and put in water and lime juice.  Wash, soak and drain.

Make a syrup with the sugar, water and a bit more lime juice. Add the ciricotes and fig leaves, and boil half an hour.  Bottle.

Campeche is famous for its fruit preserves and liqueurs.  This recipe will have to stand for all of them.  The recipe is standard, except for the fig leaves, which are used only when their tenderizing and thickening action is desirable, as with the tough ciricote.

Ciricote wood is yellow and brown, with a richly figured grain.  There is a great future for this tree.  If the better varieties were propagated, they could produce fruit until the tree was mature; the tree could then be harvested for its wood.

 

 

 

CHIAPAS

 

An important plant in Chiapas is chipilín (Crotalaria longirostrata), an alfalfa-like plant grown for its edible, mild-flavored leaves.  Alfalfa sprouts make a reasonable (though not terribly close) substitute.  One could even use pea tendrils (available at Asian markets).  These are similar in texture and flavor, though not looking much like chipilín, and are in fact often used in Chiapas.

Arrayán leaves are called for in several recipes; the arrayan is a bush endemic to the area.  The name means “myrtle” in Spanish, but the Chiapas arrayan is not much like a Spanish myrtle.  Bay leaves make a good substitute.  Another useful flavoring herb is avocado leaf.  I have seen a kettle of chile and beef simmering with a whole branch of avocado leaves thrust in. Mexican mountain avocado leaves have a wonderful spicy taste.  Closely related to bay leaves, they have a similar flavor and culinary use, but must be used fresh rather than dried–hence their absence from markets.  In the United States, most California avocados have spicy-flavored leaves, but Florida and Gulf Coast avocadoes are derived from Caribbean ancestry with virtually tasteless leaves.  If you don’t live near a Californian or Mexican avocado orchard, use bay leaves.  Conversely, if you do have access to such avocado leaves, try them in the following recipes.

 

 

 

TAMALES AND RELATIVES

 

Green Corn Tamales

 

20 ears of green corn

1 1/2 lb. sugar

1 lb. butter

2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

 

Shuck the ears, but be careful not to damage the shucks.  Grind the corn.  Beat in the other ingredients.  Wash the corn shucks, trim off the tips, and make tamales–two tablespoons of mix per leaf of shuck.  Steam for 45 minutes.

The corn in question would be regular eating corn: firmer and less sweet than United States sweet corn.  If using sweet corn, cut down the sugar considerably, and the butter somewhat.

 

 

 

Green Corn Tamales, II

 

18 ears of sweet corn

1/2 lb. cream (get Mexican-style sour cream if you can find it)

8 eggs

1/2 lb. butter

Sugar to taste

Cinnamon

Mexican white cheese

Salt to taste

 

Make as above.

A common variant saves you from so much cholesterol: leave out the eggs and butter, cut down on the cinnamon, and use fairly soft cheese.  This produces, basically, a cheese tamale.

Both forms are common market fare, and excellent.

 

 

 

Rice Tamales

 

2 lb. rice

1 lb. butter

1 lb. sugar

1 quart water

2 tsp. baking powder

Corn leaves

 

Cook the rice.  Dry it out and grind it.  Beat the butter until creaemy.  Beat in the rice powder and baking powder.  When it is thoroughly beaten up, add a bit of warm water, and then beat in the sugar.  Meanwhile, soak the corn leaves to soften.

Put two or three tablespoonfuls of mixture on each corn leaf, wrap, and steam 3/4 hour.

 

 

Tamales with Saffron

 

4 lb. masa

2 lb. lard

2 lb. chicken meat, shredded

1 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

15 highland Chiapas chiles (or less, or even more, to taste)

2 pieces of French bread, toasted (optional)

6 garlic cloves, chopped

1 onion, chopped

2 lb. tomatoes, chopped very fine

20 saffron threads

1/2 tsp. ground clove

Almonds, plums and/or pimento strips (optional)

Salt to taste

Banana leaves

 

Grind all the spices (together with the toasted bread, if wanted).  Fry the onion and garlic in a few ounces of the lard; take out and discard if you want.  In the oil, fry the tomatoes, then add the spices and cook down to a sauce.  Add in the chicken.  Some sugar can be added if desired.

Mix the masa with the rest of the lard.  Add the salt.  Anoint the leaves with this.  If wanted, add to each tamale an almond, a plum, and/or a pimento strip.  Then add the sauce and cook as usual.

 

 

Tamales with Hojasanta (hojasanta is generally called “mumu” or “momo” in Chiapas)

 

2 lb. masa

1 lb. lard

1 lb. beans, cooked, mashed and fried

20 small highland chiles–seeded, fried and ground

2 tbsp. dried shrimps, ground

2 tbsp. ground squash seeds (sikil)

30 hojasanta leaves

6 bunches of maize leaves

Salt to taste

 

Mix the masa with the lard and salt.  Mix the beans, shrimp, squash seed meal and chiles.  Soak the corn leaves.  Make tamales on the hojasanta leaves, wrap up, and wrap these in turn in the corn leaves.  Steam half an hour.

A variant recipe uses far more squash seeds–two cups.  This makes a much richer tamale.  Suit yourself.

 

 

Vegetable Tamales

 

4 lb. masa

2 chicken breasts, shredded

3 carrots

3 summer squash

2 lb. tomatoes

1/2 cup chickpeas (cooked)

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 tsp. pepper

2 tsp. baking powder

2 lb. lard

Salt to taste

Corn leaves

 

Mix the lard, baking powder and salt with the masa.  Fr the garlic and onion, cut up, then add the other vegetables, all chopped finely.  Then add the meat and spices.  Then make and cook tamales in the usual way, steaming for an hour.

 

 

 

 

SOUPS

 

 

Bread Soup

A thoroughly Spanish recipe, but too popular in Chiapas to leave out.

 

6 sweet rolls (any kind of Chiapan-style sweet bread: rolls with a little sugar and shortening)

4 French rolls

2 carrots

Handful of green beans

6 baby summer squash

2 hard-boiled eggs

1/4 cup cooked chickpeas

1/2 onion

2 tomatoes

1 sprig thyme

sprig oregano

4 tbsp. lard

2 quarts chicken stock

2 plantains, sliced (and fried if you want)

3 oz. raisins

3 tbsp. sugar

A few threads of saffron, and/or a cinnamon stick

A few peppercorns

Salt to taste

 

Cut the breads into small slices and toast.  Cut up and cook the vegetables separately.  Grease a saucepan.  Alternate slices of bread with cooked vegetables; scatter in the herbs and raisins.  The last layer should be bread, with slices of egg on top to decorate.  Then pour on the stock and cook just enough to make the whole dish piping hot.

The stock should be just enough to cover the bread and be more or less absorbed by it.  This is one of those “soups” in which the spoon will often stand up by itself.  It is interesting in that it is the only soup I know from south Mexico that resembles the migas (crumbled bread) dry-soups so extremely common and important in southern Spain.  These migas are yet another class of dishes with a Moorish heritage; they are related to the tharid of Arabic cooking.

Variants exist with other spicing; with parsley, mint, or epazote; with wine; with different vegetable mixes; etc.  Creativity is the watchword.

 

 

Chipilín Soup

What would Chiapas do without chipilín?  It’s a vital source of vitamins and minerals in the diet.  A simpler form (without the dumplings) of this superb soup is particularly popular–more or less a daily food.

 

2 quarts water

1 green or maturing onion with stem

1 green chile such as xkatik

Grains from two ears of sweet corn

1 large bunch young, tender chipilín

1 lb. masa

3 oz. lard

1/2 lb. fresh Mexican white cheese, crumbled

2 avocadoes

2 limes

 

Cut up the vegetables and put in the water.

Mix the masa, lard, and salt.

Make dumplings of this, stuffed with the cheese.  Add to the soup.  Boil all, quickly.

Serve with slices of avocado, more cheese, and lime wedges.

 

 

Cream of Chipilín Soup

A basic soup in south Mexico.  Many great minds have expended noble energies in creating variants, some of which are listed below.

 

2 cups chipilín leaves

1 tbsp. butter

4 very young, tender summer squash

Grains from 4 ears of sweet corn

1/2 cup cream

1/2 quart boiled milk

1 small onion, cut in quarters

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Start the soup by cooking the leaves in water.

Meanwhile, fry in butter the onion (chopped).  Take out when golden.  Put the cut-up summer squash and fresh corn into the oil and fry quickly.

Add in the milk, pepper and salt.  Cook a minute or less.

Turn off the flame, and add the cream, stirring constantly.

The really traditional, indigenous form of this soup leaves out the butter and milk.  Fry the onion in oil or lard.  Use corn meal, or toasted corn meal (atole), instead of milk.  In this case, mix the corn meal into the water first. Then add the leaves, and proceed otherwise as above.  Add some white cheese, crumbled or in chunks.

Variant:  The fresh corn is left out when not in season.

Variant (upscale):  To the basic soup, add maize dumplings.  Cook.  Near the end, add white Mexican cheese squares.  Serve with a dollop of Mexican sour cream poured in.  Variant of the variant:  put the cheese in the dumplings—i.e., make a half-inch-thick ball of corn meal with a bit of cheese in the center.

Variant, or closely related soup (“squashvine soup”):  Add the tender tips of squash vines–butternut squash is a good pick for this.  The tendrils at the end, plus the very smallest leaves (under an inch wide), are used.  Reduce the chipilín accordingly, or eliminate it altogether and just use squashvine tips.  Good, garden-fresh, tender squashvine tips are among the most delightful of all vegetables.

 

 

Covered Rice

A “soup” although the rice absorbs all the liquid.  Such dishes are sopas secas, “dry soups,” in Spanish.  This is not oxymoronic; no one expects sopas to be soups in the English sense.

This is a rather elaborate restaurant dish.

 

1/2 lb. rice

1 chicken breast, shredded

4 eggs: two raw, two hardboiled

2 large chorizos, sliced and fried

1 onion

1 tomato

3 large summer squash

33 carrots

1 can chickpeas

1 tbsp. flour

1/2 stick butter

3 oz. sugar

1 1/2 oz. capers

Almonds

Raisins

Saffron

Oil or lard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Like Chinese fried rice, this dish is better with leftover rice–cook the rice well in advance.

Cook the rice with the saffron and, by preference, some of the raisins, almonds and capers.  Chop the vegetables and cook briefly with salt.  Take out and fry with the chicken.  Butter a casserole dish.  Layer rice with almonds, raisins, capers, slices of hard-boiled egg, and chorizo slices.  Then top with the vegetables and chicken, then a last layer of rice.

Separately, beat the whites of the other two eggs till they form peaks.  Add the yolks, flour and sugar.  Cover the casserole with this and bake till all is thoroughly heated.

Naturally, simpler variants or relatives exist, grading downward into rice refried with vegetables and whatever bits of meat are available.

 

 

Dried Shrimp Soup

In contrast to the preceding, this is a typical household recipe.

 

2 lb. large dried shrimp

4 chilpotle chiles

3 guijillo chiles

1 1/2 lb. tomatoes

onion

2 carrots (optional)

2 potatoes (optional)

2 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

Water

 

Soak the shrimps in hot water, shell, and clean.  Boil the shells for stock; strain.  Add the shrimp to this–a total of 1 1/2 quarts water–with the chiles (seeded), garlic and onions.

Roast the tomatoes and grind.  Add to the soup, along with vegetables as desired.

Variant:  add a small can of pimento strips and grind these with the tomatoes.

 

 

Flower and Shoot Soup

 

2/3 lb. squash flowers

1/3 lb. tender tips of squash vines

2 ears sweet corn

2 large summer squash

1 tomato

1 serrano chile

1 quart water

Oil or lard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cut the grains off the corn ears.  Separately, blend the tomato with the chile and fry the paste.  Add the water, then the squash (cut up in thin slices), then the rest of the ingredients.  Cook till vegetables just begin to soften.

It would be hard to imagine a more refreshing summer soup.  For an even lower-calorie variant, don’t fry the tomato.

Young pea tendrils are also popular in Chiapas, and are even better than squash vine-tips.  They should be stir-fried or steamed.

 

 

Green Rice (another and particularly good “dry soup”)

 

1 cup rice

4 poblano chiles

2 cooked eggs

1 piece (size according to taste) of onion

1 sprig of parsley, and/or any other green herbs, such as cilantro or chipilín

1/3 lb. lard or oil

2 cups milk

2 cups water

2 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

 

Wash the rice and dry in the sun.  Seed the chiles.  Toast them and wrap in plastic or towel, then peel them.  Grind them in the milk.  In the lard, fry the rice.  When it begins to color, add the onion and garlic, chopped.  When these are transparent, add water, parsley, and salt; cover and boil.  When it begins to boil, turn down flame to a very low simmer.  Add the milk-chile mix toward the end and simmer till it is absorbed.  Decorate with slices of cooked eggs.

A more folk variant leaves out the milk and eggs.

 

 

Juliana Soup

 

2 quarts chicken stock

1 chayote

3 summer squash

2 carrots

3 potatoes

Slice of cabbage, or few leaves of kale

1/2 cup cooked chickpeas

1 threads saffron (optional)

6 French rolls, sliced

Oil, if wanted

Salt to taste

 

Chop the vegetables finely and put to boil.  Fry or toast the bread slices and put in bowl.  Serve the soup over these.

A local version of standard French or Spanish vegetable soup.  Kale and mustard greens are at least as typical of Chiapas as cabbage; try it with them.  Naturally, this is another dish of a basically “open city” sort, and any seasonal vegetable can be used.

 

 

Shuti Soup

“Shuti” is an Indian name for large river snails, popular in Chiapas.  This soup is included mainly for ethnographic interest, but it would be good with more or less any seafood.

 

“Shuti

1/2 lb. tomato

2 quarts water

1 onion

1 hojasanta leaf

l/2 lb. toasted squash seeds

2 ancho chiles, seeded and soaked

 

Quickly cook and trim the snail.  Cook all for 15 minutes.”

(translated from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:17)

 

 

Soup to Raise the Dead (Caldo Levanta-muertos)

 

1 tongue (veal or beef; whole tongue, untrimmed)

1 brain (ditto)

1 oxtail

1 chicken

3 large tomatoes

1 large onion

1 head garlic

1 large sprig thyme

1 large sprig oregano

Achiote

Small highland chiles

Salt to taste

Water

 

Boil and skin the tongue.  Cook the brains briefly with salt.  Cut up the chicken and boil.  Separately, fry the achiote, then add in the tomato, onion, garlic, thyme and oregano (the vegetables being chopped).  Add these into the pot with the brains; then add the meat, cut up.  Cook till done.  Fry the chiles and blend; add at the last minute.

This may or may not raise the dead, but at the worst it will do as well as anything else for the purpose.  It is the sort of thing people love to recommend for a cold or a hangover; I think this is the source of the name.

 

 

Squash-flower Soup

 

1/2 cup cream

1/2 lb. squash flowers (trimmed of stems)

8 summer squash

4 poblano chiles

2 sweet corn ears

1 tbsp. chopped onion

1 tbsp. epazote, cut up

1 quart boiled bilk

1/2 stick butter

Salt to taste

 

Fry the onion in the butter.  Cut the flowers into 3-4 pieces each and add.  Seed, roast and peel the chiles; cut up and add.  Then add the grains from the corn ears; then the squash, cut up.  Stir-fry all.  Season and cover.  Boil for a few minutes, then add the milk and the epazote and simmer briefly.  Finally add the cream.

 

 

Sweet Corn Soup

 

8 cobs sweet corn

3 tomatoes

1 1/2 oz. butter

1 onion

1/2 tsp. pepper

Salt to taste

Water

 

Cut the corn off the cobs.  Blend up some of the grains and add to some water.  Blend up the tomato and fry in the butter with the rest of the corn, the pepper and the onion (chopped).  Combine all and cook very briefly.

 

 

Tapachula Soup

Tapachula, the market city of far southeast Chiapas, has its own cuisine.

 

1 lb. squash flowers

2 tbsp. lard

1 onion

Grains from 2 ears sweet corn

2 quarts milk

2 oz. butter

2 tbsp. flour

1/2 cup cream

2 summer squash

3 tbsp. flour

2 eggs

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Wash the flowers and remove stems.  Cut up and fry in lard.  Separately fry the onion (cut up).  Add the corn.  Add half the milk and combine all the above.

Blend all.  Add the rest of the milk.

Fry the flour in butter.  Mix in some milk (i.e., make a standard white sauce).  Season with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, separately, cook the squash; cut up; fry quickly.  Then dip these slices in a flour-egg batter and deep-fry.

Put the cream in a soup tureen.  Pour in the soup.  Add the fried squash and serve immediately.

 

 

Tortilla Soup

A Chiapan variant of a universal Mexican staple.

 

1/2 cup cream

18 tortillas, toasted and cut into wedges

2 oz. grated Mexican white cheese

1 tomato

1 small chile (fresh, or, if dried, seeded and soaked)

3 cups chicken stock

Sprig of mint

2 garlic cloves

Pinch of black pepper

Salt to taste

 

Peel the tomato (after immersing in boiling water for a minute to make this possible) and blend up with the chile and garlic.  Combine this with the other ingredients and bring to boil.

Here, too, anything and everything goes.  Leaving out the cream; adding some of the chicken meat; using other herbs; adding more vegetables–No two soups need be alike.

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Asado

 

2 lb. meat (pork or lamb, preferably)

4 ancho chiles

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. pepper

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

2 bay leaves

2 arrayán leaves (a local Chiapas plant, rather similar to bay, so just use more bay leaves if you are not near a Chiapas market)

1 tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. vinegar

1 oz. lard

Salt to taste

 

Seed the chiles and fry.  Blend up.  Separately, grind the garlic, thyme, and oregano.  Cut up the meat and fry it in the lard.  When it is half done, add the other ingredients and cook another 20 minutes.

Variants on this theme involve marinating beef or pork steaks in the recado and cooking them in a pan, etc.

 

 

Chanfaina

Chiapas version of a classic Iberian dish.

 

2 lb. sheep tripe and/or assorted variety meats of sheep or goat

Piece of sheep’s liver

2 tomatoes or 1/3 lb. tomatillos

1 ancho chile

1 small French roll, toasted

1 sprig parsley

1/2 tsp. achiote

1/2 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Wash the tripe and cool with salt.  Separately, blend the tomatoes, chile (soaked and seeded), toast, liver, pepper and cinamon.  Fry the achiote and then add in the blended vegetables.  Then add the tripes and parsley, all cut up.  Boil.

 

 

Chanfaina a la Chiapa de Corzo

Chiapa de Corzo is an old, tranquil market town in central Chiapas.

 

1 1/2 lb. beef variety meats: liver, heart, tripes, kidneys

1 tomato

1 onion

Sprig of thyme

2 cinnamon sticks

2 cloves

2 black peppercorns

1 tbsp. breadcrumbs

1/2 cup liver paste (homemade; cook and grind the liver)

2 tbsp. achiote

Lard

2 tbsp. vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Cook the beef parts in salted water.  Take out the meat; save the stock. Cut up the meat.

Chop the tomato and onion and fry in lard.  Add the cut-up meat and stir-fry.  Then add the stock from the meat.  Dissolve the ground liver and breadcrumbs in some of the stock.  Add the vinegar, achiote, and spices.   Combine all and cook ten minutes.

 

 

Chojen Salad

A common Highland Maya dish with a Maya name.

 

1/2 lb. cold roast beef

1 onion

2 tomatoes

3 bunches of radishes, cut up

Juice of 2 limes or bitter oranges

Green chiles

Salt to tasste

 

Cut up all ingredients finely.  Mix.

A standard variant uses a beef stomach, cooked, cooled, and cut up.  This may not be to the taste of all readers.  Like the Yucatan counterpart, this dish used to be made with deer meat.

 

 

Cocido

 

1 lb. beef, cooked and cut up

1 lb. pork ribs, ditto

1 lb. pork back meat, ditto

1 lb. beef brisket, ditto

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 bunch cilantro

11 tsp. achiote

Longaniza, sliced

3 chayotes

Handful of green beans

6 small potatoes

4 carrots, cut up

1 small cabbage, cut up in chunks

2 corn ears in chunks

1 quince, cut up and cored

3 small sour apples, whole

6 peaches (fairly hard ones)

1 plantain

6 summer squash

Water

Salt to taste

 

Put in a large pot enough water.  Add salt, onion, garlic and tomato.  Separately, fry the achiote; throw out the seeds and add the oil to the pot.  Then add the meats and vegetables.  Simmer for about half and hour.

 

 

Cold Pork Leg

Another of the cold meat dishes so popular for lunch in Chiapas.

 

1 pork leg

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

2 bay leaves

2 arrayan leaves (or 2 more bay leaves)

2 limes

Water

Salt to taste

 

Spice mix:

2 ancho chiles

1 tomato

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

2 bay leaves

2 arrayan (or bay) leaves

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. sugar

1/2 tsp. pepper

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Marinate the leg in the lime juice with water and salt for 3 hours.  Then take out of this liquid and boil in water to which the herbs are added.

Meanwhile, seed and fry the chiles.  Blend with the other ingredients (except the leaves).  Fry the resulting mix quickly, adding the whole leaves.

Cover the leg with this, bake half an hour, chill, and serve sliced.

Variant: Make more recado, slash the leg, and rub the extra recado into the slashes.  This is less authentic but spicier.

 

 

Grilled Ham

 

1 smoked ham (Virginia ham will do)

5 onions

4 heads garlic

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

6 laurel leaves

5 arrayan leaves

1/2 lb. brown sugar

1 large piece of pineapple

1 stalk of fennel (finocchio)

7 quarts or more of water

 

Boil the ham for two hours or more with all the ingredients except the sugar.  Cool and skin it.  Slice.  Sprinkle the slices with sugar and grill them.

 

 

Fiambres

 

Fiambres just means “cold cuts” in Spanish.

 

1 veal tongue

1 chicken

8 pig’s feet (that is, 8 feet, not the feet of 8 pigs)

1 lettuce head

6 tomatoes

6 onions

3 avocados

8 radishes

2 oranges

3 tbsp. vinegar

1/2 cup oil

Salt to taste

 

Boil the meats.  Make a salad with the lettuce (cut up), tomatoes (in strips), onions, oil and vinegar.  Cut up the meats and mix into the salad.  Garnish with radishes, orange slices and wedges of avocado.

It is good to make this in two parts: first mix the meat and dressing, then leave it to marinate for a few hours, then add the vegetables just before serving.

As the name suggests, you can really use any cold boiled meat for this.

 

 

Mixed Meats with Beans

Variant of the pork-and-beans dish (probably of Celtic ancestry) known everywhere in the Hispanic/Iberian world.

 

2 lb. black beans

6 oz. salted meat

6 oz. chicharron (fried pork rinds)

6 oz. longaniza sausage

6 oz. pork short ribs

1 onion

1 head garlic

Pickled serrano chiles

Salt to taste

 

Wash and soak beans.  Cook with garlic and onion.  After half and hour, take them off the fire and add in the meats.  Cook another half hour.  Add the chiles and cook ten minutes.

We recommend that the salt meat be soaked and drained first, and the sausage fried to get rid of excess oil.

 

 

Mole Chiapas Style

A local variant of the Mexican staple.

 

1/2 lb. mulato chiles (dried)

1/2 lb. ancho chiles (dried)

Oil

Chicken or turkey boiled with an onion; save the stock

1 plantain

3 oz. raisins

5 oz. sesame seeds, toasted

3 pieces of sweet bread, toasted or fried

1 tortilla, toasted or fried

1/4 onion, cut up and fried

2 lb. tomatoes, cut up and fried

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Seed and fry the chiles.  Soak in the stock.

Fry the onion, then the tomato.

Blend the chiles and stock; separately, the onion and tomato; then the other ingredients, all in the stock.

Cook till the mix thickens.  Pour over the fowl.

Variants: cinnamon and garlic can be added to good advantage.  Other spices are possible but less traditional.  (Chocolate is not used in Chiapas moles.)

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:44)

 

 

Ninguijuti

Interesting for the indigenous name, from Zoque.

 

1 lb. pork chops

1 lb. pork loin meat

2 tbsp. lard

2 tomatoes

3 garlic cloves

Hot chile to taste

2 tbsp. achiote paste

Juice of 2 limes

3/4 cup masa

Salt to taste

 

Cut up the meat, removing bones.  Cook in a little water till getting done.  Then fry in lard.

Blend the tomato, garlic, chile and achiote.  Add to the meat.  Add the stock, beating in the masa and lime juice.  Cook briefly.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:45

 

Picadillo

 

1/2 lb. beef

1/2 lb. pork leg

3 potatoes

1 tomato

1 chayote

2 carrots

2 ears of sweet corn

4 oz. string beans

1 quince

Large sprig of mint

1 lb. cabbage

1 tsp. achiote

3 garlic cloves

1 quart water

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Cut the meat up finely.  Chop the onion and garlic.  Fry in oil in the saucepan.  Add the tomato, finely chopped.  Then add the water, salt and achiote.  (If you use the grains, not the paste, fry separately and take the seds out.)  When it begins boiling, add the meat, then the quince, then the vegetables–the sweet corn last, toward the end.  Finally add the leaves from the mint, just before serving.

 

 

Pork and Sausage with Scarlet Runner Beans

Another variant on the pork-and-beans dish.  See above, Mixed Meats with Beans.

 

2 lb. scarlet runner beans (or any dried bean)

2 ancho chiles

1 slice of bread

1 tomato

2 chorizos

1/2 lb. short ribs of pork, cut up

1/2 lb. longaniza sausage

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Salt to taste

 

Wash, soak and cook the beans till tender (if dry, they will take a couple of hours or more).  Seed and fry the chiles.  Grind the bread and fry it up with the cut-up sausages and meat.  Combine all and simmer.  Arrayán or bay leaves make a very good addition.

Pretty much the same thing is made with lentils, which take much less time to cook and thus can be cooked with the meat.

 

 

Pork Leg

 

1 bone-in pork leg (3 to 5 lb.)

1 onion

1 bunch parsley

2 chorizo sausages

2 garlic cloves

3 oz. ham

3 oz. butter

3 large tomatoes

Juice of 5 oranges

1 tsp. pepper

1 cup water

Salt to taste

 

Rub the leg with butter, salt and pepper, and the juice of the oranges.  Marinate in the orange juice overnight.

Bone the leg and stuff the resulting hollow:

Chop the ham, onion, parsley, chorizos and one tomato finely. Fry all.  Drain thoroughly and stuff into the pork leg.

Add the water and the other two tomatoes, blended up, to the marinade.  Bake the pork in this, basting occasionally.  Serve decorated with lettuce leaves and other garnishes.

 

 

 

Puchero with Chaya

 

2 lb. pork chops

1/4 lb. rice

Oil

6 peppercorns

Sprig of thyme

3 tomatoes

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

1 large bunch chaya leaves

 

Cook the chops in 2 quarts of water with the onion and one garlic clove.  Separately, roast and peel the tomatoes, and blend with another garlic clove.

Fry to color a strip on onion and the last garlic clove.  Add the rice, fry golden, and add in the tomatoes.  Add the spices.  Precook the chaya if it is tough.

Cook quickly, add 3/4 cup water, and then the pork and chaya.  Cook til rice is done.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:28)

 

 

Siguamut

An indigenous dish, originally made with game.  Also known as “siguamonte.”  Any meat with bone in can be used.

 

2 lb. meat

1 tomato

1 onion

6 small potatoes

3 carrots

2 garlic cloves

1 tsp. achiote

1 sprig epazote

10 small highland chiles

2 tbsp. oil

Salt to taste

 

Cut up the meat and roast it.  Then cook in salted water for an hour if using  venison–otherwise, omit or reduce this step.  Fry the achiote; then, in the oil, the garlic, onion, and tomato, all chopped.  Add all to a baking dish with potatoes, carrots (cut up), chiles (toasted and ground), the epazote and the salt.  Cook 15-20 minutes.

Variants exist; any game can be used, and the vegetables can be adapted as you wish.

 

 

Stuffed Chiles

 

1 lb. pork

10 poblano chiles

2 small onions

5 tomatoes

1 carrot

2 summer squash

1 1/2 oz flour

Few raisins

4 eggs, separated

1 tsp. pepper

4 garlic cloves

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Seed the chiles, fry, leave in a towel for a while, and peel.

Cook the meat with the garlic, onion and tomato.  Cool and cut up.  Fry the onion and tomato.  Cut up the other vegetables and add in, along with the meat, raisins and seasoning.

Cut up the rest of the tomatoes, onion, garlic and herbs.  Fry and blend.

Stuff the chiles; powder with flour.   Beat the whites of the eggs to peaks.  Add in the yolks and a tablespoon of flour.  Cover the chiles with this and fry in hot oil, then add the sauce and simmer.

 

 

Stuffed Onions

 

6 oz. cooked pork leg

3 large onions

2 oz. flour

3 tomatoes

3 eggs, separated

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

1/2 tsp. pepper

2 garlic cloves

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Cook the onions with salt for 15 minutes (or less).  Take out and carefully remove centers.  Chop these.

Cook the pork and chop finely.  Fry with the onion centers, one garlic clove (mashed) and one tomato (chopped).

Beat the egg whites to peaks. Add in the yolks and flour.  Cap the onions with this and fry them in a good deal of oil.  Set on paper towels to blot up excess oil.

Meanwhile, roast, peel, chop and fry the other tomatoes, with the other garlic clove and the herbs.  Blend all.

Put the stuffed onions into this sauce and simmer 10-15 minutes.

 

 

Stuffed Pork Loin

One of the most popular dishes, existing in countless variants.

 

1 pork loin

1/2 lb. ground pork

1/2 lb. ground beef

2 eggs

4 summer squash

1 strip of pineapple

4 carrots

1 oz. lard

2 lb. tomato

3 oranges

1 head of lettuce

2 tbsp. chopped parsley

3 pickled jalapeno chiles

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. pepper

Salt to taste

 

Open out and flatten the loin.

Mix the salt, pepper, garlic (crushed), ground meat, orange juice and beaten eggs.  Cover the flattened loin with the ground meat.  Put on this slices of the vegetables; then roll up the loin in such a manner that every slice of the final roll will be slightly different. Tie it into a log shape, with the stuffing in the center.

Fry it, adding the tomato (roasted and blended), pepper, parsley, juice of one orange, and salt.  Cover and simmer for an hour.

Chill.  Serve cold, adorned with its sauce and with lettuce leaves and jalapenos.

Variants are mostly in regard to the vegetables used in the stuffing and the manner of their display.  For instance, they can be cut into long thin strips, such that they go all the way through the loin, making each slice the same.  Of course, various herbs and seasonings are used to create other variations.

Also, one can oven-roast the loin instead of frying and then simmering.  This isn’t quite as good, but may be necessary if the loin is very large.

 

 

Tasajo

A Chiapa de Corzo dish, traditional in festivals.

 

2 lb. tasajo

2 heaping tbsp. rice, soaked

1/4 cup achiote

1/3 lb. squash seeds, toasted and ground (sikil)

2 tomatoes

1/4 onion

4 oz. lard

 

Cook the meat a long time in a lot of water.

Then grind the rice with the achiote, in water, for a thick sauce.

Blend the tomato and onion.  Fry in lard.  Add the rice and achiote.  Then stir in the sikil, dissolved in stock.  Cook, stirring.

Serve as sauce on the meat.  (Or—untraditional—cut up the meat and finish cooking in the sauce.)

 

Tzotzil Radish Salad

 

Radishes

Freshly made chicharrones (fried pork rinds) in 1″ squares

Cut up equal amounts of the above.

Season with chopped mint and parsley, and enough lime juice to thoroughly wet all.

 

 

 

POULTRY AND RABBIT

 

Chicken in the Pot

A relatively Spanish-style dish.

 

1 chicken

4 potatoes

4 chayotes

1/2 cup olives, optional (very Spanish, but I prefer without)

3 tomatoes, cut up

1 onion, cut up

1/2 tsp. ground thyme

1/2 tsp. ground oregano

3 cloves

3 peppercorns

2 bay leaves

2 arrayan leaves (or two more bay leaves)

1 tbsp. ground cinnamon

1 pinch saffron

Salt to taste

1 Spanish canned pimento, cut up, or some pimento strips (optional)

1 cup cooked chickpeas (optional)

1 cup vinegar

1 cup white wine

 

Cut up the chicken.  Peel and slice the vegetables.  Combine all except the pimento and chickpeas.  Cover the pot and cook in the oven.  Adorn with the pimento and chickpeas at the end.

(Conaculta Oceano 2000a:40)

 

 

Chicken with Chorizo

 

1 chicken

4 chorizos

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1/2 lb. potatoes

1 quart chicken stock

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Chop and fry the garlic and onion.  Add the chorizo meat (taken out of the skins).  Drain.  Fry well, then add the stock.

Cut the chicken into pieces.  Add to the stock with the potatoes and cook all.

 

 

Pressed Turkey

Otherwise known as “stuffed turkey.”  Another passionate favorite.

 

1 turkey (8-10 lb.)

3 lb. ground pork

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. pepper

1 small can of chopped pimento

3-4 oz. almonds, finely chopped

1/4 cup vinegar

1 cup sweet wine

1 green onion with stem, cut up

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

1 head of garlic

Salt to taste

 

Cook and bone the turkey.  Wash and rub with salt and pepper.

To the ground meat, add the other ingredients, except the herbs.  Mix well.  Stuff the turkey and sew it up.  Cook in a large pot with the herbs and salt.  Take out and press by wrapping it in a towel and leaving a heavy object on it; leave all night in the refrigerator to chill, thus weighted down.  Serve cold, sliced, with lettuce leaves and radish for garnish, and red sauce.

 

 

Rabbit a la Zihuamonte

 

1 rabbit

2 potatoes

5 cloves

2 green chiles

3 tbsp. oil

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 ancho chile

1/4 cup masa

Sprig of epazote

6 peppercorns

 

Cut up the rabbit.  Bake till golden.  Then put in a pot with water.  Add the potatoes, cloves and green chiles.

Cut up and fry the garlic and onion.  When colored, add the tomato and the rabbit.  Fry separately the dried chiles (seeded and ground).  Add some of the stock, thickened with the masa.  Stir.  Add the epazote and peppercorns.  Then add to the rabbit.

This dish is perfectly good made with chicken.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:38)

 

 

 

Charcuterie

 

If you are totally compulsive, here’s how to smoke meat Chiapas style: Build a box about 5′ square with a grill at the bottom.  Suspend hams and sausages within.  Put hot charcoal on the grill and cover with damp sawdust of pine and/or oak.  Leave till the meats take on the color of old gold.  This is a minimalist description.  I haven’t tried it.  Only someone who knows the tricks of the trade should make the attempt.  Naturally, the charcutiers have more elaborate equipment.

 

 

Chorizo

 

4 lb. pork leg

6 ancho chiles

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

2 tsp. pepper

1 head of garlic, peeled and mashed

Small cup vinegar

Salt to taste (a good deal is necessary)

Sausage skins

 

Grind the meat fine.  Seed and soak the chiles; blend and add.   Add the herbs and garlic, all ground, and the salt and vinegar.  Stuff the sausage skins thoroughly, making sure there are no air pockets or loosely filled places.  Dry or smoke the sausages.

As usual, you can just fry up the mix instead of making sausages with it.

 

 

Longaniza

 

4 lb. pork

3 heads garlic

2 tbsp. pepper

2 large tomatoes

Salt to taste (a good deal is necessary)

Sausage skins

 

Separate lean and fat pieces of pork.  Chop up.  Peel and mash the garlic; chop the tomatoes fine.  Mix all and stuff the sausage skins, making sure they are thoroughly stuffed (no air pockets or loose places).  Dry or smoke.

 

 

Moronga

 

2 quarts blood

1 large onion

2 tomatoes

1 piece of pork fat, ground

1/2 cut cooked rice

Fresh chile, to taste

Mint leaves

Salt to taste (a good deal is necessary)

Sausage skins

 

Heat the blood.  When thoroughly hot, add the other ingredients, all chopped fine or ground.  Stuff the sausage skins.  Boil the sausages half an hour.  Dry (best done in slow oven).  Even without drying, they will keep, refrigerated, for a long time.  Do not store unrefrigerated (even if dried).

 

 

Simple Paté

 

1/2 lb. liver

1/2 lb. pork

1/2 lb. beef

2 chicken breasts

1/2 cup milk

2 eggs

1 bread roll

4 oz. lard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook and grind the meats.  Fry the bread in the butter and soak in the milk; grind up.  Beat the eggs.  Mix all the ingredients and put into a greased mold that can be fitted into a bain-marie arrangement (easily jury-rigged with a couple of nesting saucepans).  Cover and simmer till cooked solid.  Chill, unmold, and serve sliced.

 

 

 

VEGETABLES
 

Baked Chayote

 

Scoop out the meat of a cooked chayote.  Mash with sugar, cinnamon, allspice and raisins.  Return to own shell.

 

 

Chiles in Escabeche

The same basic recipe is wonderful for wild mushrooms and other vegetables.  For these others (and even for the chiles, if you prefer), leave out the ginger and perhaps the cloves and cinnamon, and add more aromatic herbs and leaves.

 

2 lb. serrano chiles

1 quart vinegar

1 onion, cut up

1 oz. salt

10 cloves

1 stick cinnamon

10 peppercorns

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Small piece of ginger

5 garlic cloves

4 bay leaves

5 tbsp. olive oil, preferably extra virgin (though that is rare indeed in Chiapas)

 

Wash the chiles and pierce them with a fork.  Boil the vinegar with the spices, adding the chiles when the liquid begins to boil.  Cook till they are olive-colored.

Fry the onion, garlic and bay leaves in the oil.

Put this in a jar and add the chiles and vinegar.

If this is to be sealed and stored, sterilize as with any canned vegetables; but it’s a great deal easier to leave it in the refrigerator.  Covered, it keeps indefinitely.

 

 

Scarlet Runner Beans

“Botil” to the Tzotzil Maya, for whom these beans are an important food.  These are large, mottled beans with a distinctive flavor.  Ordinary beans or dried limas can be substituted.  Use large beans that cook up soft but not mushy.

 

1 lb. scarlet runner beans

1 onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves

2 tbsp. flour

10 highland Chiapas chiles

5 tbsp. oil

Salt to taste

 

Wash the beans and soak overnight.  Cook for an hour.  Separately, fry the garlic and onion.  Separately (again), fry the chiles, adding the flour slowly.  Then combine all with the beans and simmer 15 minutes.

Any good dried chile will do.  The highland ones are small and hot, so adjust quantities (one really big New Mexico chile can equal to ten highland ones) and hotness.

 

 

Vegetables in Escabeche

 

1/2 lb. fresh chiles

1/2 lb. carrots

1/2 lb. summer squash

1/2 lb. onions

1 cauliflower

Sprig of thyme

Sprig oregano

4 bay leaves (or 2 bay leaves and 2 arrayan leaves)

1 quart vinegar

1 cup water

1 tbsp. sugar

5 tbsp. olive oil

15 black peppercorns

5 cloves garlic

Salt to taste

 

Cut the garlic and onion into strips and fry.  Cut up the other vegetables.  When the garlic and onion are fried golden, add the vinegar and herbs.  When this begins to boil, add the other vegetables.  Cook briefly; stop when vegetables are still firm.

This dish can be eaten as is, or kept to marinate.

Any mix of vegetables can be used.  Wild mushrooms are marinated the same way, and it is perfectly good for cultivated mushrooms as well.

 

 

White Beans

A nice vegetarian dish.

 

1 lb. white beans

1 ancho chile

1 small French bread roll

2 tomatoes

1 onion

3-5 serrano chiles, canned or fresh

1 small head of garlic

12 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. ground oregano

1/2 tsp. ground thyme

Oil and salt as needed

 

Wash beans and soak overnight.  Cook with the garlic and onion for 45 minutes.  Break up the bread and fry it with the chile (seeded and soaked), the onion and the tomato.  Add these to the beans, then add the spices.  Cook 15 minutes more.

 

 

Wild Mushrooms

 

2 lb. wild mushrooms

1/2 onion

2 lb. tomato

2 bell peppers

1 jalapeno chile, seeded

1 plantain, peeled and cut up

Lard

2 hojasanta leaves

Salt to taste

 

Wash the mushrooms and take off tough or spoiled parts.  Chop the ingredients.  Mix with lard and salt.

Lightly toast a banana leaf and lay the other ingredients on it.  Wrap all in a sheet of aluminum foil and steam 45 minutes.

The original recipe specified the local cusuche mushroom, but any flavorful mushroom does fine.  One can also leave out the plantain.

(based on Conaculta Oceano 2000a:49)

 

 

DESSERTS

 

Fruit Cheese

Peaches, apples, quinces, guavas and other fruit are preserved thus.  See Guava Paste recipe in Yucatan section.

 

Cut up, peel, core or seed and bring to boil.

Put in a colander and leave overnight.

Weigh the pulp.  Mix in sugar, equal to 2/3 of the weight.  (Use the remaining juice, strained out, for making jelly–or just drink it.)

Cook down, stirring constantly, till it begins to separate from the sides of the pot.  (Do this is a Teflon pot with a wooden spoon, unless you want  a fearful mess.)  Turn out into a pan, plate or dish, and cool till solid.

 

 

Sandy Cookies a la Chiapas

 

1 lb. flour

3/4 lb. sugar

3/4 lb. butter

6 eggs

1/4 cup lime juice

1 tbsp. lime zest

11/4 cup milk

1/2 tbsp. baking soda

 

Cream the butter, mixing in the sugar and then the flour.  Beat in the eggs, one by one.  After this, add the lime juice and zest, and, finally, the baking soda dissolved in the milk.

Butter a cookie dish or a mold and bake till golden.  This recipe is for little cakes made in molds, but is fine for cookies.

 

 

 

DRINKS

 

The favorite local drink is raw rum, known as aguardiente (“burning water”) in Spanish, and in Highland Maya as pox, which means “medicine.”  (As in Yucatec, x is pronounced sh.)  It has the color and taste of water and the kick of a team of Chiapas mules.  Alcoholism is a problem, so some of the Maya communities have been shifting from pox to cola drinks for ceremonial occasions.  A myth has been duly elaborated that cola has magic powers.  This has led to a new political tension: competition between suppliers of rival cola brands.

One of the great delights of San Cristobal is the punch, locally pronounced bonche, sold piping hot around the cathedral in the evening.  It dispels the mountain cold.  It consists of fruit cooked in water with spices, with pox added to taste.   Bonche may be basically hot pox with a bit of fruit, or a whole lavish fruit cocktail with just a splash of hot pox, or anything in between.

A mescal is made around Comitan from the local agaves; it is something of an acquired taste, being reminiscent of soap.

 

 

Anisette

 

1 quart aguardiente (vodka will do)

1 lb. sugar

1 oz. anise seeds

Heaping tbsp. fennel seeds

Ten drops of anise essence

1 tsp. nutmeg

 

Mix and leave three days (more if you want it stronger, but it gets bitter).  Strain and rebottle.

This makes a traditionally sweet, syrupy product.  There is no reason not to cut the sugar way down, to make it bearable to those with a less sweet tooth.

 

All of Chiapas’ many wonderful fruits are made into liqueurs by similar methods.  Take any fruit, macerate a bit if necessary, and steep in rum or vodka for a few days with a lot of sugar.

 

 

Bonche de Piña

 

1 pineapple

1/2 lb. sugar

1 stick cinnamon

1 piece ginger

10 allspice berries

2 1/2 quarts water

 

Mash the pineapple with water.  Add the other ingredients and cook.

Lace well with pox (or equivalent–any sort of rum is great).  Serve hot.

It is traditional to crumble up panque–pound-cake–into this, but the result is possibly a bit much for most non-Chiapans.

 

 

Bonche de Frutas

This is the fitting end of a Chiapan meal!  There is nothing like warming up with bonche on a cold, drizzly night in front of the Cathedral in San Cristobal.

 

As above, but instead of pineapple, use finely cut up fresh apple, guava, pear, and perhaps a peach; also prunes, raisins, and bits of sugarcane.

The fruits and spices vary a lot.  A cinnamon stick and some apple, guava and prunes are basic.

 

 

Chocolate with Egg

 

2 lb. cacao beans

2 lb. sugar

2 egg yolks

1 tbsp. ground cinnamon

 

Toast the beans on a comal till golden.  Take off the skins.  Grind in a metate with the sugar and cinnamon.  When finely ground, add the yolks, mix well, form into cakes and store.

If you aren’t cooking with a comal over an open fire, oven-roast the beans and grind them fine in a food processor (blenders don’t work for this).

Many people add finely ground almonds along with, or instead of, the yolks.

 

 

Sour atole

A Maya ritual drink.

 

2 lb. maize

1/2 lb. sugar

8 cloves

Cinnamon to taste

Water

 

Soak maize in water for three days, enough to produce some souring.  Then drain, grind, and mix with 3 quarts water.  Add the spices and cook, stirring constantly, till the atole thickens.

 

 

Tascalate

 

This is the traditional chocolate drink of south Mexico.  It is my personal favorite way to absorb chocolate.

 

Mix toasted corn meal, chocolate, achiote paste, and chile powder or cinnamon, to taste, in water.  Drink hot or cold.

This can be sweetened with honey or sugar, but traditionalists (among whom I number myself) prefer it with only the sweetness of the toasted corn meal.  Usually, the chile is used in the unsweetened version, the cinnamon in the sweetened.

 

Local pozole (maize drink) is made with chocolate and is similar.  (Pozole in the southeast is usually just cornmeal and water–not a rich stew as it is in north and west Mexico.)

 

 

TABASCO

 

 

BASICS

 

Pozol or “Chorote”

The staple food of much of Tabasco.  This recipe is given here for ethnographic interest, since few readers will be likely to prepare it.

 

2 lb. dried corn kernels

1/2 lb. cacao seeds, toasted and peeled

 

Cook the corn with lime (calcium oxide, not the citrus fruit) for a few minutes.  Try a grain to see if it peels easily by rubbing in the hands.  If not, continue cooking.  If so, take the corn and wash it several times, then return to flame and simmer.  This corn is known in most of Mexico as “nixtamal” (a Nahuatl word) but in Tabasco as “chegua.”

Grind the chegua.  Grind the chocolate very fine.  Add both to water.  Strain, using the strainer to beat the mix at the same time to make it foam up.  Cook, stirring constantly.  This can be flavored with achiote, vanilla, and the like.  Various tree flowers are used in Tabasco and neighboring regions.  In Tabasco and Chiapas there are flowers that create a marvelous foam when beaten with the chocolate.

 

 

Tostones de Platano

 

Boil plantains, mash, add some flour to hold together.  Let stand 20 minutes.  Flatten into potato-chip-thin cakes and deep-fry.

This makes a great appetizer, used like tortilla chips to spoon up dips.

 

 

Totopos

 

A large corn cake.  Shape masa into a cake a foot across and a finger thick, and grill.  This is a staple food.

 

 

 

TAMALES AND RELATIVES

 

Chaya Dumpling Soup

 

1/2 lb. chaya leaves

2 oz. bacon

1 small onion

1 egg (or 2 egg whites, if watching cholesterol)

1 small bread rolls or 2 slices bread, soaked in milk or water

Grated cheese

1 tbsp tomato paste

Oil

Parsley, and other herbs as desired (thyme and oregano recommended)

Stock (chicken or meat)

Salt and pepper to taste

1 1/2 cups cooked rice

 

Chop the chaya and the onion.  Save some of the onion.  Fry the rest, with the chaya, till soft.

Grind up the bacon, bread, herbs, and the rest of the onion.  Mix with the egg, cheese, tomato paste and chaya-onion mix.  Season and form into balls.

Set the soup stock to boil.  Add the rice and chaya balls.  Warm up.  Or, even better to my taste, you can serve the soup over the rice.

Simpler, commoner variant:  just mix the chaya-onion mix with nixtamal or bread crumbs to make the dumplings.

 

 

Chipilín Tamales (simple folk form)

 

2 lb. masa

1 bunch chipilín

1/2 lb. lard

Salt

Banana leaves

 

Prepare the masa as in the other recipes.  Wash, chop and mix in the chipilín leaves.  Proceed as in other recipes, cooking the masa-chipilín mix first (stirring constantly), then making tamales and steaming them for an hour.

 

 

Chipilín Tamales (festive form)

 

1 lb. masa

1/2 lb. chipilín leaves

1/4 lb. lard

Banana leaves (or functional equivalent)

1 lb. pork

2 tomatoes

1 bunch chives

1 small onion

 

Cook the pork in a little water, chop, and fry with the tomato, chives and onions, finely chopped.

Take the pork stock, stir in the masa, chipilín leaves and lard, with salt to taste.  Cook over low heat.  When thick, stir in the fried ingredients.

Wrap pieces of this mixture in banana leaves.  Steam ca. 20 min.

Serve with tomato sauce.

 

 

Garfish Tacos

 

1 roast garfish (or 1-2 lb. cod, baked till not quite done)

1/2 lb. tomatoes

1/2 lb. onions

Lime or bitter orange, cilantro and tabasco chile to taste.

Tortillas

 

Flake the fish and fry with the chopped tomato and onion.  Frying here means stir-frying or sautéing, not battering and deep-frying as for the Baja California fish tacos that have recently become popular in the United States.

Make tacos, adding the other ingredients to taste.  (The above are the Tabasco traditional add-ins, but of course you can add whatever you find necessary in a fish taco.)

 

 

Garfish Tamales, I

 

1 small roast garfish (2 lb.; or substitute 2 pounds of cod or similar fish)

1 onion

Vinegar

1/2 lb. tomatoes

1 chile güero (a hot yellow fresh chile), or other hot chile, chopped

1 large sprig of epazote

Salt to taste

4 1/2 lb. masa

2 lb. lard

3 bunches of banana leaves (or substitute)

Oil for frying

 

To roast a gar in the true Tabasco manner, pass a stick through the mouth and out the cleaning slit, and roast over a fire.  Failing that, grill or bake.

Flake the fish.

Chop the onion; marinate in the vinegar.  Add the tomato, flaked fish, chile, and epazote sprig.  Season with salt and leave to marinate.

Mix the lard (melted) into the masa.  Add enough water to make a rather thin paste.

Cook this, stirring constantly, until a drop of it put on a banana leaf holds together and flows down the leaf.

Make small tamales: spread a tablespoon of masa on a leaf, add a tablespoon of the fish mix, roll up, tie or fold to seal.  (If lazy, make bigger tamales.)

Steam the tamales for an hour.

 

 

Garfish Tamales, II

 

1 medium-sized garfish

1 lb. tomatoes

2 bell peppers

2 green onions or bunches of chives

1/2 tsp. oregano

2 lb. masa

1/2 lb. lard

2 tbsp. achiote paste

Salt and pepper to taste

Leaves for wrapping

Tabasco chiles (if you can stand them; mild chiles if you can’t)

 

Roast the garfish over charcoal or wood fire.  Skin and bone it.  Chop up a tomato, a bell pepper, and some of the green onion or chives.  Mix the salt, pepper, 1 tbsp. achiote and oregano with this.  Fry all, then add the fish and fry till all is integrated.

Mix the masa with lard and the rest of the achiote, and some salt and soup stock, till it makes a soft, smooth paste.

Carefully add in the fish mixture.  Wrap.

Steam for about two hours.

Make a salsa by chopping together the rest of the tomato, onion, bell pepper, and green onion and the Tabasco chiles.

 

 

Pork mone

Mone is a type of steamed meatball.  This one is traditional in wakes for the dead in the area of Torno Largo.

 

1 lb. ground or well-chopped pork

1 large tomato

1 small onion

1 mild chile

2 hojasanta leaves

Banana leaf

Salt to taste

Lard and water for cooking

 

Cut up the vegetables and one hojasanta leaf.  Mix with the meat and a little lard.

Lay out the other hojasanta leaf on the banana leaf.  Spread the mixture on it, roll up, and tie.

Put in water and simmer for an hour and a half.

Serve with roasted plantains.

Variants can be made using beef, variety meats, etc.

(Several other mone recipes are in Conaculta Oceano 2001c:18.)

 

 

Tamales in the Pot

 

1 lb. pork chops

1 chicken

1 tortilla

3 chiles

3 cloves garlic

4 tomatoes

1 onion

8 or 9 leaves epazote

Oregano, cumin seeds and achiote to taste

3 lb. masa

1 lb. lard

1 bell pepper

6 Tabasco peppers

1/2 lb. pepitas (pumpkin seeds)

Salt

 

Cut the meat into 10 portions.  Boil, putting in the pork first, later the chicken, till almost done.

Brown the tortilla.  Seed and roast the chiles and soak in hot water.  Cut up the garlic, two tomatoes, and half an onion and fry them with the seasonings.  Add the tortilla and chiles and blend, using some of the broth.

Cook the meats a bit more in this soup.

Mix the masa with the rest of the broth, the lard, and some salt.  Cook, stirring constantly.

Roast and peel the bell pepper, roast the rest of the onion, toast the Tabasco peppers, and blend with the rest of the tomatoes, for a salsa.

Toast and grind the pepitas, i.e. make sikil.

Take ten small pots.  Put in each a banana leaf.  Add a bit of the masa.  Put on this the meat mixture.

Bake for 20 minutes.

To serve, turn out on a plate, remove the leaf, and cover with the sauce and ground seeds.

 

 

 

SOUPS

 

Cowboys’ Stew

This uses the dried and salted beef of Tabasco, which cowboys carry for rations while riding the range.  The hot, humid climate depletes the body’s salt in short order, hence the need for extremely salty food.

 

2 lb. tasajo (dried salt beef, like jerky but saltier and a bit moister)

2 plantains

1/4 small winter squash

10 chaya leaves

1 mild green chile

1/4 onion

1 tomato

Parsley, chives, salt to taste

 

Boil the meat till tender.

Add the plantain (peeled and cut up), the squash (in pieces) and the chaya leaves (separately, and in that order, letting them cook a bit before adding the next item).

Roast the chile, onion and tomato.  Peel.

When all is cooked, add the chile, onion, tomato, parsley and chives.  Cook very briefly.

Those not riding the Tabasco range will want to soak the salt out of the meat first–or just substitute fresh meat.

 

 

Fish Soup with Hojasanta, I

 

In rich fish stock, cook a chunk of snook belly meat with one hojasanta leaf.

Tomatoes and Tabasco parsley make good additions.

 

 

Fish Soup with Hojasanta, II

“Mojarra” can be used for this, but it’s better with belly meat or steak of snook.  Any good firm white-fleshed fish will do.

 

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

1 xkatik chile

3 lb. white fish (whole, or fillet with bone and skin)

4 tender hojasanta leaves

6 black peppercorns

Oregano, salt and oil to taste (the oil is optional)

 

Chop very fine, or blend, the tomato and peppers.  Fry for sofrito.  Add water, the fish and hojasanta leaves and the other ingredients.  Boil till fish is just done.

 

 

Fish Soup with Hojasanta, III

Ingredients as above, plus one more tomato and an onion

 

Chop and fry the tomatoes, onion and peppers.  Put with fish in 3 cups water.  Add the spices.  Cut up the leaves and add.

 

This is especially recommended as a truly incomparable and extremely simple dish.  Almost any fish will do; a mixture of seafood is wonderful.  This is a recipe in which hojasanta can be readily replaced by finocchio, in which case you have something similar to Italo-Californian cioppino.

 

 

Fish Stew

 

2 lb. whole fish

3 cloves garlic

1 laurel leaf

3 carrots

3 small summer squash, preferably Mexican gray sq uash

1 tomato

6 small potatoes

1 chayote

1 small head cabbage

1 medium-sized onion

1 bunch cilantro

4 or more chaya leaves

2 small ears sweet corn

Salt to taste

Oil

 

Fillet the fish.  Make a stock by cooking the heads and bones for 20 minutes in water, with salt to taste.  Strain.

Chop the garlic and fry in 2 tablespoons oil.  Mash the tomato (in a blender or the like) and add.

Add in the vegetables, cut into chunks except for the potatoes, which should be whole and unskinned.  Cook till getting soft.

Add the fish fillets; cook for ten more minutes.  Mix in the mashed garlic and tomato.

Serve with white rice.  On the side, serve chopped green chiles, cilantro and onion.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:22)

 

 

Garfish soup

 

l large garfish

1 bitter orange

2 plantains

1 tomato

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

Oregano, cilantro, achiote, salt and oil to taste

 

Scrub the fish with the bitter orange, squeezing the juice out as you do so.

Set the plantains (peeled and chunked) to boil.  When almost done, add the fish, the tomato (cut up and fried in the oil), and the other ingredients.  Simmer till fish is done.

 

 

Plantain Soup

 

3 plantains

1 tbsp. vinegar

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

2 green onions (scallions)

10 peppercorns

Lard or oil

Salt

Chicken stock

1 small ranch cheese (a fresh, white, rather dry and salty cheese.  Look for queso ranchero at a Hispanic market, or substitute feta)

 

Boil the plantains and mash.

Blend the vinegar, tomato, bell pepper, and onions, and fry.  Grind the peppercorns and add in.

Mix in the plantain and salt.  Fry the paste again.

Mix in a bit of chicken stock to make a thick creamy texture.

Cut up the cheese and top the soup with it.

Variant: By using a vegetable stock, this becomes one of the few really good vegetarian dishes in the Tabasco file.

 

 

Seafood Soup

 

1/2 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

1/2 head garlic

1/2 lb. snook

1/2 lb. crabs in shell

1/2 lb. raw shrimp

1/2 lb. clams

1 tsp. oregano

1 1/2 quarts water

2 bay leaves (or more)

5 tbsp. olive oil

5 white peppercorns

Few capers and green olives

 

Blend the tomato, onion and garlic. Fry in the oil.

Add the water and boil.

Add the sea food and seasonings.  Cook till done.

When cooked, add in the capers and olives.

Serve hot with quartered limes on the side.

(It would be possible to shell the shrimp and crab first and make a stock with the shells.)

 

 

Shrimp Soup

 

In stock made by boiling many shrimps and shrimp shells, etc., cook shrimp, bits of chile, summer squash, and herbs (parsley, Tabasco parsley, cilantro, others to taste).

 

 

Snook Stew

 

4 large steaks of snook

4 garlic cloves

Oil or lard as necessary

1 small onion

1 bell pepper

1 tomato

2 hardboiled eggs (optional)

2 leaves of Tabasco parsley

1 tbsp. vinegar

Croutons (made from 8 slices of bread, cut up, toasted; optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil a quart and a half of water.  Add the fish; cook for five minutes, take it out, remove bones and skin.

Cut up, and fry, the garlic, onion, bell pepper, and tomato.

Add these to the water and boil.  Return the fish and seasonings to same and cook five more minutes.  Slice the eggs, add, cook five more minutes.  Serve with the croutons.

 

 

Soup for the Bridegroom

 

The Moors brought pilaf to Spain.  In Spanish it became known as a “sopa seca,” literally “dry soup.”  This is a Mexican development of the recipe.  The Moorish flavor–chicken with clove, cinnamon, pepper and so on–has been supplemented by characteristic Tabasco ingredients.

 

1 lb. rice

Breast meat, and (if you want) liver and gizzard, from 1 chicken

1 large tomato, cut up

1 bell pepper, cut up

3 garlic cloves, crushed

1 tbsp. cilantro, cut up

1 tbsp. Tabasco parsley, cut up fine

1 clove

10 peppercorns

1 stick cinnamon

1 sprig oregano (or 1 tsp.)

1 tbsp. achiote paste

1 tbsp. vinegar

Stock

Lard or oil

Salt to taste

 

Wash and soak the rice.

Boil the other ingredients and chop fine.

Fry all with the soaked (but uncooked) rice.  Add stock, to 1″ above the level of the rice mix.  Simmer till rice is done.

 

 

 

SEAFOOD

 

 

Bobo

“Choco” dialect for “catfish.”

 

1 large catfish

1 lime

2 leaves of hojasanta

4 leaves chaya

3 shallots

1 tomato

3 Tabasco chiles

1 garlic clove

Salt

Leaves of banana or the like, to wrap

 

Clean the catfish.  Rub with salt and lime.  Put on the hojasanta leaves.  Chop finely the chaya.  Blend the garlic, shallots, tomato and chiles.  Wrap all in the hojasanta leaves, rub with some lard, and wrap in the banana leaves.  Bake in moderate oven (350-375o) for half an hour.

 

 

Ceviche

 

2 lb. freshly caught fish (raw)

4 limes

1 tbsp salt

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1/4 cup cilantro

1 Serrano chile

1 tbsp olive oil

10 olives

2 avocados, sliced

 

Cut up the fish.  Cover with the lime juice and salt and let stand in a cool place for 4 or 5 hours.  Chop the vegetables finely.  Mix them and the other ingredients.

Ceviche is, of course, a universal Mexican delicacy; this is a Tabasco variant.  Any fresh sea food can be used (the more the better–a contrast in textures is desirable).  However, be absolutely certain the sea food is really fresh and from uncontaminated water.  Pollution has rendered Mexican seafood very dangerous when raw.  Sadly, Tabasco is one of the worst-polluted areas.

 

 

Drunken Fish

 

1 tomato

2 Serrano chiles (remove seeds and membrane)

4 allspice berries, powdered

Oregano to taste

2 or more bay leaves

1 glass of sherry

3 tablespoons vinegar

1/2 stick butter

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

1 large snook or other fish (whole or in steaks)

 

Blend the vegetables.  Add the wine, vinegar, bay leaves and spices, and a little butter.  Marinate the fish in this for half an hour.  Then add the rest of the butter, and the fish, and simmer (or bake) in a covered dish till sauce is mostly absorbed.

 

 

Fish in Adobo

Any firm but delicate white-fleshed fish is good for this.

“Adobo” is cognate with French “daube.”  It refers to a cooking process in which pieces of meat or fish are highly spiced and then simmered, or cooked in a casserole.

 

1 bream or similar fish, ca. 2-3 lb.

3 limes

1 onion

6 garlic cloves

10 cumin seeds

1 piece achiote (cube of paste or small bag of powder)

2 cloves

1/2 tsp oregano

8 peppercorns

2 oz. vinegar

1/2 cup oil

 

Clean the fish.  Slash diagonally.  Marinate for an hour in water with juice of one lime.  Then scrub the fish.  Blend the onion and garlic; add the achiote, and the spices, powdered.  Mix these with the oil and juice of the other 2 limes, and enough vinegar to make a paste.  Rub this over the fish.  Let stand one hour, then bake at 350o, basting with the sauce occasionally.

 

 

Fish in Hojasanta Leaves

 

2 lb. seabass or similar fish

1 tomato

2 (or more) laurel leaves

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 tsp. oil

Parsley leaves

Cilantro leaves

Tabasco parsley leaves

Chipilín leaves

Hojasanta leaves

Pepper, oregano and salt to taste

 

Rub the fish with the pepper, oregano and salt.  Add the tomato, bell pepper, and onion, all cut into strips.  Add the chipilín, chopped, and the oil.

Wrap in the hojasanta leaves.  Wrap the whole bundle in foil.   Bake at 350o till done (20-30 min.).

 

 

Fish in Paper (a simpler variant of the above)

 

For six persons:

6 pieces fish

6 cloves garlic

6 leaves of hojasanta

Salt and pepper to taste

10 green chiles

1 further clove garlic

1 slice of onion

 

Crush the garlic and spread it on the fish.

Roast the chiles and blend with the garlic clove and onion slice.  Briefly fry the mix in a little oil.  Spread this too on the fish.

Wrap each fillet in an hojasanta leaf, wrap the result in aluminum foil (or cooking paper), and bake at 350o.

 

Fish with Tabasco Parsley

 

1 fish or fillet, ca. 2 lb.

1 lime

Oil

1 large bunch of Tabasco parsley

3 peppercorns

1 garlic clove

1 cinnamon stick

1 slice of breaad

Salt and pepper to taste

Water to cook

 

Wash the fish and rub with lime, salt and pepper.  Cook in moderate oven, covering with the Tabasco parsley, pepper, garlic, cinnamon and moistened bread, blended, and fried in a little oil.

This dish is perfectly good with ordinary parsley.  Indeed, it is similar to dishes of Spain and other parts of Mexico that use ordinary parsley.

(Conaculta Oceano 2001c:31

 

Garfish in Chirmol

If you can’t get a garfish–or maybe even if you can–you might try this with any other firm-fleshed fish, whole or filleted.

 

1 garfish of ca. 3 lb.

3 thin tortillas

4 garlic cloves

1 large tomato

5 shallots

3 dried chiles

1 piece achiote (small cake or cube, or a small bag of achiote powder)

5 allspice berries

1/2 lb. masa

1/4 cup lard or oil

1 bunch epazote

A little oregano

Salt

 

Wash and clean the fish.

Toast the chiles; remove seeds and membranes.  Toast and crush the tortillas.  Roast the tomato, onion and garlic.  Fry and mash these together.  Grind the chiles and spices, and mix in.  Simmer to thicken.  Add the fish and enough water to cover.  Thicken the soup with the masa, add the lard, epazote, and oregano, and cook.

(Conaculta Oceano 2001c:32)

 

Fish with Tabasco Parsley

 

1 fish or fillet, ca. 2 lb.

1 lime

Oil

1 large bunch of Tabasco parsley

3 peppercorns

1 garlic clove

1 cinnamon stick

1 slice bread, moistened

Salt and pepper to taste

Water to cook

 

Wash the fish and rub with lime, salt and pepper.  Cook in moderate oven, covering with the Tabasco parsley, pepper, garlic, cinnamon and moistened bread, blended, and fried in a little oil.

This dish is perfectly good with ordinary parsley.  Indeed, it is similar to dishes of Spain and other parts of Mexico that use ordinary parsley.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:31

 

Garfish in Chirmol

If you can’t get a garfish–or maybe even if you can–you might try this with any other firm-fleshed fish, whole or filleted.

 

1 garfish of ca. 3 lb.

3 thin tortillas

4 garlic cloves

1 large tomato

5 shallots

3 dried chiles

1 small cube achiote, or achiote powder made up into paste

1 tsp allspice

1/2 lb. masa

1/4 cup lard or oil

1 bunch epazote

A little oregano

Salt

 

Wash and clean the fish.

Toast the chiles; remove seeds and membranes.  Toast and crush the tortillas.  Roast the tomato, onion and garlic.  Fry and mash these together.  Grind the chiles and spices, and mix in.  Simmer to thicken.  Add the fish and enough water to cover.  Thicken the soup with the masa, add the lard, epazote, and oregano, and cook.

 

 

Garfish in green sauce

 

1 garfish, ca. 3 lb.–or any other fish; this will work for anything, and almost any firm white-fleshed fish is better than a garfish unless you are a loyal Tabasqueño.

This recipe is a much-transformed descendent of a medieval Hispano-Moorish delicacy (see Introduction).  One wonders what the refined gourmets of old Grenada or Cordova would have made of a garfish—a living fossil biologically, and looks and tastes like it.

 

4 oz. chipilín leaves

4 oz. chaya leaves

2 oz. Tabasco chile leaves

1 chile xkatik

1 onion

5 cloves garlic

4 tsp. lard or oil

water

1/2 lb. masa

 

Wash the gar and cut in pieces.

Blanch and blend the leaves.  Take a slice off the onion and one from the chile; reserve for a minute.  Blend the remainder of these two items with the leaves.  Put the blended vegetables in pot with the gar, add salt (and water if necessary), and cook over a fairly low fire.

Fry the slice of onion and the slice of bell pepper.  Add to the rest.

Stir in the masa.  Cook till the whole turns from green to yellow; this should indicate doneness.

Tabasco chile leaves are widely but uncommonly used as a vegetable in Mexico.  (I have also seen them as a vegetable in parts of East Asia.)

 

 

Garfish Roasted

Possibly not the world’s most sophisticated recipe, but one of the very commonest in use in Tabasco.

 

1 garfish

5 shallots or onions

20 Tabasco chiles

Salt

2 limes

 

Roast the gar over coals.  Make a salsa of the other ingredients.

 

 

Piguas roasted

Recall that piguas are giant crayfish-like prawns.

 

2 lb. piguas, peeled

Juice of bitter orange

Salt, tabasco chiles, garlic, pepper.

 

Blend the condiments.  Paint the piguas with it; leave half an hour.  Cook in a covered pan or casserole dish till they become dry and golden.

 

 

Piguas with Garlic

See note on piguas, above.

 

4 large piguas

10 garlic cloves

10 ground peppercorns

2 limes

Salt to taste

 

Shell the piguas.  Mix the other ingredients and marinate the piguas half an hour.  Proceed as in previous recipe.  Cook very quickly.

This should be intensely garlicky.

Any large prawn or langostino will do as substitute.

 

 

Shrimp in Escabeche

 

2 lb. fresh shrimp

1/2 cup olive oil

4 tomatillos or tomatoes

6 yellow chiles, chopped

1 large onion

10 black peppercorns

6 laurel leaves

6 allspice leaves (if you can’t find any, use some ground allspice)

1/2 tbsp oregano

1 cup vinegar

10 garlic cloves

 

Peel the shrimp.  Fry in a bit of oil.  Add the other ingredients (except the vinegar), the spices ground, the leaves and vegetables chopped fine or less so according to taste.  Fry a bit more, then add the vinegar and boil till seasoned (a very brief time).

 

 

Shrimp in Green Sauce

That medieval green sauce again.

 

2 lb. shrimps

30 chaya leaves

4 garlic cloves

1 small onion

1 lb. masa

1/2 lb. lard

Leaves of chipilín

Salt to taste

 

Shell and clean the shrimp.

Blend the vegetables and cook with the shrimp.

Meanwhile, mix the masa with water to make a paste.  Mix into the shrimp.  Then mix in the lard and salt.  Cook.

 

 

Snook Casserole

 

Large snook (6 lb.)

1 laurel leaves

1 lime

Salt

2 onions

10 allspice berries

2 cloves

2 tomatoes

6 tbsp olive oil

Parsley, 1 bunch, chopped

1 jalapeno chile, cut up

2 tbsp lard

 

Boil the fish briefly with one laurel leaf, half a lime, salt, onion, allspice and cloves.  Pour off and save the water.  Fry the fish in a little oil in the same dish.  In a separate pan, take 4 tsbp oil, a chopped onion, then add the tomato, roasted and mashed.  When fried, add chopped parsley and 2 tbsp of the fish broth.  Add the fish and chile.  Put in a pan greased with butter.  Breadcrumbs can be added on top.  Bake for 10 minutes.

 

 

Snook steaks

 

2 lb. snook steaks

2 limes

1 1/2 tomatoes

2 sweet red peppers or, better, mild and flavorful red chiles

1 onion

Butter

Olive oil

Bottled chile pepper sauce (Mexican or Caribbean) if you can stand it

Allspice

Oil for frying

 

Season the steaks with lemon and salt.  Fry briefly in a little oil.

Slice the vegetables.  Fry in oil with chile sauce and ground allspice to taste.

Cover the steaks with this, wrap in aluminum foil and bake for 7 minutes.

 

 

Snook Stew

 

2 onions, sliced

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2 cups tomato, blended

1 bunch parsley, chopped

1 bunch oregano

1 bunch marjoram

Salt and pepper

2 cups water

2 lb. snook

 

Blend the vegetables and herbs, and fry.  Add to the water.  When they have boiled five minutes, add the snook, cut in pieces.  Cover and simmer 15 minutes.

 

 

Sole

 

1 sole, ca. 1 lb

3 tomatoes

1 onion

Cilantro

2 habanero chiles

Juice of 2 bitter oranges

Salt

 

Clean the sole, rub with salt and pepper, and grill.  Make the other ingredients into a sauce by chopping finely and adding the salt and orange juice.

 

 

Stuffed Snook Fillet

Wrap a thin snook fillet around shrimp, octopus bits, parsley.  Cover with local white cheese, crumbled.  Mask with a sauce of onion, tomato and chile, chopped and fried.

 

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Barbecued Ribs a la Tabasco

 

2 lb. pork rib slab

2 bitter oranges

Salt to taste

4 oz. black pepper

1 head garlic

1 onion

1 clove (or more)

1 pinch oregano (or more)

 

Marinate the slab in the juice of the oranges, and salt, for 8 hours.

Then mix in the other ingredients and marinate overnight.

Bake in oven till done.

Traditionally a dish of Jalapa, Tabasco, served with thick corn cakes of green corn.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:40)

 

 

Chanchac

Tabasco variant of a traditional Maya dish (Ts’anchak; see Yucatan section) made with deer when available.

 

2 lb. stewing beef or venison

2 oz. chives

2 oz. cilantro

2 oz. Tabasco parsley (or ordinary parsley)

1 small onion

1 bell pepper or mild chile

2 garlic cloves

3-5 whole allspice berries (or more to taste)

 

Cut the meat into cubes, for soup, and boil till meat is tender.  Chop the vegetables.  Add these and the seasonings to the soup and cook till just done.  Eat with relish of chopped cilantro, onion and hot chile marinated in lime juice.

 

 

Chile pepper stuffed with meat

 

1 lb. lean pork

2 garlic cloves

6 cloves

2 onions

2 oz. oil

15 black peppercorns, ground

1 stick cinnamon

3 tbsp vinegar

1/2 tsp sugar

2 oz. raisins

5 egg whites, beaten to meringue

Ca. 5 bell peppers to stuff

1 bell pepper or mild large chile

1 large tomato

1/2 tsp oregano

Small bit of achiote

 

Boil the meat with one of the garlic cloves and the 6 cloves.  Take out, saving the water.  Mince the meat fine.  Chop the other garlic clove, and one onion, very fine and fry.  Add in the meat.  Grind the spices and add, along with the vinegar and sugar.  Mix these and the raisins into the meat.

Roast, peel and seed the stuffing peppers.  Stuff them, roll in the egg white and a bit of flour, and fry.

Meanwhile, make a soup of the water by blending up some onion, bell pepper, tomato and oregano, frying, adding to the water, and seasoning to taste with achiote or the like.  If desired, add masa to thicken.

Pour this sauce over the peppers and finish cooking (very briefly; just warm them up together).

If you don’t want to fry these, you can treat these as they would be treated in the Near East: leave off the egg whites and bake these in a casserole dish.

(In this case, they are baked in the sauce.)  This is healthier and, to our taste, better.

This is originally a Near Eastern dish, made with Mediterranean vegetables.  The Spanish brought it to Mexico and adapted it to local ingredients.  Variants of it are found all over Mexico.

 

 

Chirmol

 

Meat (beef, pork, deer…), marinated in bitter orange juice, garlic and salt 2 hours

5 dried ancho chiles

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 piece achiote

8 allspice kernels

10 black peppercorns

1 pinch oregano

5 toasted tortillas

6 tbsp lard

1 spring epazote

8 roasted garlic cloves

 

Briefly roast the meat over charcoal or flame.  Then add to water and boil.

Vein and seed the chiles.  Roast these, the tomato and the onion; peel.  Blend.  Fry these in the lard.  Grind up the other ingredients.  Add these and the boiling stock from the meat.  Add the epazote.  Simmer till somewhat thick.  Add the meat and serve.

The Tabasco version of a Maya classic.  No doubt some form of it—without the black pepper and garlic—was central to feasts in Palenque and Yaxchilan in their glory days.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:43)

 

 

Chocolomo

“Choco lomo” is a “mestiza-Maya” name: choko means “hot” in Maya, while “lomo” is the Spanish for “loin roast.”  This is basically a Yucatan dish (see Yucatan section), but has spread all over southeast Mexico.

 

2 lb. beef, cut up

1 beef heart, cut up

1 beef brain

1 beef kidney, prepared (see below)

2 garlic cloves

1 purple onion

1 bell pepper

20 black peppercorns

1 tsp. oregano

2 tsp. vinegar

1 tomato

 

For salsa:

1 bunch radishes

Cilantro

White onion

Bitter orange juice (or lime juice or vinegar)

 

Prepare the kidney: soak overnight in refrigerator; discard water; cut up the kidney, trimming off and discarding all membranes and white fibrous parts.

Boil the meats with the garlic, onion (quartered), bell pepper, tomato, and peppercorns.  When meat is close to done, add the oregano and vinegar.

Add the brains toward the very end of the cooking process, and simmer a while.  (If cooked too long or on too hot a fire, they fall apart.)

For the salsa: cut the ingredients fine.  Add the juice.

Kidneys are hard to get and rarely prepared now, in Mexico or the United States.  This is a pity; they are very good if prepared correctly.

 

 

Green Sauce (for use on any boiled meat)

 

Cilantro

Chipilín (or alfalfa sprouts or pea tendrils)

Chile leaves

Tender hojasanta leaves

1 onion

2 tomatillos

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

Meat

Masa to thicken

 

Use equal quantities of all the leaves–weight of each about equal to the weight of the onion.  Blend all the ingredients.  Add to the broth of whatever meat is being used.  Cook, stirring to prevent sticking and burning.  Cut up the meat and add, allowing it to boil once more.  Serve immediately, or it may lose the green color.

Tabasco or regular parsley can be added, or other green leaves that work well.

It is desirable to blanch the chipilin before blending up.

 

 

Meatballs

 

2 lb. beef

1 lb. pork

1 tomato

1 onion

l bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

2 eggs

4 leaves of Tabasco parsley

1 ball of masa (i.e. about half a cup)

1 piece of achiote (cube of paste, or small bag of powder)

1 tbsp viinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Grind the meats (or just use ground meat from the store) and mix with the garlic, pepper, salt and vinegar.  Leave a while.  Meanwhile, blend the tomato, onion, bell pepper, garlic and salt.  Fry this in lard or oil.  Add a pint of water to form a broth.  Add the achiote and masa.  When boiling, mix two raw eggs with the meat mixture and forming the meatballs.  Add these to the broth, with the parsley leaves (whole, separate).  Boil about half an hour.

 

 

Planked Pork Leg

 

1 pork leg (fresh ham), ca. 6 lb.

1/2 lb. Spanish-style ham

1/4 lb. prunes, soaked and mashed

1/4 glass vinegar

1 pint red wine

1 tomato

1 onion

1 bell pepper

1/2 head garlic

10 black peppercorns

1 spring thyme (or a good deal of powdered thyme)

1 bay leaf

8 allspice berries, or 1 tsp allspice powder

Marjoram, salt, and cinnamon to taste

 

Remove fat from the leg.  Chop or blend up the other ingredients and rub into the leg, sticking it with a fork to allow the spices to penetrate.  Bake.  Then sprinkle with sugar and roast in a hot fire.

The original recipe called for sodium nitrate to preserve the pork in Tabasco’s tropical climate.  No need for that now.

 

 

 

Tabasco Stew

 

1 lb. stewing beef

1 lb. beef ribs

1 lb. soup bones

1/2 head of garlic

1 bunch fresh oregano

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

1 onion

1 bunch cilantro

2 ears of sweet corn

2 chayotes

2 macal tubers

1 manioc tuber

1 summer squash

2 plantains

6 chaya leaves

Salt

 

Cut the meat in pieces.  Put in plenty of water and boil.  Add salt and garlic.  Skim the broth.  When the meat is tender, chop and fry up the garlic, oregano, tomato, bell pepper and onion; peel and cut up the other vegetables; add all to the soup.  Cook till nearly done, then add the cilantro and simmer a bit longer.  Serve with white rice.

Macal is a Maya root crop similar to taro.  Potatoes are perfectly good in this in place of macal and manioc.

 

 

Tasajo with Chaya and Plantains

 

1 lb. tasajo (dried salted meat)

4 oz. chaya

2 plantains, peeled and chunked

3 tomatoes

1 bell pepper

1 small onion

1 bitter orange

Oil for frying

Water

 

Soak the meat in several changes of water.  Then boil it till it softens.

Separately boil the chaya and plantains.

Cut the meat finely, as for hash, and fry till browning.  Add the tomato, pepper and onion, all finely cut up, and then the chaya and plantain, also finely cut up.

Add the juice of the bitter orange.  Cook a little longer.  (The earlier in the process you add the orange juice, the less orange flavor it retains but the more it adds sourness to the whole.  Thus, you can vary the final product to taste.)

 

 

 

POULTRY

 

 

Black-bellied Whistling-duck

 

2 ducks

2 garlic cloves, mashed

1 tomato

1 onion

1 Tabasco chile

10 peppercorns

1 cloves

Oregano

Salt to taste

1 cube achiote

Juice of 1 bitter orange

3 tbsp lard

 

Boil the ducks with salt and garlic till they become slightly tender.

Chop the vegetables and grind the spices.  In a casserole dish, heat the achiote till it softens, then add the orange juice.  Add the lard, fry the other ingredients.  Add the ducks; cover and simmer till they are golden.

As noted above, use ordinary duckling for this.

 

 

Polish chicken

A festival dish in Tabasco.  The connection with Poland seems pure fantasy, though a tenuous connection via the cabbage and tomato sauce may be implied.

 

2 chicken breasts

A quarter of a cabbage head, chopped fine

1 garlic clove, chopped

Oil

3 tomatoes

2 peppercorns

2 cloves

1 (or more) laurel leaf

1 sprig of thyme, or 1 tsp ground or crushed thyme

1 small can of chipotle chiles

1/2 onion, sliced

Salt to taste

Tomato sauce–just blend up a tomato and spice it

 

Fry the chicken, cabbage and garlic until lightly browned.

Blend the tomato, spices, and chipotle.  Add to the chicken.  Add the onion, and salt to taste.  Cook dry, then add the tomato puree and cook till done.  Serve with tortilla chips.

 

 

 

VEGETABLES

 

 

Chaya Salad

 

2 lb. chaya

1/4 onion, sliced

Salt, pepper and lime to taste.

 

Boil and cut up the chaya.  Mix with the other ingredients.

One can add other vegetables, and/or herbs.

 

 

Chaya with Squash

Special recognition for a superior vegetarian dish.

 

1 lb. chaya

1 lb. Mexican summer squash

1 chopped onion

3 chopped tomatoes

1 cup sweet corn kernels

Salt, pepper and chile to taste

 

Cook the chaya and chop.  Cut up the squash.  Fry the chaya, squash, onion, tomato and corn for about 20 minutes or till well cooked.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:48)

 

 

Chayote Stew

 

3 chayotes

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

1 tomato

1 chile

Bunch of cilantro

Oil

 

Wash and peel the chayotes.  Cut in quarters.

Heat oil in a pan.  Add the onion, garlic and tomato.  Fry a while, then add the chayote.

Cover and cook till the chayote is done, then add the chopped chile and cilantro.

 

 

Chaya with Plantain

 

1 lb. pork rib roast or other cut, for boiling

Chaya to taste (1/2 to 1 lb.)

4 plantains

3 tomatoes

1/2 onion

Achiote to taste (1-2 tbsp. recommended)

 

Cook the pork.  When tender, add the chaya and plantain (cut up).

Cut up the onion and tomato and fry, adding in the achiote.  Then add to the meat and boil.

A rib slab is good for this dish in south Mexico, where pork is meaty and not always tender.  Americans will probably want to save the rib slab for barbecue and use a tougher, more boiling-oriented cut here.

 

 

Chayote Torta

 

10 chayotes

5 eggs

2 oz. raisins

2 tbsp. butter

1 cup lard (this can be cut down, or even left out, for a low-fat version)

2 cups sugar

Salt to taste

 

Boil, peel and mash the chayotes.

Mix the other ingredients into this paste.

Bake in a greased mold at 350o for about 20 minutes (until browning on top).

“Torta” is cognate with French “torte,” but the Spanish word means several quite different things: sandwiches, omelets, and baked egg dishes like the following.  These egg dishes are of Moorish origin (compare the Persian kuku dishes).

 

 

Guacamole a la Tabasco

 

2 avocados

4 hot chiles

Juice of 1 bitter orange or 2 limes

2 tbsp olive oil (optional)

1 onion, chopped fine

6 peppercorns, ground

 

Peel and slice the avocados.  Roast, peel, seed and mash the chiles.  Mix these with the bitter orange juice, and then mix in all the other ingredients.  Serve, garnished with raw onion rings and the like.

 

 

 

DESSERTS

 

Atole

A version of the standard Mexican corn drink.  Various atoles and pozoles are the staple food of much of Tabasco.

 

1 lb. masa

3 pints milk, scalded

3 pints water

Pinch of cinnamon or anise

Sugar to taste

 

Dissolve the masa in the water.  Strain through a colander.  Add the milk and spices.  Simmer, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes.  If too thick, add water to dilute.

This can be made with chocolate also: dissolve one tablet of Tabasco chocolate in the atole as it cooks.

Variants can be made with cooked corn meal or sweet corn.

 

 

Champurrado

 

1/2 lb. masa

3 pints water

1/2 lb. brown sugar

4 oz. chocolate

 

Make as for atole.

 

 

Chaya and Plantain Upside-Down Cake

 

1 1/2 cups butter

2 1/2 cups sugar

2 plantains

8 pitted prunes

5 eggs

2 cups flour

3 tsp. baking powder

1 can evaporated milk

Vanilla

3 cups cooked and chopped chaya

 

In a cake mold, put 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, slices of plantain, and prunes.

Beat a cup of butter with the rest of the sugar, mixing in the eggs one by one.

Mix the flour and baking powder.  Mix this into the above.  While mixing it in, add slowly the milk (mix the vanilla into the milk) and the chaya.

Turn the mix into the mold.

Bake at 325o for 1 hour.  Let stand till cool.  Turn out onto a plate.

If worried about cholesterol, you can use half as much butter, and 7-8 egg whites (discarding the yolks).  Do not, however, use margarine or oil instead of butter.  It won’t work.

 

 

Chocolate Made at Home

This recipe is offered for interest.  It’s too much work for a result that is inevitably inferior to good commercial chocolate (unless you have industrial equipment).  It would almost be easier, and certainly more fun, to go to Tabasco and get chocolate there.  It is sold there in many forms, from raw seeds to pure bitter chocolate to the elaborate, spiced chocolate tablets described here.  I prefer the straight bitter chocolate.

This recipe is a standard way to make the chocolate tablets typical of Tabasco.  However, for real chocolate tablets, you have to ferment the beans, and that is an expert technical job out of the reach of the ordinary cook.  You can get raw beans in Central American markets and try this yourself, roasting the beans like almonds in an oven, till they are just brown.  Raw beans are hard to work with–the line between too raw and too burnt is a fine one, and only an expert can roast them properly.  Also, they have a different taste from processed chocolate.

 

2 lb. cacao beans (seeds of the cacao tree)

1 lb. English-style biscuits (similar to nonsalty crackers or not-very-sweet cookies)

4 oz. almonds

1 1/2 lb. sugar

4 oz. cinnamon sticks

5 egg yolks

 

Heat a griddle.  On this, heat the cinnamon and then pulverize it.  Then toast the cacao beans until browned.  Peel and grind up.  Soak the almonds in hot water, peel, and toast till golden.

Blend the yolks, almonds, sugar and biscuits.

Mix all the above and pass through mill again.

Form into the characteristic Mexican chocolate tablets: flat disks 2″ to 3″ across and about 1/8″ to 1/4″ thick.

Break up one of these and mix with hot water, for cocoa.

 

 

Cocoyol fruits

The hard, sour fruits of a local palm tree.  They are only marginally edible even after this treatment, but they were often the only fruit around; they crop in the worst droughts, and were a famine staple in the old days.  They remain popular.  This product is thus of solely local appeal, but is added for ethnographic interest.

 

50 cocoyoles

4 cones of raw sugar (i.e. about 2 lb.)

 

Wash the cocoyoles a long time.  Cook in water.  Add the sugar and cook down to a thick syrup.

 

 

Grapefruit Conserve

 

6 lb. grapefruit

3 or more lb. sugar

 

Grate the peel, separating the white inner part.  Remove, but save, the membranes, seeds, etc., saving the pulp and juice.  Mix these latter with the sugar.

Boil these.  Put the white peel, membranes and seeds in a cheesecloth bag and cook with the rest until the syrup starts to thicken.  Then take out this bag and squeeze the juice out of it, back into the pot.

Add the peel and cook 10 minutes.

Put into jars, seal and label.

If properly canned (check that the seal is tight) this will last three months.  Of course, you can store it in the refrigerator for quite a long time without an airtight seal.

 

 

Guava ears

 

2 lb. lemon guavas (guayavas)

2 lb. sugar

Juice of 3 limes

1-3 fig leaves

 

Cut the guavas in half and remove the seeds.  As this is done, put each guava half in the lime juice, to prevent browning and add flavor.

Meanwhile, prepare a syrup: boil a quart of water with the fig leaves.  (These make the syrup thicker and stickier, but can be dispensed with.)  Then add the sugar.

When this syrup thickens, add the guava halves.  Cook down till syrup is thick, stirring frequently.

(cf. Conaculta Oceano 2001c:52, which adds 4 cinnamon sticks)

 

 

Monkey Ears

 

Same recipe as above, but using small wild papayas instead of guavas, and panela (Mexican brown sugar) instead of white sugar.  The fig leaves provide an enzyme that tenderizes the papayas.  The cinnamon can be omitted.  This is a very characteristic Tabasco sweet.  The wild papayas are sharp and sour, counteracting the sweetness of the syrup.

 

 

Orange Cake

 

1 lb. cake flour

Grated peel (zest) from 1 orange

Zest of 1 lime

2 tsp baking powder

10 oz. butter

6 oz. sugar

4 eggs + 4 egg whites

1/4 tsp salt

6 oz orange juice

Orange marmelade

1 packet of confectioners powdered sugar

 

Mix the flour, zests and baking powder.

Separately, beat the butter and sugar until creamy.  Add in the whole eggs one by one.

Beat in the flour, salt, and orange juice, adding alternately, little by little.

Grease two cake molds and pour in the batter.  Bake 45 minutes at 350o.

Use the orange marmelade between the two layers.

Top with meringue of the beaten egg whites and powdered sugar (or any other frosting desired).

 

 

Tascalate

 

3 large tortillas, without salt

2 tablets of Tabasco chocolate

Cinamon stick

Water

Small amount of achiote powder or dissolved paste (optional, but usual)

Sugar or chile powder to taste

 

Toast the tortillas in low heat until very crisp but not brown.  (Beware–they go from moist to burned with almost no intermediate stage.  Watch them like a hawk.  In South Mexico they are often just sun-dried.)  Then crush them with the chocolate and cinnamon.  Add to water and sweeten to taste.  This can be drunk as is, but is better cooked a minute and cooled.

An easier variant, universal in Chiapas and southwest Mexico, uses toasted corn meal.

The combination of chocolate and chile is traditional, and I much prefer chile powder to sugar in this recipe.  Tascalate is a very refreshing drink, and making it too sweet ruins it.

 

 

 

 

MAYALAND CUISINE

E. N. ANDERSON

 

Dedicated to

Doña Elsi, Doña Zenaida, Doña Noemy

Doña Aurora, Doña Elide and Don Felix,

and all the other teachers

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Yucatan and Quintana Roo                               3

 

Campeche                                                       85

 

Chiapas                                                           97

 

Tabasco                                                           128

 

 

 

Preface

This work consists of the recipes lying behind the book K’oben by Amber O’Connor and E. N. Anderson (Rowman and Littlefield 2017).  Originally, the present work (Mayaland Cuisine) had a large component of regular text, introducing and explaining the Maya world and Maya food.  All that material was updated, fleshed out, and incorporated in K’oben.  The recipes, however, were very thinly represented, so here they all are together.  Enjoy!

Gene Anderson, Riverside, CA, 2016

 

YUCATAN AND QUINTANA ROO

Culinary Specifics

An important characteristic of Yucatecan cuisine is that onions and garlic often roasted.  The distinctive taste of thoroughly roasted and mashed onion or garlic is one of the real “signature flavors” of Yucatan.  Traditionally, they are roasted over an open flame till the skins begin to blacken and the inside begins to soften.  It should be soft enough to mash easily—no more than that.  In the kitchen, the broiler does the best job.  You can also bake them, or roast them in a covered frying pan.

The other recipe chapters of this book are arranged in a traditional cookbook fashion, but I have taken the liberty of arranging this chapter according to local thinking, since it makes the task of explaining everything a good deal easier.  I begin with basic maize staple foods.  Then follows a section for recados.  Then come relishes and salsas.  Then tamales and related foods.  Only then do I move on to the traditional soups, fish, flesh, fowl, desserts, and drinks.

Critical to Yucatecan food are recados (from Spanish recaudo, “collection”), called xak’, “mix,” in Maya.  These are homemade or bought in the market in bulk or in cubes.  These cubes are sometimes found in North American markets that have a Caribbean clientele, but should be avoided unless you know your spices well.  In the United States, cubes of recado and of achiote paste are sometimes adulterated or stale.  Thus, in the following recipes, when the recipe calls for a cube, use a cubic inch of homemade recado.

A special section of the following is devoted to recados.

 

One recipe needs to be here, as it is basic to tamales and much else that follows:

 

Maya Lard

Take fat cuts of pork.  Chop fine and fry over low heat, adding some water.  Stir to avoid sticking.  Or: cut into larger chunks and bake (adding water) in moderate oven till the drippings are rendered out and the meat is quite dry.  In either case, enough water must be added so that the meat juices do not cook out or dry up.  The goal is a mix of fat and meat juices, not just fat.

 

 

BASIC MAIZE FOODS

 

Bread of the Milpa

 

This is a ritual dish for the Food of the Milpa (janlikool) and Praying for Rain (ch’a’ chaak) ceremonies.  The number 13, the masa, and the sikil were all sacred to the ancient Maya.  The thirteen layers represent the thirteen layers of the cosmos.  These breads are sometimes marked with sacred designs in achiote-colored oil or stock, as well as with sikil.

The dish is included here for ethnographic interest.  The culinary interest is slight.

 

2 lb. masa

2 cups cooked beans (black-eyed peas or black beans) (optional)

6 oz. sikil

Salt

Banana leaves

 

Make thick tortillas of the masa.  Stack them with layers of sikil and beans in between, till they are seven tortillas high (13 layers in all).  Wrap in banana leaves and cook in pib.

 

Variant:  Piim waj

Maya for “thick corncake.”  Sometimes reduplicated (pimpim) or translated into Spanish as gordita.

 

Make a giant tortilla: 1 foot across and 1/4″ thick.  Wrap in leaves and bake in pib.  Or it can be cooked, unwrapped, on a griddle.

This is much better if the masa is mixed with lard, as for tamales, especially if you are cooking it on the stovetop.

It is even better if mixed with cooked beans (black-eyed peas are the traditional ones), including their liquid.  In this case it has to be wrapped and baked (in oven, about 350o, if no pib is at hand).  It is then eaten with Tomato or Chile Sauce.

 

 

Is Waj (“Corncake of New Maize”)

 

Market version:

Grind up new maize (cut from ears of sweet corn) and leave standing for a few days until very slightly sour.  Add salt and make into very thin tortillas.  Cook till crisp.

More sophisticated version:

1 cup white flour

1/2 cup lard

Kernels from 3 roasting ears, cut off close

1/4 tsp. baking soda

Salt

 

Grind kernels.  Mix with other ingredients.  Make into very thin tortillas and cook on griddle.

Kernels from really young, tender sweet corn are really too soft for this; one needs kernels with some substance.  The Maya eat young corn at the stage that in my youth was called “roasting ears”—the kernels still tender, but somewhat more starchy than the sweet-corn stage.  One can use tender sweet corn kernels, however, by reducing the quantity somewhat, so the resulting dough is firm enough to make good tortillas.

Variant: common is a sweet version, using sugar instead of salt.

 

 

Saka’ (Sak ja’, “white water”: Corn gruel)

The other staple food–along with waj.

The ancient saka’ is just corn meal or mashed new corn in water.  Today, the word usually means pozole:  Wash nixtamal kernels (available in Mexican markets).  Boil till they break open.  Drain.  Grind and form into a ball the size of a tennis ball.

Variant:  Fry or toast the nixtamalized kernels before grinding.

For consumption, the ball is dissolved in water, stock, or soup.  The simple rural method is to dissolve in water with salt and chile.

To approximate saka’: Cook a small amount of “Maseca” or other prepared Mexican corn meal in good stock, stirring constantly.

Similar preparations are made by processing the maize in slightly different ways.  Sikil can be mixed in and the resulting atole cooked.

Fancy pozole or atole: Grind fresh green corn.  Mix with sugar.  Coconut cream can be mixed in if desired.

Ground toasted corn kernels, made into a drink, are pinole.  (Pozole, pinole and atole are Nahuatl words; saka’ is the basic Maya word.)

 

 

 

RECADOS

 

These are the soul of Yucatecan cooking.  It is essential to make your own recados, unless you can get to a major public market in Yucatan.

To make a recado, grind all the ingredients very fine, and moisten with enough vinegar or bitter orange juice to make a solid paste, adding salt to taste.  Failing bitter orange juice, use lime juice or a mix of orange and grapefruit juice (do not use bottled bitter orange juice preparations).

In Yucatan, you can get a spice mix called xak’. (This just means “mix” in Maya, and is also used for the recados themselves.)  The pre-made spice mix typically involves a cinnamon stick, 1 tsp. cloves, 1 tsp. pepper, 2 tsp. oregano, 1/4 tsp. cumin, and 1 tsp. allspice.  (Naturally, these ingredients are variable.)  All these are ground fine.  Then all you have to do is add achiote paste and you have your recado.

 

 

Achiote Paste

 

Bring achiote seeds to boil, in water.  Drain and soak overnight in vinegar, bitter orange juice or lime juice.  Blend.  It takes a tough blender to make these hard seeds into a paste.  A stone mortar and pestle is preferable, but then the preparation takes a strong arm and a lot of pounding.

 

 

Black Recado

 

2 ancho chiles or other dark dried chiles

1 tsp. allspice

1/2 tsp. cumin

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 tbsp. achiote paste

2 garlic cloves

2 tsp. oregano

Citrus juice or vinegar

 

Roast the garlic cloves.  Seed and toast the chiles.  They should darken enough to make the recado quite dark.  Grind all.  In Yucatan the chiles are actually burned to a glossy black, but this kills the taste of the chiles.  It also has to be done outdoors, standing upwind, since the vapors of burning chile peppers are seriously dangerous to eyes.

Variant: the garlic is not always roasted.

 

 

Hot Recado

 

2 tbsp. dry chile

4 allspice berries

8 epazote leaves

1/2 tsp. black pepper

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. achiote

Vinegar or bitter orange or lime juice to make thick paste

 

 

Mole Recado

 

2 ancho chiles

3 pasilla chiles

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

3 cloves

Half tbsp. sesame seeds

3 garlic cloves

Bitter orange or lime juice to make thick paste

 

 

Recado for cold meat

 

3 allspice berries

1/2 tsp. black pepper

3 cloves

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

1 roasted head of garlic

Pinch of saffron (optional)

Ground dry chile to taste

Vinegar, bitter orange juice, or lime juice to make paste

 

Spread on the meat or mix in with it.

 

 

Red Recado

This is the standard–the Universal Seasoning of Yucatan.

 

1 tbsp. achiote paste (more in Quintana Roo, often 3 tbsp.)

1 tsp. (or more, to taste) black pepper

1 tsp. dry oregano leaves, crushed

1/4 – 1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

2-4 cloves

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

3 garlic cloves, slowly roasted till soft

Bitter orange juice (or substitute) to make thick paste

 

Prepare as with above.  Variants:  Allspice is often added—about 4 berries.  Garlic can be unroasted.  Coriander seeds (very few) can be added, but are rare in Yucatan.  Naturally, everyone varies the amounts slightly.

A village recado would be heavier on the achiote, garlic, and oregano, which everyone grows in the yard, and much lighter on the expensive store-bought spices (cloves, cinnamon, cumin, pepper).

 

 

Roast Garlic Recado

 

20 large garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

1 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. cloves

2 tsp. oregano

Bitter orange or lime juice

 

Roast the garlic (broiling in oven, or over open flame).  Peel and mash. Grind the spices.  Mix with enough bitter orange juice or equivalent to make a paste.

Variant: use some unroasted garlic, and/or a roasted onion.

 

 

Steak Recado

 

1 tbsp. black pepper

3 garlic cloves

2 tsp. oregano

Vinegar (recommended for this one) or bitter orange juice or lime juice, to make thick paste

 

Some steak recados add allspice, cinnamon and cumin—very little of each, say about 1/4 tsp.

 

 

Spicy Recado

 

1 tbsp. pepper

1 small stick cinnamon

4 cloves

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. oregano

1 pinch saffron

Bitter orange juice or lime juice, to make thick paste

 

 

Tamale Recado

 

1 tbsp. black pepper

3 allspice berries

5 epazote leaves

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. achiote

ground dry chile

Vinegar or bitter orange juice or lime juice to make thick paste

 

 

White Recado

Not called for in any of the following recipes, but great in soup or stew, especially with turkey.

 

1 tbsp. black pepper

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. oregano

2 cloves

1 pinch cumin seeds

1 pinch saffron

1/4 tbsp. cilantro seeds

Coriander seeds (optional)

Vinegar (white vinegar is ideal here; citrus juice is not recommended for this one)

 

 

APPETIZERS AND SALSAS

 

Basic relish to eat with Maya food:

 

1 bunch radishes

Few leaves cilantro

Chopped onion and/or garlic, to taste (optional)

1 fresh green chile or one habanero chile (if you can stand it–the taste is much better, but habaneros are almost unbearable to the uninitiated)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Chop the radishes and other ingredients and marinate in bitter orange juice or lime juice.

Chopped tomatoes can be added.

 

Botanas (snacks to eat with drinks)

A typical selection might include:

onion, garlic and tomato stir-fried and then mixed with cilantro and sikil

Cucumbers, onions, cilantro, radishes, cut up, in vinegar

Boiled potato cubes with onion, cilantro, vinaigrette

Ceviche (raw fish and shellfish bits marinated in lime juice with cut-up chiles and tomatoes and onions, with salt and black pepper)

 

 

Ha’ Sikil P’ak (“Water, sikil and tomatoes”—a nice descriptive name)

 

2 tomatoes

1 red onion

Few sprigs cilantro

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1/2 cup sikil
Chile habanero to taste

Salt to taste

 

Roast and peel tomatoes.  Chop these with cilantro and onion.  Add the bitter orange juice.  Stir in the sikil, then the habanero.  This should be a thick paste.  Serve for dipping up with tortilla wedges.

 

 

Habanero Salsa

 

1 onion

5 garlic cloves

2 lb. tomatoes

1 habanero

1 tbsp. oil

1 pinch oregano

1 pinch salt

 

Chop all.  Fry the garlic and onions first, then the chile and finally the tomato, stirring constantly.  Add the oregano late in the process.

 

 

K’utbi Ik (Chile Sauce)

 

Seed and toast fresh chiles.  Wrap in cloth for a few minutes so skins steam loose, and then peel.  Blend or mash with similarly roasted tomato, and garlic or onion.  Herbs may be added.

 

 

K’utbi Ik, dry chile version

 

Toast and grind dry red chiles.  Roast garlic, green chiles, and onion.  Mash all with lime juice.

 

 

K’utbi p’ak (Tomato Sauce)

 

Same as above, but with little or no chile.

Or: Chop and fry onion or  garlic.  When colored, add chopped tomato, salt, and herbs (epazote, cilantro, oregano) if desired.  Bitter orange juice or lime juice can be mixed in.  Mash somewhat—it should be chunky, not a paste (see below).

Or: Roast and peel tomatoes.  Blend with some cilantro, salt, bitter orange juice and habanero chile.

It can also be yach’bij (mashed more thoroughly—to a paste—with a pestle in a molcajete—a small mortar), or suut’bij (the same, but with a revolving motion, not smashed down), or just licuado—blended in a blender!

 

 

Little Dogs’nose (Xni’-pek’)

 

This is the standard Maya salsa.  It gets its name because it makes your nose run and become cold and wet like a dog’s.

 

Seed and chop a habanero chile.  Add chopped onion, garlic, tomato, and any herbs, to taste.  Marinate in bitter orange juice or lime juice, with salt.

It is important that all the ingredients be absolutely fresh for this.  Xni’-pek’ can marinate for a day or so, but no more than that.

 

 

Marinated Onions

This is the universal accompaniment for many cooked meat dishes, including pok-chuk and turkey.

 

1 large red onion

10 peppercorns

3 allspice berries

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp. oregano

1/4 cup bitter orange juice

As much habanero chile as you can stand

Salt to taste

 

Cut onion into slices.  Add the peppercorns and allspice.  Let stand very briefly in boiling water.  Drain.

Add garlic, oregano, orange juice and chile.  Let marinate briefly.

Variant: use vinegar and some water instead of bitter orange juice.  In this case, everything is combined, brought to a boil, and left to marinate for a day or more.

 

 

P’uybi Ik (Ground Chile)

 

Toast dried chiles till slightly colored.  Then (not before) seed them and grind fairly fine.

 

 

Rooster Beak (pico de gallo)

 

5 jicamas

5 sweet oranges

3 bitter oranges

Ground chile, to taste

Cilantro, to taste

Salt, to taste

 

 

Peel and cut up the jicamas and sweet oranges.  Mix with the juice of the bitter oranges and add the seasonings.

“Rooster beak” is a name generally given to salsas that have a bite like the peck of an angry rooster.  This is a mild one, somewhere between a salsa and a salad.  It need not be; you can use chopped fresh habanero chiles.

The pieces should be small and even, but definitely separate.  This is not a blended sauce.

 

Rooster Beak II

 

1 tomato

1 small white onion

1-2 cloves garlic

1 jalapeno chile (or whatever chile you prefer)

Bitter orange or lime juice

 

Chop first four ingredients into quite small but distinct pieces, and marinate in the juice.

 

 

Wasp Larvae

 

Toast wasp larvae and eat with relishes.

Or just smoke a wasp nest to drive away the adults and more or less cook the larvae, then open the nest and eat the smoked larvae from it.  They taste like smoked bacon (at best). (I have tried this one.)

 

 

Wolis

A mixture of masa, cooked black-eyed peas, sikil, ground dried chile, chopped cilantro and chopped onion.  These are not mashed up—just mixed, so the peas and onions remain chunky.  The mixture is wrapped in hojasanta leaves, then in a second wrapping of banana leaves, and cooked in the pib or steamed to make tamales.

Without the masa, it is a standard quickly-improvised relish to put on tortillas or other corn cakes.  For this, take cooked black-eyed peas; drain; mix in the other ingredients, to taste.

 

 

Xek’

The term just means “mixed,” but one standard “mix” is a salad of orange sections and chopped jicama with salt, chile, chopped cilantro, and lime juice.  This is traditionally served on the Day of the Dead, November 1.

 

 

Xub Ik (Superhot Chile Sauce)

 

30 dried chiles

2 lb. tomatoes

6 allspice berries

A few peppercorns

4 cloves garlic

8 or more oregano leaves

Branch of epazote

 

Seed the peppers.  Toast them (optional, but typical).  Boil.  When soft, add other ingredients.  Blend all.

Meat can be cooked in this, or it can used simply as a sauce.

Prepare with all windows open.  Use rubber gloves if your hands are sensitive.  Avoid touching eyes or other sensitive parts of the body.

 

 

Some other typical garnishes and relishes:

Tomato, sikil, coriander, garlic, onion, salt–chopped fine, fried and blended to a smooth paste

Cucumbers vinagreta (thin sliced with onion, cilantro, habanero chiles, garlic, vinegar, oil)

Potato slices vinagreta

Cabbage, chile and cilantro, chopped, vinagreta

White beans cooked with tomato, onion, spices, bits of ham and bacon

Chicharrones stewed with onion, tomato, chile

 

 

 

TAMALES AND RELATIVES (including antojitos—substantial snacks—and tortilla-based items)

 

 

 

Black-eyed Pea Tamales

 

A standard market snack.

 

1 lb. pork (shoulder is good; loin or other cuts perfectly all right)

Water to cover, 4-6 cups

6 tomatoes

1 clove garlic, roasted or not

1 chile, toasted

1 branch epazote

1 oz. masa

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1 cup cooked black-eyed peas

Masa for tamales

 

Put the pork in water with the tomatoes, garlic, chile, and epazote.  Cook till very tender.

Remove the pork from the broth.  Save the broth.  Shred the pork into small pieces; chop up the other items, leaving out and discarding the garlic and epazote.

Now cook the broth down with the 1 oz. masa and the bitter orange, till thickened, so it has a high percentage of fat.

Mix this and the black-eyed peas slowly into the masa.  Cook down very slowly till hot.  The result should be thick enough not to stick or collapse; it has to be the main substance of the tamales—a firm, solid mass, largely maize dough.

Let cool.  Then make tamales by putting a layer of masa about ¼” deep on a corn husk, banana leaf segment, piece of foil, or kitchen paper.  The big tough corn husks sold for this purpose in Mexican markets are best, but foil will very often have to do.  Put a heaping tablespoonful of pork filling on the masa and roll up into a tamale:  a sealed, stuffed corn-dough item some 4-6” long.

Steam.  The Maya traditionally seal them tightly in a closed vessel and bake them for anywhere from an hour on up in a pib.  The classic method otherwise—for those of us without a pib—is to crowd them vertically into a pot with an inch or so of water or stock at the bottom, and steam them on the stove top.  They also do fine in the oven, on a rack over water in a pan, the whole being sealed with tinfoil; or vertically in a casserole dish in the oven.

A very cheap version leaves out the pork, but in that case you still have to boil down a fatty cut of pork to get the “Maya lard” to make the tamales.

 

 

Chanchamitos (simple tamales)

 

Yucatecans love multiple diminutives.  “Chanchamitos” means “little little little ones”–Maya chan, “little,” is doubled, and the Spanish diminutive ending added for good measure.

 

1/2 lb. pork or chicken meat

1 spring epazote

1 1/2  lb. masa

1 square of recado rojo

1 tbsp. lard

Salt to taste

Corn shucks

 

Chop up the pork.  Boil with the epazote.  Then dissolve some masa in the stock to thicken it to thin sauce consistency.

Mix the rest of the masa with the recado, lard, and salt.

Using this masa, make tamales in the usual way, but only 1/4 to 1/3 the size of regular ones.

Variants:  These can be made with any sort of meat that will do for a filling, including leftovers.

 

 

Chaya Tamales (also called “Braza de Reina”—“Queen’s Arm”–or sometimes “Braza de India”)

 

Boil chaya leaves.  Roll any kind of tamale or similar food in them, using the same technique as for stuffing grape leaves or cabbage leaves.  Eat the whole thing, chaya leaves and all.

As the name implies, these are usually made long and rather slender, like a girl’s forearm.

One good filling mix: 1 kg chopped tomatoes

½ onion

3 small chiles or 1 chile xkatik, chopped

Oil for frying

Salt

Hardboiled eggs, chopped

 

Fry up the tomatoes, onions, and chiles (to a sofrito).  Mix with the eggs.  Use for stuffing the tamales.

 

Hojasanta is very often used instead of, or even with, chaya.  Chard leaves work perfectly well.

 

 

Chaya-stuffed Tamales (Ts’otobij Chay; “Dzotobichay” on restaurant menus)

As the name suggests, this very popular dish is thoroughly Maya, surely pre-Columbian.  The name means “chaya stuffing” or “chay with filling stuffed into it” (Maya ts’ot, “to stuff something into a hollow space”).

 

1 lb. chaya (swiss chard if you can’t get chaya)

3 lb. masa

1 lb. lard

8 eggs

¼ – 1/2 lb. sikil (ground squash seeds)

Salt and pepper to taste

Chaya leaves for wrapping

6 small tomatoes

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

Some chile, optional

 

Chop the chaya and mix with the masa, lard and salt.

Cook the eggs and chop finely.  Mix with the sikil.

Make tamales the usual way (the egg mix inside the chaya-masa mix), steaming for an hour.

Roast the tomatoes, onions and garlic.  Add whatever chile is desired.  Mash.  Serve as sauce for the tamales.

This recipe invites creative interpretation.  You can stuff it with anything, as long as the stuffing is not strong-flavored enough to kill the delicate chaya taste.

 

 

Chulibuul with sikil

Chulibuul means “stewed beans.”

 

2 lb. young fresh beans from the field (substitutes: frozen limas or black-eyed peas)

2 lb. masa

3 onions

Branch of epazote

4 garlic cloves

1 lb. sikil

Salt to taste

 

Cook the beans.  Mix the masa with a little water.  Chop finely the onions and epazote.  Grind the garlic.

Mix all, and cook slowly and carefully.  Add half the sikil.  Serve with the rest of the sikil sprinkled over it and with tomato sauce poured over it.

Fresh variant:  Use sweet corn kernels instead of masa.  Cook the beans first; add the corn and just bring to boil, no more.  The result bears a great resemblance to succotash, except for the sikil.

Toksel variant:  If this is made without any maize–just the beans and sikil–it is “toksel.”

Out in the fields, farm workers heat stones in the campfire and drop them into this stew to cook it.  Stone soup?

 

 

Codzitos

Another mestiza-Maya word: Kots’ (codz in the old spelling), “something rolled up,” with the Spanish diminutive ending added.  These are the simple, finger-food version of enchiladas.

Roll fresh or freshly-fried tortillas around tomato sauce with Mexican cheese or ground or shredded meat.

A fancy version I noted at the wonderful Hacienda Teya–a restaurant in a restored henequen estate east of Merida–rolls the codzitos around shredded boiled chicken, then covers them with k’utbi p’ak, then crumbles fresh white cheese over all.

 

 

Eggs a la Motul (Huevos Motuleños)

Motul is a large, historically important town in central Yucatan.  This dish is a standard breakfast all over the Peninsula.

 

2 tortillas

Lard

1 tomato

1/4 onion

2 oz. ham

2 eggs

Oil

Salt to taste

1-2 oz. refried black beans

Several green peas (necessarily canned in Yucatan, where peas don’t grow, but much better if fresh)

Tomato sauce

 

Fry (saute) the tortillas in the lard.

Cut up the tomatoes and onion in small pieces.  Fry.

Cut up the ham into small pieces.  It can be fried also (but usually isn’t).

Fry the eggs.

Now cover the tortillas with beans; the beans with the eggs; the eggs with the tomato, onion and ham; and the whole thing with tomato sauce.  Garnish with the peas (or mix them in with the tomato and onion, earlier step).

Chickpeas or other vegetables can be used.  Various garnishes exist.  Much of the quality of the dish depends on the ham; get the best.

Of course, the true Yucatecan eats this mammoth breakfast with habanero sauce–the perfect wake-up at seven in the morning!

 

 

Empanadas

 

Make small tortillas from masa.  Fold them around any filling—beans, chopped meat, chicken, k’utbi p’ak, etc., in any combination.  Moisten the edges to seal them.  Then shallow-fry (sauté) in a pan, or deep-fry in hot oil (but shallow-frying is better).  Serve with sliced cabbage, onions in lime juice, or other topping over them.

 

 

Enchiladas a la Quintana Roo

 

10 tortillas

1 cup shredded cooked spiced chicken

3 oz. Mexican sharp white cheese, crumbled

1 onion, chopped

2 ancho chiles

2 pasilla chiles

1 oz. almonds

1 oz. peanuts (optional)

1 cup chicken stock

1 tbsp. lard

Salt to taste

 

Shallow-fry the tortillas in lard (basically, just put them in some oil in the skillet and move them around till they soften and begin to toast at the edges).  Roll them around the chicken.  Top with cheese and onion.

Seed and toast the chiles.  Grind with the almonds and peanuts.  Blend with the stock and season.  Cook quickly to thicken and pour over enchiladas.

 

 

Fish Tamales

 

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. cumin seeds

3 tbsp. achiote

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 lb. fish fillet

4 tbsp. lard

1/2 onion, chopped

2 tbsp. cilantro, finely chopped

1 tomato, chopped

1/2 cup bitter orange juice

2 lb. masa

Banana leaves

 

Grind up the garlic, cumin, and one tbsp. of the achiote with the salt and pepper.  Cut up the fish and rub this recado into it.

Heat half the lard.  Fry the vegetables in it.  Add the fish and then the bitter orange juice.

Mix the masa with the rest of the lard and achiote, and some salt.

Make tamales the usual way.

 

 

Green Corn Tamales with Chicken

 

Grains from 30 sweet corn ears

1/2 lb. lard

1 tbsp. sugar

1/2 cup milk

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 lb. pork loin meat, cooked

Meat from 1 small chicken, cooked

5 chiles

1/2 tsp. black pepper

2 cloves

2 garlic cloves

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

Salt to taste

 

Grind the kernels.   Mix in the lard, sugar, salt, milk and soda.  Beat.

Shred or cut up the meat.  Seed and toast the chiles.  Grind all the flavorings.  Mix all, and make tamales in usual way.

Variant: red recado has been known to work its way into these, though it is a fairly strong flavor for green corn tamales, and tends to kill the delicate flavor of the green corn unless very small amounts are used.

 

 

Hojasanta Tamales

 

Make as for Chaya Tamales, above, or wrap any tamale in hojasanta (mak’ol or mak’olam in Yucatec Maya) and then in banana leaves.  Steam or bake in pib.  The hojasanta leaves are edible, but not the banana leaves.

 

 

Joloches (joroches)

From Maya jooloch, “corn shuck, dried corn leaf”–presumably from the appearance of the dumplings, like corncobs in the shuck.

 

1/2 lb. ground beef

1/2 lb. ground pork

1 lb. tomato

1 onion

1 bell pepper

3 garlic cloves

Red recado

1/2 cup vinegar or bitter orange juice

1 1/2 lb. masa

2 tbsp lard

Salt to taste

1 lb. cooked black beans

3 oz. sikil

 

Cook the meat with the tomato, a strip on onion, half the bell pepper, three garlic cloves, salt, some water and the recado diluted in vinegar or juice.

Mix the masa with lard and salt.  Form cones, and stuff them with the meat mix.  Close the tops with masa.

Chop and fry the rest of the onion and bell pepper.

Warm up the beans and add the fried vegetables.

Add in the cones and cook 15-20 minutes.

This is one of those common, standard recipes that is infinitely variable.  Almost any ingredient can be left out or decreased in quantity, and other common ingredients sometimes find their way in.

For instance:  A quick-and-easy village form of the above is simply:

 

Squash flowers

Onion

Salt

Masa

 

Boil the flowers with the onion and salt.  Form the masa into little cones and add in.  The cones should look like the flowers; presumably this is the original inspiration of the dish.

Or we can have:

 

Joloches with Longaniza

 

1/2 lb. longaniza

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 xkatik chile

1 lb. masa

Lard

Salt to taste

Kabax beans

 

Cut up the longaniza and vegetables.  Fry the longaniza, and then the vegetables in its oil.  Make small masa dumplings filled with this mixture.  Flatten and fry.  Add to the beans and serve.

 

 

Panuchos

 

As popular as salbutes (for which see below).  A typical workers’ breakfast, using up the remains of dinner from the day before.

 

2 lb. masa

1 lb. mashed black beans (cooked with two branches of epazote; left over from yesterday)

3 red onions

Leftover breast meat from a turkey roasted in red recado

Juice of 4 bitter oranges (or 8 limes)

Tomato and chile sauces

Lard

 

Make small tortillas.  The Maya way is to put an ounce or so of masa on a banana leaf—or, today, a plastic sheet—and press the masa gently into a tortilla.  These have to be homemade and 3-4” across (about half as big as regular ones), so they will puff up.

Toast on griddle or frying pan.  Hopefully, they will puff up, leaving a hollow center (like pita bread or Indian puris).   This hollow center is known as saay in Maya.

Stuff the hollow with mashed beans.

Fry (sauté) the bean-stuffed tortillas in lard.

Shred the turkey meat and put on top.  Shredded lettuce or other vegetables can be added.  (Chicken or other meat can be used, though turkey is traditional and particularly good.)

Cut up the onion and marinate in the salt and orange juice.  Serve separately.  Also serve separately the k’utbi p’ak and chiles.  Panuchos are very much an eaters’-choice type of food.

 

 

Papadzules

 

Papa ts’uul means “rich people’s food.”  (Ts’uul, or “dzul,” is now used to mean “foreigner,” but seems originally to have meant “rich person.”)  This may, however, be a folk etymology; Cherry Hamman explains it as “papak’, to anoint or smear, and sul, to soak or drench” (Hamman 1998:94).  Either way, economic progress has come, and this is now a relatively humble staple dish, typically found on the breakfast menu.

 

1 egg

1 tomato

Bit of habanero chile

1 sprig epazote

Oil

4 tortillas

2 oz. sikil

Salt to taste

 

Hardboil the eggs.  Chop or mash up.

Boil the tomatoes, chiles and epazote.  Drain, but save the water.   Blend.  Fry in oil.

Dissolve the sikil in the reserved cooking water.  Mix half of this with the oil.  (This is what people generally do now, and I have watched it many a time, but Hamman tells you the ancient way: roast and grind the squash seeds yourself, mix with water, and knead till they produce some oil.  See Hamman 1998:94).  Spread on the tortillas.  Then spread on these the egg mix and roll up.

Pour over the roll-ups the rest of the sikil sauce, and the tomato sauce.

Variant: a much more elaborate version involves mixing the sikil with stock, epazote, onion, garlic and chile, and serving the whole with marinated onions:  red onions cut up, blanched, and marinated in vinegar or bitter orange juice with spices and chopped habanero chiles.

Another variant involves boiled chaya (or spinach, one bunch) and 3 tbsp of cut-up chives.

 

 

Polcanes

 

Maya pool kaan, “snake head,” with a Spanish plural.  The name comes from the resemblance between the opened-up dumplings and a snake’s head with mouth open.  Another common and cheap market snack.

 

2 lb. black-eyed peas (fresh or briefly cooked to soften)

1/2 lb. sikil

1 tsp. ground chile

1 lb. masa

3 tbsp. lard

Salt

 

Cook the beans.  Drain.  Mix with sikil and chile.

Mix the masa with the lard and salt.  Stuff with the beans.  (Or mix flour and masa, make a thin skin and stuff like ravioli.)

Steam or pib-bake in corn husks like tamales, or deep-fry like hush-puppies.

For eating, split and fill with tomato sauce.

 

 

Salbutes

 

Something of a national dish of Yucatan.  The name is from Maya tsajil but’, “fried minced meat.”  As with such “small eats” the world over, the best place to get these is down at the marketplace in the morning, where the working people are stoking up for a hard day’s work.  Salbutes become a powerfully nostalgic flavor for those who regularly eat them in such circumstances.

 

Make small tortillas from fresh masa.  Deep-fry in very hot lard.  While these are still as hot as possible, pile on them shredded cooked chicken or turkey (preferably cooked in red recado), chopped cabbage or lettuce, marinated onion (see above), tomato slices, radish slices, and/or anything else desired.

This is often accompanied by the chicken or turkey stock; black beans; and lime slices.  As the Maya name implies, they are often topped with fried minced pork instead of poultry.  In fact, they are topped with just about anything: beans, tripe, chorizo, etc.  A good market stall will have alternatives, the eaters choosing what they want.

 

 

Sopes

 

Fry small, thick tortillas.  Top with anything interesting.

Some toppings noted at Merida markets and fiestas include:

Nopal salad (prickly pear pads cooked, cut up, and marinated in oil and vinegar with spices)

Nopal cut up in chocolate mole (made by cooking and mixing chocolate tablets and ground chiles)

Any and all meat, preferably cooked in red recado, shredded

Beans or beans and meat, usually refried black beans

The sopes are then usually further topped off with lettuce or cabbage, various sauces, etc., over the meat.

 

 

To’obi joloch (Sweetbread Tamales)

 

Boil sweetbreads until tender.  Chop; eliminate tough membranes.  Mix in a handful of chopped shallots and 2 cups sikil.

Use to fill tamales in the usual way.

 

 

Vaporcitos (“little steamed ones”)

A very common, minimalist sort of snack.

 

Mix masa, lard and cooked black-eyed peas.  Make this mix into tamales—no filling added—and steam.  Eat with Tomato Sauce.

The same thing baked in a pib is called xnup’.

 

 

Wedding Tamales

This is the full-scale tamale of Yucatan.  The main ingredients can, of course, be varied, according to what is available.

 

1 chicken

1 lb. pork

1 cube red recado

1 tbsp. steak recado

2 lb. tomatoes

1 tbsp. ground allspice

1 small head of garlic, roasted and bashed

Branch of epazote

1 lb. lard

Chile and salt to taste

Masa

 

Cook the meats.  Dissolve the spices in vinegar and add.  Add other ingredients.  Bone the meats and make tamales in the usual way, using the stock, or grease skimmed from it, for the lard.

 

 

 

SOUPS

 

 

“Barriana” soup

Silvia Luz Carrillo Lara, in Cocina Yucateca (1995:17-18), reports that this is a true “mestiza” soup, found in many old cookbooks.  This is an adaptation of her recipe.  It is a relatively “Spanish” dish, preserving the flavors of the Spanish Colonial world.  Like all such recipes, it seems to be dying out in Yucatan, but variants of it can still be found.  The Spanish ancestors of this dish are still around in southern Spain, and use leftover bread instead of masa, the latter being an obvious Mexicanization.

 

1/2 lb. masa

1 tomato

1/2 red onion

1 bell pepper

1/4 cup lard (“Maya lard” recommended)

3 pints chicken or beef stock, freshly made

12 olives

2 tbsp. capers

2 tbsp. raisins

2 tbsp. chopped almonds

Salt and pepper to taste

Pinch of saffron (optional)

 

Break the masa into small pieces and fry them in the lard.  Chop the tomato, onion, and pepper, and fry them separately.  Add the masa.  Then add the stock and cook ca. 10 minutes.  Add the other ingredients and cook until all is heated.

Variants without the masa, often with different thickenings, exist.

 

 

Chaya Soup

 

8 or more fresh chaya leaves

1 chayote

1 summer squash

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. ground oregano

6 cups water

1 chipotle chile in vinegar or marinade (canned marinated chipotles are fine)

Salt to taste

 

Chop the chaya finely.  Cut up the other vegetables.  Cook all.

Obviously, this recipe can be varied at will.  The basic idea is chaya plus other vegetables—a mix of starchy and crunchy ones—and standard Yucatecan spicing.

 

 

Covered Soup

This is what Mexicans call a “sopa seca,” a “dry soup.”  This isn’t an oxymoron, just the standard term for a soup that includes enough starch to absorb all the free liquid.  Such dishes have a Moorish origin; they are related to pilaf.  This one is thoroughly Spanish, and thus out of place in a book about the true mestizo cookery, but it is far too typical of Yucatan to leave out.  It represents a large class of popular recipes transported from Spain to Yucatan virtually without change.  It also provides insight into what was imported from Spain in the old days: capers, saffron, oil, vinegar, wine, and olives were staples of trade.

 

For the “stuffing”:

A large chicken cut up, or any small poultry

3 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. oregano

2 bay leaves

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1 stick cinnamon

2 cloves

6 allspice berries

1/4 cup vinegar

 

For the rice:

1/2 lb. rice

5 tbsp. oil

2 xkatik chiles

2/3 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. saffron

1 bunch parsley

1 banana leaf

3 oz. lard

 

For the final assembly:

1 oz. lard

2/3 lb. tomatoes

1/2 cup stock

2 oz. bottled green olives, optional

1 tbsp. chopped parsley

4 tbsp. sherry

1 oz. capers

3 oz. Mexican white cheese

 

Cut up the poultry.  Grind the onions, garlic and spices, rub onto poultry, and marinate overnight.

Soak the rice for an hour or more.  Drain and fry in the oil.  Add chopped chiles.  Roast the tomatoes and blend with the onion and garlic.  Soak the saffron in 1 oz. water.  Add all these to the rice, cover, and simmer over very low heat for a while–not till fully done.

Spread the banana leaf with lard, in a baking dish.  Put half the rice mix on this.

Then fry the poultry in the final 1 oz. lard.  Add tomatoes (roasted and chopped) and stock.  Then add olives, parsley, sherry and capers.

Cover with the rest of the rice mix, fold the banana leaf over, and bake 10-20 minutes at 375o.

Sprinkle with broken-up white cheese for serving.

 

Much simpler variants exist, converging on the familiar “Spanish rice” of Mexican restaurants everywhere.  This is basically a pilaf with peppers and tomatoes instead of Moorish ingredients.  Rice is fried with chopped onion, then spices and other ingredients are added, then liquid to cover ½-1” deep, then all is simmered at the lowest possible heat till the liquid is absorbed.  Standard in Yucatan are simple “Spanish rices” with chicken cooked in red recado, or other variants, added to the tomato-onion-pepper basic formula.

 

 

Lentil Soup

 

1 lb. pork

1 tbsp oregano

2 cups lentils

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 onion, chopped

Red recardo, 1 oz.

2 mild chiles

1 carrot

1 chayote

1 platano

2 potatoes

Salt

Pepper

 

Boil the pork and lentils till the lentils are tender but not quite thoroughly done.  Add other ingredients and finish cooking.

 

 

Sopa de Lima (Bitter Lime Soup)

This soup requires a strange lime-like citrus fruit, the lima agria, with a unique flavor.  Note that it is a lima, not a limón (lime or lemon).  It is fact the Thai lime, easy to find in any Oriental market.  (No one knows how it got to Yucatan.)  The Yucatecan bitter lime should be fresh for this soup, but I get acceptable results with dried Thai lime and a bit of fresh ordinary lime.  It is also possible to use ordinary lime only.  This is done even in Yucatan if bitter limes are not available. The real lima is preferable, though.

This is probably the most famous single Yucatecan dish, after cochinita pibil.  Yucatecan restaurants far from Yucatan all carry it.  They often can’t get the real lima agria, so don’t judge this soup by versions you may have had outside Yucatan.

 

For the stock and meat:

1 chicken

Salt and pepper, to taste

4 cloves

1 tbsp. dried oregano

4 garlic cloves

1 tsp. cumin seeds

Enough water to produce 8 cups stock

 

For the soup:

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 xkatik chile (or other mild chile according to your preference)

1 tsp. vinegar

1 lb. tortillas, cut in strips or wedges and fried in lard

1 bitter lime

 

Cook the chicken with the other stock ingredients.  Eat the dark meat (cook’s privilege).  Shred the white meat.

Blend the tomatoes, onion, chiles (seeded and soaked), vinegar, and salt.

Combine all: into the stock, mix the blended vegetables; the shredded chicken; the fried tortilla strips; and the cut-up lime.  A few sqeezes of ordinary lime juice are good too.

Variants: Chicken cooked in red recado is often used, and adds to the flavor.

A couple of tablespoons of beer find their way into some versions.

The fried tortilla strips are dispensable.

 

 

Squash Soup

 

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

3 oz. butter

6 small summer squash

6 or more squash flowers

Salt and pepper to taste

 

In a saucepan, chop the tomato and pepper and fry in the butter.  Add water and the cut-up squash and flowers.

Variant:  a couple of ounces of chopped ham can be fried with the tomato and pepper.  I prefer the vegetarian form, however.

 

 

Tortilla Soup

 

1 lb. beans

6 tortillas

Oil for frying

1/2 onion, chopped

1 serrano chile, chopped

2 sprigs epazote

2 tomatoes, roasted and skinned

1/2 lb. chorizo, taken out of its casing and fried

Grated Mexican sharp white cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook the beans in enough water for the final soup.

Cut the tortillas in wedges and fry.  Fry the onion, chiles, and epazote.  Add the beans and tortilla strips.

Blend the tomatoes with salt and pepper.

Combine all ingredients–sprinkling the chorizo and cheese over the top.

 

 

White Bean Soup (Yucatan form of a very popular Spanish dish)

 

1/2 lb. white beans (traditionally small white limas, but ordinary white beans will do)

1/2 white onion

2 tomatoes

1/3 lb. of chorizo sausage, or 1 small chorizo and 1 longaniza sausage

1/4 head of cabbage (optional)

1 green pepper

1/4 lb. Spanish, Virginia or similar flavorful ham

Salt and pepper to taste

Cayenne pepper to taste (optional)

1/2 lb. potatoes

 

Wash the beans.  Then soak, and boil in the same water until beginning to be tender.

Chop and fry the tomatoes, onions, pepper, cabbage, and ham.  Add seasonings.

Combine these and the sausages with the beans.  Cut up the potatoes, add, and cook all till the beans are tender.

A sprinkling of marjoram and oregano–fresh or dry—is good.  One can also decorate with chopped parsley, or even (untraditional but good) cilantro.

 

 

SEAFOODS

 

 

Baked Fish I

 

1 large fish (preferably fairly oily)

3 garlic cloves

1 onion

3 oregano leaves

5 bay leaves

1 glass white wine, optional (it’s good but the Maya would never have it)

1/2 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1/4 cup olive oil

Salt to taste

 

Marinate the fish in the other ingredients for an hour.  Bake.

This can also be done on the stove top in a heavy saucepan.  Try adding xkatik chiles.

The fish is often even better if rubbed with red recado or otherwise marinated beforehand.

 

 

Baked Fish II

 

1 large fish

3 oz. olive oil

1/2 lb. potatoes

1/2 cup vinegar

6 tomatoes

1 onion

2 xkatik chiles

1/2 tsp. ground cumin or cumin seeds

6 leaves oregano

4 bay leaves

Salt and pepper to taste

Chopped parsley

 

Grind the spices (except the bay leaves) and blend with vinegar and some oil.  Rub into fish.

Cut up the vegetables.  Put the fish on the bay leaves and cover with the vegetables mixed with the rest of the oil.  Bake.

Variant: Lard is used in the villages instead of olive oil.  Butter can be used.

This can be done on the stove top also, in a heavy saucepan.

 

 

Chiles Stuffed with Dogfish

See also following dish.

 

1 piece, ca. 1 lb., of roast dogfish

Branch of epazote

4 tomatoes

1 onion

6 xkatik chiles

Vinegar

1/2 lb. lard

1 cube red recado

 

Boil the dogfish with epazote.  Flake and fry with onion, tomato, and epazote (all cut up).  Separately fry some of the onion and tomatoes.

Roast the chiles, wrap in a cloth and leave for a while, then skin and seed.  Stuff with the dogfish mix.  Fry.

Add the rest of the onion and tomatoes, with the recado, to the boiling stock.  Cook down and pour this sauce over the chiles.

A much more elaborate version of this occurs in Patricia Quintana’s wonderful book The Taste of Mexico (pp. 274-275).

However, only a true dogfish addict would go to the trouble of making even the simple form with real dogfish, and I strongly recommmend using regular shark, or (still better) codfish, or some other firm white-fleshed fish.  I always do.  I admit it—I am not fanatical about dogfish.

 

 

Chiles Stuffed with Seafood

Quintana Roo variant of a universal Mexican dish.

 

6 large poblano chiles, or bell peppers

1 lb. mixed seafood: shrimps, crabmeat, fish, shellfish

Lard

2 cloves garlic, chopped

Oregano to taste

3 tbsp. cilantro, finely chopped

2 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

1 xkatik chile

1 habanero chile (if tolerated)

 

Sear the large chiles or bell peppers.  Seed.  They can be peeled also.

Cut up the seafood (the more variety the better).  Fry quickly with the spices.  Stuff the chiles.  Sauté and serve.

Separately, chop the tomatoes, onion and other chiles, roasting any or all if desired.  Fry quickly.  Serve this sauce over the chiles.

Tomatoes or other vegetables can be stuffed similarly.

 

 

Conch in Escabeche

Conch is, alas, getting rare due to overfishing and pollution, and this magnificent dish may not be with us long.  However, the loss is not total, for any seafood can be cooked this way.  Abalone or other relatively chewy sea food should be particularly good, but now abalones are rare too.  One reader suggests scallops—not very close, but perfectly acceptable.

 

1 lb. conch meat

Juice of 2 bitter oranges or 6 limes

1 onion

5 oz. oil

1/2 bottle vinegar

2 xkatik chiles, roasted and seeded

6 oregano leaves

1/2 tsp. toasted cumin seeds

1 roasted head of garlic

4 bay leaves

Pinch of nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil conch till tender.  (For a conch, that can vary from several minutes to an hour, depending on the maturity of the conch, but for scallops a very few minutes is quite enough.  Small scallops need little more than being brought to the boil.)  Leave to cool in the orange or lime juice.  Cut up.

Fry the onion lightly in the oil.  Add the other ingredients.  Boil quickly.

Marinate the conch in this.

 

 

Dogfish Pudding

 

1 1/2 lb. dogfish

1/4 tsp. oregano

2 branches epazote

1 onion

2 large chiles in vnegar

1 lime

4 eggs

1 tbsp. lard

1 oz. breadcrumbs (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Sauce:

2/3 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

1 tbsp. lard

1/4 cup dogfish stock

 

Garnish:

2 avocados

1 head of lettuce, preferably buttercrunch or red leaf

1 bunch radishes

 

Boil the dogfish with the oregano and epazote; save the stock.  Shred the fish.  Chop and fry the onion.  Add the fish with the epazote leaves.  Chop and add the chiles.  Fry quickly.

Beat the eggs with some lime juice, salt and pepper.  Blend into the fish mix.  Put all in mold.  Top with breadcrumbs if desired.  Bake at 350o.

For the sauce, roast the tomatoes.  Blend with the onion.  Fry in the lard.  Add in the stock.  Put over the pudding.

Garnish with avocado and radish slices and lettuce leaves.

I have not brought myself to using dogfish (see Chapter 2) in this.  Use any white-fleshed fish, cod being probably best because it has enough flavor and texture to stand out in this pudding.

 

 

Fish a la Celestun

 

1 onion

1 bunch parsley

2 tomatoes

Fresh chile, to taste

1 red snapper or similar fish

4 cloves

1 tsp. pepper

Pinch saffron

Frozen peas (optional)

1/4 cup vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Chop the onion and parsley.  Fry.  Add the tomato and chile, roasted and blended.  Add the fish and spices and vinegar; cook in the sauce till nearly done, about 15 minutes.  Add the peas (if wanted) and finish cooking, 5-10 minutes.

In Celestun, a charming old fishing village famous for its flamingoes, the fish is usually fried first, sometimes grilled, and then covered with the sauce after it is cooked.  The Celestunians use canned peas, having no frozen ones available, but frozen ones are better.

 

 

Fish Fajitas

 

A creative response to the fajita craze.  This version is an elaboration of that created by the Faisan y Venado restaurant in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo.

 

1 lb. white fish fillet (not too delicate a species), cut into strips

Salt and pepper

Juice of 2 limes

4 oregano leaves

Pinch of cumin powder

2 cloves

Ground dried chile

1 onion

1 green pepper

1 tomato

 

Marinate the fish in the spices.

Cut vegetables into strips.  Stir-fry with the fish.

 

 

Fish in Green Sauce

A classic Arabo-Spanish recipe, which has evolved into countless variations in southern Mexico.  Compare variants in Chapters 2 and 4.

 

1 large bunch parsley

1 sprig oregano

1 bunch green onions with tops (trim off the ends)

1 bunch cilantro

6 tomatillos

2 xkatik or other mild green chiles

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

6 tbsp. vinegar

1 onion

Salt to taste

Oil

1 fish

 

Blend up the greens and flavorings in the vinegar.  Fry in oil.  Add the fish and cook.

Variants:  This may be the most variable dish in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Everybody has his or her own version of it.  You can use any mixture of the green ingredients, in any quantity.  You can vary the spicing at will.  You can fry, grill or boil the fish first.  Sometimes, people don’t fry the green sauce first, but just fry or bake the fish in the sauce.  In fact, you don’t even have to have a fish.  This sauce is used for other seafood and even for pork.

Here, for instance, is another version:

1 fish, ca. 2 lb.; or 2 lb. of fillets or fish steak

5 garlic cloves, roasted

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. black pepper

Salt

4 tbsp. chopped Italian parsley

1/3 lb. tomatillos

2 xkatik chiles

2 green onions with the leaves except for the very tips

1/2 cup vinegar

1/2 cup oil

 

Clean the fish.  Grind the spices and rub into the fish.  Leave for an hour in cool place.  Blend the other ingredients (greens, vinegar and oil).  Put over fish.  Cook in a covered dish over a slow fire.

Note that in this version the green sauce is not fried.

Yet another version, almost unbearably good, uses some hojasanta leaf.

 

 

Octopus in Its Ink

 

3 large octopi

6 garlic cloves, chopped

2 lb. tomatoes, chopped

1/2 cup olive oil

2 large onions, chopped

2 serrano chiles, chopped

Lard

3 bay leaves

1/2 tsp. ground pepper

1 pinch ground cumin

1/2 tsp. ground oregano

1 tbsp. parsley, chopped

2 tbsp. vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Take out the ink (remove ink sacs from octopi) and save it.  Wash the octopi and rub with 1 clove of the garlic, mashed.  Simmer, with a tomato, one onion, and lard, till octopi are tender.  Then clean off membranes etc. and cut up.

Chop and fry the rest of the garlic, the chiles, and the other onion.  When colored, add the bay leaves, the rest of the tomato, the pepper, cumin, oregano, parsley and the octopus ink dissolved in vinegar.  When this begins to boil, add salt and the octopus. Boil a few minutes, till done.

Squid in its ink is made more or less the same way.

At this point I cannot resist mentioning a dish from Tampico’s great seafood restaurant, the Restaurante Diligencia:  seafood petrolera.  This is basically the above recipe with other seafoods–shrimp, fish roes, some fish, clams or oysters–cut up and added.  The name is a sick joke; Tampico has offshore oil, and thus oil spills at sea.  This dish looks exactly like the aftermath of an oil spill.  However, it tastes heavenly.  The roes in particular “make” the dish.

 

 

Rice with Seafood

Another of those infinitely variable recipes.  More typical of Campeche than Yucatan.

 

6 garlic cloves, chopped

1 onion, chopped

Oil

1 lb. seafood (mixed, or cut-up squid, or shrimp, or other)

1/4 cup vinegar

Several sprigs parsley, chopped

2 roasted tomatoes

2 cups rice

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Fry the garlic and onion in a little oil.  Add the seafood.  Add the vinegar.  If octopus or squid are among those present, mix in the ink.

Add the parsley and tomatoes, chopped finely.

Separately, fry the rice.  Add water and simmer over very low heat.  When almost done, add the seafood.

Variant:  This is the minimal recipe.  Most people would add bay leaf, oregano, green peas, and bell or chile peppers (chopped).  Many would add spices including clove, cinnamon, cumin and allspice–all in very small amounts.  Some would throw in a carrot, or summer squash, or chayote, or anything else interesting and available.

 

 

Salpicon de Chivitos

Tiny sea snails with shells like curled goat horns (hence their name—“chivitos” means “little goats”).  This is good with any shellfish.  I first encountered it in a tiny cafe on an isolated beach on the north coast of Yucatan.

 

Boil the shellfish.  Mix with their own weight (or a bit more) of raw chopped tomato, onion and cilantro.  Dress with salt, pepper, dried oregano, lime juice and a bit of oil.

 

 

Samak Mishwi

 

Arabic for “roast fish.”  I have seen it Yucatecanized to “samik mishul.”  This is one of the relatively recent Lebanese contributions to the Yucatan world.  It is as un-Maya a recipe as could be imagined, but I find fascinating the adoption of Lebanese culture in the Yucatan Peninsula.

 

2 fish

Olive oil

1 garlic clove

2 limes

4 oz. tahini (ground sesame seed paste)

6 sprigs parsley

 

Brush the fish with olive oil and grill.

Serve with sauce:  Mash the garlic cloves with salt and mix with the lime juice and sesame paste.  Thin this with water as needed.

Garnish with chopped parsley.

This sauce is a version of the famous taratur sauce of the Mediterranean,but substituting Mexican limes for lemon or vinegar.

 

 

 

Shrimps in Chirmole (or Chilmole)

Chilmole (Nahuatl for “chile sauce”) is a very widespread recipe type, deriving from central Mexico, and based on a rich sauce of ground dried chiles, usually thickened with masa.  In central Mexico there is a whole conoisseurship of dried chiles, but in Yucatan there is not much choice.

 

1 lb. fresh or dried shrimp

4 oz. dried chile (ancho, morron or the like)

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

3 Tabasco peppers

6 peppercorns

1/2 tsp. achiote

4 large oregano leaves (or 1 tsp. ground oregano)

2 cloves

1 lb. tomato, chopped

1 branch epazote

2 oz. masa

3 eggs

Salt to taste

 

Boil the shrimps, peel and clean.

Toast the chiles and grind with the onion, garlic and spices.  Combine with the shrimps, the stock they were boiled in, the tomato, the epazote and the salt.

Dissolve the masa and cook down the whole into a thick sauce.  Serve decorated with slices of hardboiled eggs or other garnishes.

Warning: note that this recipe uses lots of chile.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:33)

 

 

Snook in Escabeche

 

As explained in the Introduction, robalo in southeast Mexico is what is called “snook” in the southern US.  It’s a flavorful, slightly oily, white-fleshed fish.  Any equivalent fish will do; even salmon works fine for this one (texture and richness being more important in this case than flavor and “white fish” qualities).

 

4 robalo steaks

1 tsp. steak recado

1/2 tsp. ground coriander

1 pinch ground oregano

1 pinch cinnamon

1 pinch ground allspice

2 garlic cloves

2 heads of roasted garlic

4 bay leaves

Vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Fry the steaks till not quite done.  Cool.

Dissolve the spices in the vinegar and some water.  Add the fish steaks.  Boil quickly.

 

 

Snook in Orange Juice

 

Fish:

2 lb. snook fillets

Juice of 1 bitter orange or a few limes

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. oregano

Juice of 3-4 bitter oranges (or equivalent)

 

Sauce:

1/4 cup oil

2 cloves garlic

2 onions

2 bell peppers

2/3 lb. tomatoes

Salt and pepper to taste

1 sprig or more parsley

 

Marinate the fish in the orange juice, to which the ground spices are added.

Roll the fillets and fry very lightly.  Cover with bitter orange juice.  Bake at 350o.

Meanwhile, make the sauce:  Fry the garlic and onions, chopped, in the oil.  Add the chiles and tomatoes, roasted.  Add the salt and pepper.  Then add the chopped parsley.  Cook.

Serve the fish with the sauce poured over.

 

 

Tik’in-xik

A very widespread traditional Maya fish dish.  Its ancestry must go back to ancient times.

 

1 fish (2-3 lb.)

3 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

Juice of 1 bitter orange or 2 limes

2-3 tsp. achiote

1 tomato, sliced

½ small white onion, sliced

1-2 xkatik chiles, seeded, roasted and cut in strips

Salt and pepper to taste

Hojasanta and/or banana leaves

 

Clean the fish and slash its sides.  Blend the spices, garlic, achiote and orange juice.  Rub this recado well into the fish.  Marinate for several minutes to overnight, according to preference.

Line a baking dish with banana leaves (or substitute).  Wrapping with hojasanta leaves and then banana leaves gives better flavor.  Put the tomato, onion and chile slices on it.  Wrap well in the leaves and bake in a slow over for 30 to 45 minutes.

Originally, of course, this would have been made in a pib, and you can still do this if you are very good at wrapping.  It is also made on the grill, which is easier.

Fish steaks marinated in the recado and simply grilled (without the wrapping) are also excellent.

If you can’t find banana leaves, wrap in any flavorful leaf, or put some fennel or bay leaves around the fish, and wrap all in aluminum foil.

Variants:  Cinnamon can be added to the recado.  All quantities can be, and are, varied according to what’s cheap, available, or preferred.  This is a notably variable dish; every restaurant has its own recipe.

 

 

Worker’s Shrimp

 

1 lb. tomato

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. achiote

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

5 allspice berries

1 oz. bottled green olives

1 oz. capers

A few raisins

1 sprig parsley

6 tbsp. oil

2 bell peppers

2 xkatik chiles

4 summer squash

2 chayotes

1/2 lb. potato

2 platanos

3 tbsp. vinegar

1 1/2 lb. shrimp (shelled and cleaned)

 

Roast the tomatoes.  Blend with the onion, garlic, spices (ground), olives, capers, raisins, and parsley.  Fry this sauce in the oil.  Cut up and add the vegetables and cook ca. 20 minutes.  Add the shrimp and cook till done, about 10 min.

Workers have more appetite than money, so a great quantity of vegetables are used here to stretch the shrimp.

The olives, capers, and raisins were originally elite Spanish ingredients, and are optional here.  Leaving them out gives a more Maya dish—more like what workers really eat.

 

 

Fish in Vinegar

A variant of fish in escabeche—the classic Spanish sour sauce, from the Arabic as-sikbaj for a vinegared dish.

 

2 lb. fish, preferably robalo steaks but any firm-fleshed fish will do

4 bay leaves

1/2 bottle cider vinegar

1 onion

1 carrot

1 bell pepper or mild chile

4 potatoes

Oil

4 tomatoes

Oregano

Few sprigs parsley, chopped

Pinch of nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Set a bit of water to boil, with the spices.  Cook 10 minutes and take out fish.  Chop the vegetables and cook in the vinegar and stock.  Add a biot of olive oil.  Pour over the fish and serve.

 

 

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Ajiaco, Yucatan style

 

A rather spectacular elaboration of a standard Mexican recipe.  This is another dish that stretches the meat with lots of vegetables.  It is thus notably healthy.

 

1 lb. pork loin

1 lb. pork short ribs

8 allspice berries

2 cloves

1 small cinnamon stick

1/2 tsp. coriander seed

1/2 tsp. oregano

3 garlic cloves

6 tsp. vinegar

1 onion

1 plantain

1/2 lb. tomatoes

2 bell peppers

3 xkatik chiles

1 chayote

1/2 lb. potatoes

1/2 lb. sweet potato

2 summer squash

1/3 cup rice

Pinch of saffron

 

Cut up the meat.  Grind the spices and garlic, mix with vinegar, and rub into the meat.  Cook for a few minutes.  Then add the vegetables, in the order listed.  The rice can be added with them or cooked and served separately.

Add the saffron at the very end (last 5 minutes of cooking).

 

 

Ajiaco, Quintana Roo style

 

2 lb. pork

4 leaves of oregano

4 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 pinch cumin seeds

2 summer squash

2 carrots

2 chayotes

1 sweet potato

1 plantain

2 potatoes

1 cup rice

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 green chile

4 oz. lard

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1 pinch saffron (optional; rare)

Salt and pepper to taste

One is tempted to add: 1 kitchen sink.

 

Boil the meat.  Add the spices.  As it cooks, cut up the vegetables and add them in.

Separately, chop up and fry the onion, tomatoes and chile.  Add the rice.  Add enough stock to cook and simmer slowly.  As it cooks, squeeze in the bitter orange juice.  Add the saffron at the very end.

Variant:  This is a typical Quintana Roo dish in that it is delicately spiced.  Most ajiacos use a great deal more chiles than this, with dried chiles being notably evident.  Adjust accordingly.

The saffron is an exotic touch; in the villages it would not be found.  But the other ingredients would.  Dishes like this are typical of Maya village cooking, because the dooryard garden is apt to produce, each day, one squash, a couple of tomatoes, a few chiles, and so on—not a lot of any one thing, but an awful lot of different things.

 

 

Balinche Salad

Compare the Chojen Salad of the Chiapas highlands.

 

Cold boiled meat—deer preferred, beef common.  It is shredded or chopped, with bitter orange (or lime) juice, chopped radish, cilantro, chile xkatik, and onion.  Half a bitter orange is served on the side to squeeze on it.

Other names are used, and ingredients are mixed and matched according to taste.

This is one of those simple dishes that vary according to the creativity of the maker.

 

 

Beef in Broth

 

2 lb. beef, cut up

3 tomatoes

1 bell pepper

1 xkatik chile

1 onion

Half of 1 bunch cilantro

1 tsp. oregano

3 leaves mint

1 head of garlic

1 tsp. black pepper

4 tbsp. red recado

2 chopped summer squash

2 chayotes, cut up

 

Relish:

6 radishes

Rest of the cilantro

Juice of bitter orange

Salt

Habanero chile (optional)

 

Boil the meat.  Chop and fry the tomatoes, bell pepper, chiles and onion.  Add to the meat.  Late in the cooking, add the herbs.

Roast the garlic and add it in.

Dilute the recado in some of the stock, and add in.  Put in the squash and chayote.  Cook till done.

Meanwhile, chop up the radishes, cilantro and chile and marinate in bitter orange juice.  Eat as relish for the meat.

 

 

Bistec

In spite of the name (which is, of course, “beefsteak”), this dish is usually made with pork in Yucatan and Quintana Roo.  However, it is made with beef too, especially rather tough cuts like flank steak.

 

2 lb meat, cut into thin steaks (1/8-1/4” thick)

Cinnamon stick

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp cloves

1 tbsp peppercorns

3 cloves garlic

Juice from 4 bitter oranges and 2 limes (or just 4-6 limes)

1 carrot

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1-2 potatoes

Salt to taste (traditionally this is an extremely salty dish, to restore salt lost in working in the blazing Yucatan sun)

 

Grind the spices together, and thin with the citrus juice.  Marinate the pork in this for an hour or two.  Fry in lard till done.

Meanwhile, peel the vegetables.  Boil with salt.  Serve the boiled vegetables separately from the bistec.

For sauce (separate):  Roast the habaneros.  Mash with salt.  Add cilantro and onion, and a bit of lime juice.  Or serve with limes, radishes and k’utbi p’ak.

Variants:  The vegetables can vary according to taste, except that the tomatoes, onion and potatoes must be there.

 

 

Bistec (Steak with Potatoes) II:  Urban Form

 

2 lb. tender beef or pork steak, cut thin

1 cube steak recado

Vinegar

Oil

3 tomatoes, sliced

1 onion, sliced

1 bell pepper, sliced

4 potatoes, sliced (in rounds)

Salt to taste

 

Dissolve the recado in a little vinegar and rub into the meat, with a lot of salt.  Put a little oil on the bottom of a casserole or saucepan.  Layer meat and vegetable slices.  Cook over low heat.

Variant: with more onion and some garlic, instead of the tomatoes and potatoes, this becomes “steak and onions.”

 

 

But’

 

Maya for “minced meat” (not rump steak!).  But’ is translated into Spanish as relleno, “stuffing,” which is confusing when it is not being used to stuff anything.

 

1 lb. ground pork (ideally, finely minced meat of fresh leg)

1 tsp. steak recado

1 pinch ground clove

1 pinch ground cinnamon

1/4 cup vinegar

2 tsp. sugar

4 tomatoes

1/2 onion

1 green chile (or bell pepper)

12 or 15 olives

1 tsp. capers

Raisins to taste

Almonds (to taste; optional)

4 hardboiled eggs

Salt to taste

 

Mix the spices into the meat.  Chop the vegetables.  Chop the whites of the eggs (reserve the yolks for garnish).  Mix all ingredients and cook in a frying pan, stirring.

This is usually used as a topping or stuffing.  It is used to stuff turkey or to make meatballs cooked with cut-up turkey.  Either way, the turkey is often boiled in a richly spiced stock (see turkey recipes).  But’ is also used in tacos or on sopes, etc., and of course for stuffing vegetables.

A very characteristic use:  wrapped around hardboiled eggs and fried, like Scotch eggs.

Traditional village versions leave out some or all of the classic Spanish imports:  olives, capers, raisins, almonds.

In fact, the very traditional, all-local form of it is:

 

But’ Negro

 

2 lb. ground pork

1 cube red recado

1 cube black recado

1/2 cup vinegar

4 tomatoes

1/2 onion

1 xkatik chile

 

Proceed as for previous recipe.  The same comments apply.

 

Variant:

8 tomatoes

1 xkatik chile

2 lb. ground pork

1/2 cube steak recado

1 cube achiote paste

1 pinch cumin

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

 

Roast and peel the tomatoes and chile.  Dissolve the spices in water.  Add to meat.    Cook all in a frying pan, stirring.  Chop the onion and garlic and add; they should fry up in the fat from the meat.  Eat with tortilla chips.

 

 

Chocolomo

The name is “mestiza Maya”; choko is Maya for “hot,” lomo is Spanish for “loin.”  Supposedly, the name comes not from the heat of the cooked dish, but from the fact that this was, and is, the traditional way to cook a freshly-butchered animal whose meat is still warm.  The purpose of this dish is to use the more delicate parts of the animal—loin and innards—before they spoil.  It is the standard “variety meats” dish in much of south Mexico.

 

Pork or beef heart, and small pieces of tripe

1 lb. pork or beef loin

Liver, kidney

Brain (optional)

Soup bones

Cube of steak recado

1 head of garlic

Juice of 1/2 bitter orange

4 tomatoes

1 onion, cut up

Sprig of cilantro

Sprig of mint

Chiles to taste

 

Clean the various meats well.  Before cooking, the meat of the kidneys has to be trimmed of fat and thoroughly cut away from the tough white tubule system, and then soaked in water for a while.  Discard this water after soaking.  This process makes kidneys taste good instead of gross.

Cook the meat with the recados.  Start with the heart, tripe, bones, and any tough cuts.  Cook for an hour or more.  Add the loin and cook a while longer.  Then add the liver and kidney; cook for a little more.  Add the brain (it is very delicate and cooks fast), vegetables and herbs.  Serve with Basic Relish, lime wedges, xni-pek, and other garnishes; it is traditional to have a fairly full board of relishes and garnishes with this dish.

Variants:  People use whatever mix of “variety meats” is available.  If you don’t like the innards, it is perfectly possible to make this dish with just pork loin (as the name implies).

Cabbage, chayote, xkatik chiles, radishes, and other vegetables are added to this dish, according to taste.

 

 

Chorizo

 

2 lb. pork

1 tsp. pepper

5 allspice berries

1 glass sherry

1 cup vinegar

Nutmeg

1 dried chile, seeded, toasted and ground

 

Grind the pork twice.  Grind the spices and add.  Mix all ingredients and knead well.  Let stand a while, then stuff into sausage skins.  Smoke over smoldering fire including aromatic leaves such as guava, allspice or avocado.

It is possible to make patties and cook directly, without the sausage skins and the smoking process.  In this case, try forming the patties around some aromatic leaves (bay leaves, herbs, etc.).

 

 

Cochinita Pibil

With this, we reach the crowning glory and fame of Yucatecan cuisine.   It goes back to pre-Columbian times; the pit barbecue, a worldwide cooking method, was sacred to the Maya–or at least was used to prepare the sacred foods.

Unfortunately, this is also the easiest Yucatecan dish to ruin.  I confess I have tried it only with pork roast, and only in the oven.  I have ruined a few roasts even with this simplified form.

 

This recipe is adapted to a very small piglet.  For a larger animal, you have to scale up the ingredients proportionately.

 

1 piglet, cleaned (ca. 10 lb., or up to 20), with all its innards, or a large pork roast (plus a pork liver, if you like liver)

3-4 cubes red recado, or mix equivalent amount of achiote with clove, cumin, black pepper, oregano, cinnamon and bitter orange juice to make up a paste.

Juice of 5 bitter oranges

Ground chile

Salt and pepper to taste (traditionally, a lot)

Mint leaves

2 xkatik chiles, cut up

Chives (or green onions)

Salt

 

Banana leaves, for wrapping

 

Relish:

2 red onions, finely chopped

Juice of one bitter orange

Chopped chiles

 

Dilute the recado in the juice of 5 of the oranges.  Rub this well into the meat and let it marinate overnight.  If using a pork roast, slash it and rub the marinade into the cuts.

Now, dig a pit about 4′ by 4′ by 3′ or more.  Heat rocks as hot as you can get them in a fire of very hot-burning wood.  Transfer these into the pit.  Put over them a layer of wet leaves.

Put the pork in a large, high-sided roasting pan and wrap thoroughly with banana leaves.  (If none is available, use any flavorful, safe leaves and wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil.)

Separately wrap the brain (or leave it out).  The liver should be wrapped separately, with chopped-up mint, chives, green chile and salt.  (If liver is not liked, do this with some of the meat.)

For a really thorough job of using all the pig, chop up the fat, mix with the blood and some spices, and pack into the carefully-cleaned small intestines, thus making blood sausage.  Cook with the rest.

Put the pork in the pit.  Cover carefully with a fitting metal cover.  Bury under a good foot of dirt.

Leave overnight.  (Times range from four to twelve hours, but the longer the cooking, the better the result.)

Serve with the raw onions, chopped, marinated with chopped chile (and sometimes tomato) in the juice of the remaining bitter orange.  Naturally, fresh habaneros are the chile of choice, but milder forms can be substituted.

Tomato or chile sauce is also often served.

In the Chetumal market, where many stalls sell cochinita pibil, the accompanying sauce is quite different, and wonderful with the dish: a simple guacamole made by mixing avocado and xkatik chiles, about half and half.  (Some stalls use more avocado, some use more chile.)  These are mashed to a smooth paste.  Some lime juice can be added, to good effect.  This is a really outstanding sauce for cochinita.

 

Fortunately for apartment-dwellers (and lazy people like me), this dish is perfectly easy to make in a regular oven, though it never tastes quite so good as when made in a pib.  The secret is to wrap it thoroughly and cover it well, so that no liquid or steam escapes, and then cook it VERY SLOWLY–200o–for several hours, until the pork is very thoroughly done.  A lot of liquid should result.

It is possible to wrap it thinly and roast at regular temperature (375o).  Indeed, this is what almost all restaurants do, especially Yucatecan-style ones that are not in Yucatan!  This produces perfectly good roast pork, but it isn’t cochinita pibil, any more than orange soda is Dom Perignon.

The best cochinita pibil is found before dawn in the village marketplaces, where the farmers are getting a quick breakfast before going off to their milpas–cornfields–for a day’s work.  The cochinita, prepared by one of the country folk the night before, is freshly dug up and still hot and juicy.  The cool air, wood smoke scent, and quiet Maya conversation add much to the experience.

 

 

Gopher

A traditional Maya dish.  So far, I haven’t tried it.  You are welcome to do the experimenting with this one.

 

Trap a gopher.  Roast (don’t skin, don’t clean, just roast).  Rub the carbonized hair off.  Take all the meat, innards included, off the bones.  Mix with salt, bitter orange or lime juice, and chile sauce (or use these as a garnish).  Make tacos of this with fresh tortillas.  (The true outback thing to do is to pick the meat off the bones with the tortilla pieces.)

This is sometimes referred to, with more rhyme than reverence, as baj yetel u taj, “gopher with its dung.”

 

 

 

K’ab ik (“Chile Stew”)

 

2 lb. beef with bones

2 cubes red recado, and a bit of extra achiote paste

1 cube steak recado

Pinch of allspice, or allspice berries

2 to 4 dried ancho chiles (I hope no one reads that as “24 dried chiles”)

2 sprigs epazote

Bitter oranges

1 head garlic

4 tomatoes

1 onion

 

Cut up and boil the meat.  Add the recados, with a pinch of allspice powder or a few allspice berries.

Seed, toast and soak the chiles.  Grind and add.

When the meat is soft, add epazote, juice of 1/2 bitter orange (or 1 lime), and a head of roasted garlic (peeled and mashed).

Add the tomatoes and onion, cut up, and finish cooking.

Serve with salsas.

 

 

Kibi

This is by far the most popular of the Lebanese contributions to Yucatecan food.  Kibis are sold on every busy street corner.  They have become so thoroughly Yucatecan that they appear on the menus of Yucatecan restaurants in Mexico City and Los Angeles!

The standard street kibi is uninspiring: ground lamb, bulgur, chopped onion and mint, formed into a depth-bomb (fusiform) shape and deep-fried.  It is often served with a relish of chopped cabbage, chile and cilantro in vinegar.

A more authentic Yucatan Lebanese kibi recipe (from a booklet of Lebanese cooking in Yucatan, by Maria Manzur de Borge, that I have lost and that is no longer available) gives a better product:

 

2 lb. beef

2 lb. leg of lamb meat

1 lb. fine bulgur

Bunch of mint

3 onions

Handful of pine nuts (pinon nuts, pignolias)

Oil

Salt

Black pepper and chile, if wanted

 

Separate the fatter from the leaner bits of meat.  Mince the meat and the onions.  Soak the bulgur for an hour.

Mix the leaner meat with the bulgur and one of the chopped onions.  Fry the fatter meat with two of the chopped onions.  Add the pine nuts.

When the fat is fried out of the meat, drain and mix with the lean meat.  Form into depth-bomb shapes and deep-fry.  A lower fat alternative (perfectly traditional) is to bake in a baking tray.

 

 

Lomitos

 

2 lb. pork, cut up

1 cube red recado

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1 onion, chopped

2 tbsp. lard

1 lb. tomatoes

2 xkatik chiles (or other fresh chiles, even to habaneros)

1 roasted head of garlic

 

Rub the pork with the recado mixed with the juice.

Chop and fry the onion in the lard.  Add the tomato and chiles.  Put in the pork.  Add water and simmmer.  Add in the garlic and cook till done.

 

 

Old Rags

Ropa vieja–so named from its appearance, like old shredded rags–is a classic dish known throughout Mexico and the Spanish Caribbean.  This is the Yucatan version.

 

1 lb. leftover stewed pork or beef (if starting from scratch, stew the meat a LONG time, till it is “boiled to rags”)

1 onion

4 cloves garlic

5 tomatoes

1 bell pepper and/or 1 xkatik chile pepper

1-3 sprigs or small branches of epazote

1/2 cup bitter orange juice

1 cube red recado

2 tsp. black pepper

Salt to taste

 

Shred the meat into small fibres.

Chop up the vegetables and fry, starting with the onion and garlic.  Add the meat and fry all.

Many variants of this recipe exist.  Tomato sauce, other spicing, etc. can be tried.

In much of the Caribbean this dish is served with “Moors and Christians” (cooked black beans mixed with white rice).

The famous Cuban version of this dish is much spicier.  It uses much more garlic, and really hot chiles instead of mild ones.  You can vary this recipe accordingly.  3 dried ancho chiles, ground, is a good start.

 

 

Om Sikil (Pipian I)

This is a village recipe, extremely conservative–basically pre-Columbian (note lack of frying and lack of any nonnative ingredient except black pepper).

The Nahuatl word “pipian” has almost displaced the ancient Maya name om sikil, but the latter is still heard.

 

2 cups sikil

6-8 cups water

1/2 red onion, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

2 cloves garlic, mashed

1 tsp. ground pepper

2 achiote cubes dissolved in water

1 tsp. dried oregano leaves

2 red chiles

2 lb. meat or fowl

1 cup sour abal (Yucatan “plum”; substitute sour plums)

1 tbsp. lard

4 oz. masa

 

Mix the sikil with the water.  Strain.  Bring to boil and add the chopped vegetables.  Cook ten minutes.  Add in the meat and spices.  Cook till meat is tender, about 1 hour.  Toward the end, add the abal or sour plum fruits.

Take out 2 cups stock.  Slowly work into it 1 tbsp. lard and 4 oz. masa.  Return this to the soup to thicken it.

It is perfectly possible to dispense with this thickening step.

 

 

Pipian

Compare Om Sikil, above.

 

4 oz. sikil

3 dried chiles

2 tbsp. achiote

2 garlic cloves

2 lb. meat (any sort), cut up

1 branch epazote

4 tomatillos

1 tbsp. masa

2 tbsp. lard if using lean meat (pan drippings here, definitely not commercial lard)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Mix sikil with water and bring to boil.

Seed, toast and soak the chiles.  Grind them with pepper, achiote and garlic.  Add to the sikil.

Add the meat, epazote and salt.  Let boil.  Add the tomatoes, blended up.

Thicken the sauce with the masa.  Add the lard.  Cook till done.

 

 

Pok Chuk (Maya for “pork chop,” usually spelled “poc chuc”)

This dish was created by the restaurant Los Almendros of Ticul.  Los Almendros has an old Mérida branch, and now is developing branches elsewhere.  This dish is widely imitated and varied.  What it lacks in complexity, it more than makes up in popularity.  One of the reasons is the beautifully artistic arrangements that can be made with the separate sauces and beans on the plate.

 

Rub a thin-cut pork chop with steak recado or red recado.  Grill.

Serve with Tomato Sauce, K’utbi Ik, roast onion, cooked black beans, and bitter orange or lime quarters—each served separately in neat piles around the plate.  Avocado slices and other garnishes are often added as well.

 

 

Pork and Chaya

 

2 lb. pork

2 tsp. oregano

4 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. cumin powder

20 chaya leaves (if no chaya is around, substitute 1 bunch Swiss chard)

1/2 cup rice, pre-soaked

1 pinch saffron

 

Relish:

1 red onion, chopped

3 tbsp. chopped cilantro

Juice of 2 bitter oranges

 

Boil the pork.  Add the spices.  When well cooked, add the chaya, rice and saffron.  Simmer till rice is just done, ca. 15 min.

Prepare a relish with the onion, cilantro and bitter orange juice.

This is a very Moorish-style recipe; Moorish cooking often involves cooking the rice or other starch in with the meat (as well as the addition of saffron).  It produces a rather stodgy dish, especially if overcooked.  Thus, you might well want to cook the rice separately and serve the stew over it.

 

 

Pork and Beans I (Frijoles con Puerco)

This dish is the local variant of a dish universal in the west Mediterranean world:  south France, Spain, Portugal.  Always, it involves beans of one or another type, with various tough parts of the pig.  This black-bean version is a sacred Yucatecan tradition.  It is often served regularly on a particular day of the week (the day varies from place to place) as the Daily Special.  Whoever said neck bones were low?  They’re among the best parts of the pig.  Also, true Yucatecans are sometimes militant about the tail and ear, but non-Yucatecans can be forgiven for leaving them out!

 

1 lb. black beans

1 lb. pork meat, cut up

1/2 lb. pork neck bones

1 pig tail, cleaned

1 pig’s ear

1 tbsp. black recado

1 tbsp. red recado

4 chopped tomatoes

1 branch epazote

3 oz. lard

1 tbsp. masa

 

Cook the beans.  Cut up the pork and add.

Dilute the recados in half a glass of water and add to the above.

Fry the tomatoes and epazote in lard.  Add in the masa and half a glass of water and cook till thick.  Add this to the stew.  Cook a minute more and serve forth.

Serve as is, or remove the pork from the beans and serve them separately.  Either way, a full range of relishes and garnishes should be provided, but must always include chopped radish with onion and cilantro in bitter orange or lime juice; and Tomato Sauce or K’utbi Ik on the side.

Rice is often cooked in the cooking liquid (after initial frying) and served separately.

“Red” variant:  Use more red recado (2-3 tbsp. or even more) and some ground allspice.

 

 

Pork and Beans II

This is a Yucatecan variant of a more Peninsular-Spanish version of the same dish.  In Spain the beans would be white–originally fava beans, now white frijoles.  In Yucatan red beans are sometimes used, and are very good in this dish.

 

1 lb. white or red beans

1 lb. pork

1 lb. pork ribs

6 cubes red recado

Vinegar

1/4 cabbage

1 summer squash

2 plantains

1 lb. potatoes

3 oz. raw ham

2 oz. bacon

2 Spanish chorizos

4 tomatoes

1 onion

1 bell pepper

4 green chiles

1/2 lb. lard

Salt to taste

 

Cook the beans.

Cut up the pork and ribs.  Add the red recado dissolved in vinegar.

When the pork is mostly done, add the beans, and the squash, cabbage, plantains, and potatoes (all cut up).

Separately, fry the chorizo, bacon and ham.  Add the tomatoes, onion, bell pepper, and chiles.  Fry.  Add a bit of vinegar.  Mix into meat and beans at last minute and simmer a while.

Variation comes by adding or subtracting different sorts of preserved pork products.

 

 

Pork and White Beans

By contrast, this is a very traditional, very Maya recipe.  White navy beans, dried limas or black-eyed peas may be used.

 

2 lb. white beans

2 lb. pork, preferably leg meat and ribs

1 onion, chopped

1 bell pepper, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

1 tbsp. red recado

Water

1 xkatik chile

1 head garlic, roasted

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook the beans.  When mostly done, add the pork, previously fried in its own fat (i.e. cook, preferably in stickproof pan, till some of its own fat renders out to fry it; you may have to add some water at first).

In this fat, fry the chopped vegetables with red recado dissolved in water or bitter orange juice.

Combine all ingredients and cook till done.

 

 

P’uyul de Chicharron K’astak’an (“small pieces of thoroughly-cooked chicharrones”)

A very Maya dish.

 

Take bits of pork skin attached to fat and meat–i.e. like chicharrones but with the meat attached, not just the skin.  Deep-fry for a very long time, till thoroughly crisp.  Eat in tacos with Basic Relish or similar garnishes.

Low-fat variant: pan-fry or grill bits of pork.

 

 

Steak a la Valladolid (Bifstek vallisoletana)

A simple but wonderful and deservedly popular recipe.  Valladolid (Yucatan) is the center of the highly traditional maize-growing region of eastern Yucatan state and neighboring Quintana Roo.  It is a homeland of simple, filling, but superb foods.

 

Rub a thin steak or pork fillet in recado of black pepper, garlic, lime juice and salt.  Then rub on red recado made of one cube achiote paste, lime juice, ground cumin and a little ground clove, dissolved in bitter orange or lime juice.  Marinate an hour or more.  Grill.

 

 

Stuffed Chayote (“Chayote Slippers”)

A manifestation of the classic stuffed vegetable dishes of Middle Eastern cooking—another Moorish legacy in Spain; note the distinctive suite of Spanish ingredients, the olives, capers, and raisins, appearing yet again.

Basically a variant of Stuffed Squash, below.

 

1 lb. ground pork

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

1 tomato

4 chayotes

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 cup oil

Olives, capers, and raisins (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook the chayotes.  Cut in half lengthwise, removing the central seed.  (The result looks like a slipper.)

Meanwhile, cook the meat in a frying pan.  In the rendered fat, cook the tomato, onion, and pepper, chopped.  Add the olives, capers and raisins.  Cook this mixture down till dry.

With this, stuff the chayotes.  Bake in a pan for a few minutes till it all holds together.

 

 

Stuffed Cheese

A thoroughly Spanish-style dish, with Moorish antecedents, now thoroughly nativized in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Large Dutch Goudas–alas, often of a quality too low to be seen in the home country—used to be sold everywhere, wrapped in red wax and red plastic wrap.  Recently, however, the balance of payments has made them expensive, and they are no longer village food.

There may still be a few proper ladies who refer to these cheeses as chak chi, Maya for “red edge,” since queso, “cheese,” is one of the many, many, many words that have a double meaning in Yucatan.  (The same ladies refer to brown sugar as piloncillo, never panoche, and refer to eggs as blanquillos–“little white things.”)

These large cheeses are often sold by the slice in rural markets.  Only the rich can afford the luxury of using a whole ball for a single dish.

Unlike most Yucatecan specialties, this dish is a cholesterol-avoider’s nightmare.

 

1 ball of Dutch cheese

2 lb. pork

14 eggs, 12 of them hardboiled

3 cloves garlic

Dried oregano to taste (use a lot)

1 clove (or more)

Oil

Raisins, olives, and capers, to taste (a lot)

Lard

Saffron, to taste (optional)

1 cup flour

2 cups of tomato sauce

Salt and pepper to taste

2 xkatik chiles

2 serrano chiles

1 bell pepper

1 lb. tomato

1 lb. onion

 

Unwrap the cheese, remove the wax, cut in half and hollow out.

Cook the meat.  Save the stock.

Peel the boiled eggs.  Chop up the whites.

Prepare a recado by grinding together the garlic, oregano, clove and saffron.

Mince the pork.  Mix in the egg whites.  Fry with a bit of the recado.  Add generous amounts of raisins, olives, capers, and 3-4 oz. of the scooped-out part of the cheese.

Take off the fire and mix in the two raw eggs and the saffron.  Stuff the cheese with this mixture.

Seal the cheese shut with the flour (made into paste with a bit of water).

Wrap in a cloth and steam (or boil, but the water coming up only an inch or so) for an hour (adding water if necessary).  Don’t worry if it falls apart.  It often does.

Serve with a sauce, as follows:

Roast the chiles, tomatoes and onion.  Skin.  Chop fine and fry in lard.  Add the meat stock and the rest of the recado.  Add more capers, olives and raisins.  Thicken with a bit of flour.

Cut the cheese in quarters and cover with the sauce.

 

The flavor of this recipe depends heavily on the use of a lot of recado, capers and olives.  Otherwise, it is bland and greasy to a serious degree.

Variant:  Shrimps and other sea foods are sometimes used for the stuffing.

 

 

Stuffed Squash

A dish with Spanish and, ultimately, Moorish roots, adapted to New World squash.  Very similar dishes are prepared by more recent Arab immigrants, especially of the Lebanese community that developed in the late 19^th century in Yucatan; see below.  Moreover, this dish has rebounded to the homeland; stuffed Mexican summer squashes, prepared with recipes very similar to this one but substituting lamb for pork, now universally join the original stuffed eggplants and so on, throughout southern Spain, the Middle East, and the Arabic world.

 

6-8 summer squash

1/2 lb. ground pork

4 cloves

Small stick cinnamon

6 leaves oregano

4 cloves of garlic, roasted

Vinegar

Pinch of saffron

Around 20 raisins

1 tsp. capers

Olives, as desired

Almonds, as desired

4 tomatoes

1 onion

2 xkatik chiles or 1 bell pepper

Lard or oil (olive oil is traditional, and best)

Pork stock

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Blanch the squash and hollow out.

Fry the ground pork.  If it is fat, enough fat will render out to fry it; if it is lean, add a little lard or oil.

Grind the spices, except the saffron, and make into a recado paste with a little vinegar.  Add to the pork.

Add the vegetables (chopped finely; the onions first), then the saffron (not all of it), raisins, olives, almonds and capers.

Stuff the squash with this mix.  Bake, or cook on stove top in a pan with a little water, until squash is soft.

Prepare a sauce by cooking down the stock with some vinegar, saffron, salt, and, if wanted, a little flour to thicken.  Pour over the squash.  Some form of tomato sauce is often used with or instead of this sauce.

Variants: the raisins, olives, almonds, and capers can be left out.  The sauces can also be dispensed with.

Variant:  A Lebano-Yucatecan version uses lamb, pine nuts, tomato and cinnamon as the basic stuffing.  It can be modified by adding the chiles, etc.

 

 

Tablecloth Stainer (manchamanteles)

One Yucatan variant of a very widespread and popular Mexican dish.  The sauce is brilliant red and leaves an almost permanent stain, hence the name.

 

2 lb. pork loin (or other meat)

Lard for frying

Meat stock

4 dried ancho chiles

2/3 lb. tomato

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1 stick cinnamon

2 cloves

8 allspice berries

1 tsp. oregano

1 tsp. sugar

1 plantain

1/2 lb. potatoes

1 sweet potato

 

Cut up the meat.  Fry in lard.  Toast the chiles.  Roast the tomato, onion, and garlic.  Blend these with the chiles.  Grind the spices and mix in.

Add these to the meat.  Add the stock.  Simmer till meat is done.

Separately, boil the plantain, potatoes, and sweet potato.  When done, add to the meat.

In central Mexico this dish would usually have a lot more chiles, of 2, 3 or even 4 varieties.  I prefer that to the Yucatan form.  But the Yucatan form has more subtle, harmonious spicing and more vegetables, and the wonderful roasted tomato-onion flavor.  Nobody says you can’t have it all….

 

 

Tasajo with Chaya, I

 

2 lb. tasajo (salted air-dried beef), soaked and cooked for a very long time

3 cubes red recado

1 lb. chaya leaves

2 summer squash

1 bitter orange

1 roasted head of garlic

Juice of 2 limes

3 habanero chiles

 

Tasajo is the Spanish and Central American equivalent of jerky (which is originally Peruvian—our word comes from the Quechua Indian word charki).  Tasajo is saltier and not quite so tough as real jerky.

Soak the tasajo for a long time in several changes of cold water.  Then wash and cut up.

Boil with the recado for a couple of hours.  Then add the squash (cut up), garlic and chayas.  Cook another 15 minutes.

Take the ingredients out of the stock.  Squeeze the bitter orange (or a couple of limes) over them.  Serve the soup separately.

Seed and roast the chiles.  Mash with salt and lime juice.  Serve on the side.

Variant:  The meat and chaya can be taken out of the stock before quite done, chopped finely and fried with onion or garlic.  I like this better.

This recipe would work with corned beef or even with a tough cut of fresh beef.

 

 

Tasajo with Chaya, II

 

2 lb. tasajo (salted dried beef), soaked and cooked for a very long time

1 lb. chaya leaves

2 oz. bacon

2 oz. chopped ham

4 cloves

4 bay leaves

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Fry the meat, bacon, ham and flavorings.  Add water and cook 30 minutes.

Boil the chaya leaves and blend.  Fry this in a little oil.  Put over the meat and cook.

Variants:  This sauce is also ideal with fish.  Add any other greens to the chaya.  More or different spicing can be used.

 

 

Ts’aanchak (familiar as dzanchac in older spelling)

A traditional way to cook deer, from long before the Europeans came.  Now adapted to Spanish-introduced animals.

 

1 lb. beef, any cut (this is a good way to use tough or bony cuts, etc.)

3 garlic cloves

1 onion, chopped

6 ears sweet corn (optional)

2 summer squash, cut up (optional)

2 limes

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Relish:

1 bunch radishes, cut up very finely

1 habanero chile, cut up

1 onion, cut up finely

1/2 cup cilantro, cut up

Juice of 1 bitter orange

Salt to taste

 

Boil the meat till tender.

When almost done, add the vegetables (if wanted—this is often just a meat dish).

Serve with the relish–the cut-up ingredients marinated in the citrus juice.  Slices of bitter lime can be used as flavorful garnish, if you can get them.

The vegetables are optional; any combination can be used.  The Maya village version is simply boiled deer meat with the relish.

The stock is critical here.  Tough, lean, flavorful meat should be used, and simmered slowly for a long time, to produce a really good stock.  It is eaten as soup, accompanying the meat, like the ancestral peasant form of French bouillon et bouilli.  Naturally, this is also accompanied by a constant stream of fresh-made tortillas from home-grown corn.

There are many variants.

 

 

Ts’ik

 

1 lb. venison, cooked (any other meat can be substituted)

2 tomatoes

1 onion

Several radishes

10-20 sprigs cilantro

1 jalapeño chile

Juice of 4 bitter oranges

 

Cut up and boil the venison.  Cut up the other ingredients and serve with the cooked meat.

This is better if the venison is marinated before cooking, and better still if it is cooked in an earth oven (pib) rather than boiled.

A very simple standard.  This is the way ordinary Maya prepare the leaner types of meat—traditionally, venison—for a quick lunch.

By shredding the meat and mixing it with the relish, one creates the dish known as “balinche salad,” above, or by other names.

 

 

White and Gold Stew

A superb, elegant dish, this stew is thoroughly Spanish in origin, and thus out of place in this book—but too good to leave out!

 

1 lb. meat (anything will do)

4 cloves

Small cinnamon stick

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

2 packets saffron, dissolved in a little water

1 tsp. ground oregano

1 tsp. ground thyme

1 head garlic, roasted

Salt to taste

2 oz. vinegar

Olive oil (or lard or vegetable oil)

1 bunch green onions, roasted

Green chiles, to taste

Sugar to taste

 

Grind the spices (or use ground ones to begin with).  Rub into the meat, with the salt.  Brown the meat over low heat.  Add water, vinegar, oil, the sugar (if desired) and the vegetables.

Variants: a little sherry can be added.  Red recado can be used.

 

 

Xakan jaanal

Maya for “mixed food,” which this certainly is.  It is a particularly good and easy dish.  In contrast to the foregoing, this is a solid village dish.

 

2 lb. pork ribs

1 10-oz. package frozen lima beans or black-eyed peas

3 garlic cloves

1-2 tsp. oregano

Salt and pepper to taste

Branch of epazote

2 chayotes

1 kohlrabi

1 head cabbage

1 onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

1 xkatik chiles, chopped

1 cup rice

 

Cook the pork.  When it is nearly done, add the beans, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper and epazote.

Cut up the chayote, kohlrabi and cabbage.  Add into the pork and beans.

Separately, fry the chopped onion.  Add in the tomato and chiles.  Add in the rice and fry a while.  When it begins to stick, add in enough broth from the pork and beans to cover to depth of 1/2 to 3/4 inch.  Simmer over very low heat till the liquid is absorbed.

Serve the pork and vegetables over the rice.

Variants: this dish is infinitely expandable.  It can also be contracted perfectly well by leaving out the chayotes, kohlrabi and cabbage, or replacing them with any appropriate vegetable.  Eggs are sometimes added to hardboil in the stock.

 

 

Yucatan Stew

 

1 lb. meat

1 head of garlic, roasted, mixed with juice of one bitter orange

1/2 tsp. pepper

1-2 cloves

1 pinch cumin seeds

Sprig of fresh oregano or tsp. dried oregano

1 small bunch cilantro

3 tomatoes or 6 tomatillos

1 large green chile

1 onion, chopped; and/or a whole green onion, leaves and all except the tough top ends

 

Cook the meat.  When it comes to boil, add the spices.  When it is soft, chop or blend up the vegetables, fry, and add.

Eat with Basic Relish.

 

 

POULTRY

 

Chicken Adobo

 

1 chicken

3 cloves garlic

1 ½ tsp oregano

Large stick of cinnamon

1 tbsp peppercorns

1 oz. red recado

1 lb potatoes

½ onion

2 mild chiles, chopped

1 lb tomatoes, chopped

 

Cut up the chicken and boil.  Mash the garlic, oregano, cinnamon, and peppercorns together.  Add these and the potatoes, cut up, and cook till chicken is nearly done.  Then mix recado with some of the the stock.  Fry the onion, chiles and tomatoes.  Add these to the mix and finish cooking quickly.

 

 

Chicken Asado

This dish is great as is, but is far, far more commonly used as the start of something else.  This is the cooked chicken that is used in panuchos, salbutes, tamales, and countless other snacks and made dishes.   It was originally made with turkey, and often still is.

 

1 chicken

1 oz. red recado mixed with lime juice, lard or chicken stock, and more salt

½ onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, cut up

1 hot chile

Cut up and boil the chicken until almost but not quite done.  Take it out of the stock; save the stock.  Rub the chicken with most of the recado mix and roast it in a hot oven (ca. 375o).  At this point, if you are making this chicken only to use in panuchos or the like, set the chicken out to cool and then pull the meat off it.

Then, mix the rest of the recado into the stock.  Add the onion, tomatoes, and chile to the stock.  Cook and serve as soup with the chicken if you still have it, or, if the chicken’s destiny is otherwise, add noodles and/or potatoes and  other vegetables and a little of the dark meat of the chicken to the soup and finish cooking.

This dish has to be carefully made if you use United States chickens, which are very tender.  They tend to fall apart if boiled very long.  This dish requires that the chicken be boiled only enough to tenderize it and sterilize it.  If it falls apart, it can’t be roasted properly.

Variant:  this is made with black recado, too, especially if one is using turkey.

 

 

Chicken a la Motul

 

2 chickens

1/2 cup red recado

Juice of 2 bitter oranges

Lard

10 fried tortillas

3 large tomatoes

1 lb. refried beans

4 oz. cooked ham

Canned peas for garnish (or 1 10-oz pack frozen peas—untraditional but far preferable)

3 oz. grated Mexican sharp white cheese (if unavailable, use feta)

Salt to taste

 

Rub the chickens with salt and recado dissolved in the orange juice.  Boil in a little water.  Drain; fry.  Take the meat off the bones and shred the meat.

Boil the tomatoes in a very little salted water.  Blend and fry in the oil.

To serve:  Layer beans on a plate.  Put a fried tortilla on this.  Add the shredded chicken.  Then add the tomato sauce.  Cover with another tortilla.  Pour sauce over all.  On the top of this stack, put the ham, peas, and grated cheese.

Variants:  Turkey is more traditional, but very rarely found now in this dish.

The chicken can be cut up, and used bone-in, rather than boned and shredded.

This is only one of the architectural marvels of Motul cuisine.   Motuleños love to pile foods on a tortilla and top with some peas.  Possibly the Maya pyramids inspired it all.  It is cooking for the eye as well as cooking for the palate.

 

 

Chicken a la Ticul

Ticul is a large town in southern Yucatan, famous for its pottery, shoemaking, and food.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Lard

2 oz. ham, chopped

2 heads lettuce, chopped; optional (I prefer it without)

2 potatoes, cooked, chopped

1 stick cinnamon

6 peppercorns

2 cloves

4 large oregano leaves (or 1 tsp. ground oregano)

1 onion

3-4 garlic cloves

4 tbsp. vinegar

Grated Mexican sharp white cheese (or feta)

Green peas (traditionally canned, but briefly-cooked frozen peas are far better)

Salt to taste

 

Boil the chicken.  Drain, saving the stock.  Fry in the lard with the ham, lettuce and potato.

Grind the spices, onion, garlic and vinegar.  Add this to the stock and boil till it thickens.

Serve the chicken with this sauce poured over it.  Top with grated cheese and peas.

Variant:  The chicken can be breaded and fried.  Fried beans are often an accompaniment.  Other garnishes include red pepper strips, fried platano, etc.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:45)

 

 

Chicken Chirmole

 

1 chicken

5 mulato chiles (or other dried chiles; mulato specified because the common ancho is a bit sweet for this recipe, but mulatos are rarely seen in Yucatan, so ancho is very often used)

1/2 cup sikil

5 toasted tortillas

5 peppercorns

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

¼ tsp allspice

2 tbsp. lard or oil

Salt to taste

 

Cut up and boil the chicken.

Blend the chiles (seeded, toasted and soaked), sikil, tortillas, pepper and onion.  Note: the quality of the tortillas matters a lot in this dish.  Get good, fresh ones.

Fry this sauce in the lard.  Add two cups of the chicken stock.  Add the chicken and cook till sauce thickens somewhat.

Variant:  Ground blanched almonds make a very good substitute for sikil in this recipe.

 

 

Chicken in Bread Crumbs (Fried Chicken)

 

Not the most exciting dish, but too universal in Yucatan to ignore.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Lime juice

Salt and pepper

1 egg

Flour

Breadcrumbs

Oil

 

Boil the chicken.  Then take out and marinate in lime juice, salt and pepper.  Meanwhile, make a batter by beating the egg with flour.  Dip the chicken in this, then roll in breadcrumbs.  Deep-fry.

The advantage of this village method is that, since the chicken is already cooked, one leaves it in the boiling oil only long enough to crisp the outside into a shell.  The result should be very crisp and not even slightly greasy.

 

 

Chicken Pibil

 

1 large chicken

1 cube red recado

2 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. ground allspice

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

Pinch of ground oregano

6 cloves garlic, roasted and mashed

Juice of 2 bitter oranges (or 4 tbsp. cider vinegar)

12 leaves of epazote

4 pieces of tomato

Chopped onion

Chopped chile

1 tbsp. lard

Salt to taste

 

Cut up chicken into quarters.  Rub with spice mix (the spices dissolved in the bitter orange juice).  Anoint banana leaves (or foil) in lard and wrap the chicken quarters–with a few epazote leaves, a slice of tomato, and a some chopped onion and chile on each quarter.  Cook in a pib.

If baking in an oven, use a covered dish.  The idea is to hold in all the steam, so none of the aroma is lost.  Many a chicken pibil has been utterly ruined by baking without proper attention to this detail.  One warning:  If you do this, be sure the orange juice and the tomato don’t supply too much liquid, or you’ll get chicken soup instead of chicken pibil.

Naturally, one can vary the spice mix.  Unauthentic but good is to add powdered chile pepper to the recado.

 

 

Chicken with Potatoes a la Quintana Roo

A very standard dish in the area where I lived and worked, out in central Quintana Roo.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Oil

5 oregano leaves

5 allspice berries

1 slice of onion

1/2 tbsp. black pepper

2 garlic cloves

1/2 cube red recado or achiote paste

Juice of one bitter orange

3 tomatoes, roasted and blended up

1 xkatik chile

1/2 bell pepper (optional)

1 jalapeno chile

1 lb. potatoes (small new potatoes, or cut-up larger ones)

 

Fry the chicken lightly in the oil, with the spices.

Blend up the onion, garlic and recado in the orange juice.  Add to the chile and add just enough water to cook.

Separately, fry the tomato and the peppers, chopped.

Add to the chicken.  Add in the potatoes and finish cooking.

Like many Quintana Roo dishes, this is very delicately spiced, and you may want to raise the amount of oregano, allspice and black pepper.

 

 

Chilmole

A relative of the “Turkey in Black Sauce” below

 

1 chicken, cut up

1 tsp oregano

4 cloves garlic

1 tbsp pepper

2 oz black recado, or make or approximate your own (see recipe above)

2 tomatoes

2 onions

Several dried chiles (1-2 anchos, or a few smaller chiles)

4 oz masa

½ c white flour

 

Boil the chicken.  Grind the spices and garlic together, add to recado, add to stew.  Roast the onion in the ashes.  Add it and the tomatoes to the stew.

Toast the chiles (traditionally until completely black).  DO THIS OUTDOORS, STANDING UPWIND; the smoke is intensely irritating.  Add.  Cook 45 min. Knead the masa and flour together.  Add to stew, mix thoroughly to thicken stew, and cook for 10 min.

Variants:  Pork can be added to this.  The black recado can be left out, since it merely adds more to the toasted chiles and spices.  Fresh chiles, roasted, can be used (but are not traditional).

 

 

Cuban Rice

A Quintana Roo dish, reminding us of the links between the Mexican Caribbean and Cuba.  The Quintana Roo version seems generally to use more lime and herbs, less achiote and oil, than the Cuban.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Oregano, to taste

1 cube steak recado

7 garlic cloves

2 tomatoes

1 slice onion

1 bell pepper

3 cups rice

Lard

1 cup green peas (traditionally canned, but fresh or frozen are far better)

Juice of one lime

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil the chicken with oregano, the spices, and 5 of the garlic cloves.

Blend or chop finely the tomato, bell pepper, and onion.  Fry.  Add to stock.

Fry the rice with the other two garlic cloves.

Add the stock to this and simmer.  When partly cooked, add the peas, chicken, and lime juice.  Cook till rice is tender.

 

 

K’oolij blanco (“white stew”)

1 chicken or (more traditionally) small turkey

White corn meal, stirred into stock to whiten it

1 small xkatik chile

2 cloves

Few cumin seeds

Few allspice berries

1 cinnamon stick

Head of garliic

1 tsp crushed oregano leaves

2 sprigs epazote

Salt

Pepper

Sprig of mint

1 onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

 

Roast chicken unitl almost done, on grill.  Boil with corn meal and xkatik or bell pepper.  Mash the spices and garlic together and add to stew.  Add oregano and epazote.  Add mint at end.

Separately fry the onion and tomato to sofrito.  Add to stew near end of cooking, and cook just to get all mixed.

 

 

Mukbipollo

“Mestiza Maya”–Maya for “buried” (mukbij) and Spanish for “chicken.”

John Stephens’ account from around 1840 is classic:

“A friendly neighbour…sent us a huge piece of mukbipoyo.  It was as hard as an oak plank, and as thick as six of them;…in a fit of desperation we took it out into the courtyard and buried it.  There it would have remained till this day but for a malicious dog which accompanied them [the friendly neighbours] on their next visit; he passed into the courtyard, rooted it up, and, while we were pointing to the empty platters as our acknowledgment [sic] of their kindness, this villanous [sic] dog sneaked through the sala and out the front door with the pie in his mouth, apparently grown bigger since it was buried.” (Stephens 1843:21-22.)

Alas, all who travel in rural Yucatan, now as in Stephens’ time, encounter these oak-plank mukbipollos.  They are the result of skimping on the fat chicken broth when you mix the masa for the crust, and perhaps of also baking too long.

 

The following is an elaborate village version.

 

1 chicken

2 lb. pork (optional)

1 cube red recado

1-2 tsp. steak recado (or just another half cube of the red)

Branch of epazote

Few oregano leaves

5″ stick of cinnamon

Tsp. ground allspice or several allspice berries

2 cloves

5 roasted garlic cloves

4 tomatoes

3 onions

2 xkatik chiles

8 lb. masa

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cut up and boil the meat in a lot of water.  Grind the spices and add.

Separately cook the tomatoes and onions in a very little water with 1 tbsp. lard, and boil 10-15 min. till a sauce is formed.

Take out a cup of stock.  Mix one fourth of the masa into the remaining stock and meat—slowly and carefully, so that lumps do not form.

Work the reserved cup of stock into the rest of the masa.  If the stock isn’t rich and fatty, you will have to add lard or oil, typically about ¼ cup, or you will wind up with the oak plank.  Again, work slowly.

With this mix, shape small pie shells like the familiar little chicken or steak pot pies of European and American cooking.  Fill with the meat.  Top with the tomato sauce.  Cover with a top crust of masa.  Rub over with thinned masa to seal.  Wrap in several layers of leaves.  Tie tightly to make a bundle.  Bury these in the pib.

The feast from which this recipe comes was cooked in a pib 3′ by 3′ and 1 1/2′ deep.  My next door neighbors in Quintana Roo, Elsi Ramirez and her family, dug it in their front yard.  Good firewood (the local equivalent of oak or mesquite) was put in, with large cobble-sized rocks on top of it.  The wood was burned till it became ash and the rocks changed color.  Then palm leaves were put over these until they were thoroughly covered.  The mukbipollos, wrapped in banana leaves and then in palm leaves, were then put in.  A metal cover was put over all, and dirt piled over it.  It was left for 3 hours.

In urban realms where you can’t dig up the yard:  Line a baking dish with banana leaves or foil.  Put the pies in, or just make one huge pie by pressing the masa against the banana leaves or foil.  Bake in a slow oven, around 350o, for 3-4 hours.  The exact heat must vary with circumstances.  The idea is to get a soft bottom crust and tougher, somewhat crisped and toasted top crust.

Variants:

Ch’a-chaak waj (bread for the ceremony of praying for rain) is made as above, or one can fry achiote in the lard used in the recipe.  The sauce should be thick so that the whole thing is more a cornbread than a pie.

The chicken can be shredded off the bones before use in the pie.

Dried chickpeas or lima beans, boiled till tender, can be added.

Spicing changes with the cook’s taste at the moment.

 

 

Chekbij waj

Similar to a mukbipollo, but, instead of making yellow corn meal into a solid piecrust, one uses a very soft, wide, round cake of white masa with a lot of chicken-grease-rich-stock worked into it (making it quite red).  The chicken is wrapped in this so the result is more like a tamale than a pie.  It is baked or steamed in leaves like the preceding.

 

 

Pabixa’ak’ (grilled or roast chicken)

Marinate chicken in red recado dissolved in bitter orange or lime juice, or in the spice mix for Cuban Rice, above.  Marinate for an hour or two, then grill or roast.

 

 

Puchero

 

1 chicken

Lard

Black pepper

1/2 tsp. cumin

2-3 cloves

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. oregano

3 garlic cloves

1 white onion

2 tomatoes

1 small summer squash

2 chayotes

2 carrots

2 small bell peppers

2 potatoes

1 or 2 plantains

Cabbage

1 package (8 oz.) fideos noodles

Salt to taste

Sprig of mint

 

Cut up the chicken, scrub with lime, and fry in lard.  Add salt, 1/4 of the onion, 2 tomatoes.  When all have colored somewhat, add water.  Make recado of the spices; add.  Then add in the vegetables (the plantains cut up but not peeled).  The cabbage goes in only when the other ingredients are fairly thoroughly cooked.

Saute fideos (thin angel-hair pasta) in a little oil.  Add stock to cook them.

Angel hair pasta may be substituted, but look for Mexican fideos (thin noodles—from Arabic fidaws, old Andalusian pronunciation fideos, meaning “noodle”).  They are thinner, cook faster and have more flavor.

Serve the puchero over these.  Serve with Basic Garnish or close relative thereof.

Variants:  The main one is that puchero is made with meat as often as with chicken.  Pork or beef neck bones are particularly common and good.  Pork ribs and pieces of stewing beef are also excellent.  Pork and chicken, or pork and beef, are routinely combined in pucheros.

The vegetables, of course, are an open set.  Garbanzos, sweet potatoes and other root crops are typically added.  Sometimes turnips and kohlrabi (the latter surprisingly common in the Yucatan) find their way in.

Thai lime, cut up, is very good in this–served in the bowl, not cooked with the chicken.

Rice is also used.  Any meat can be used instead of, or along with, chicken.  Chicken and pork make a good—and frequent—combination.

Garbanzos are sometimes added.

 

 

Rice and Beans

A dish native to Belize—some would call it the national dish there.  It has spread just across the border, and nativized in the Caribbean city of Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo.

 

1 chicken

Coconut oil

1 cube achiote paste

2 cloves garlic

Salt and pepper

1/2 cup rice

1/2 cup cooked red beans

1 plantain

1 onion

 

Cut up the chicken.  Make a recado of the spices.  Rub into chicken.  Cut up chicken and roast the pieces or fry them in coconut oil.

Sauté rice in coconut oil.  Add coconut cream thinned with some water and cook.  Mix with the beans.  (Excellent canned coconut cream may be found in any Asian-food market.  If you feel compulsive, here’s how to make it:  Grate the meat of a very ripe coconut.  Soak the gratings in warm water.  Pack in a cheesecloth and wring out.  This is great for developing the arm muscles.)

Cut plantain into thin strips and fry.  Serve on the side.

Separately, slice and fry the onion.  Serve over the chicken.  Alternatively, make Marinated Onions (see above) and briefly fry them.

Serve the chicken separately from the rice-bean mix.

Accompany with boiled local vegetables (such as chayote), sliced; chopped cabbage marinated in vinegar, salt and pepper; sliced raw tomatoes; salsa cruda of onion, tomato, cilantro; and xni’pek’ (habanero salsa; see above.  Habaneros are just as popular in Belize as in Yucatan.  In Belize they go by the English Caribbean name of “Scotch Bonnet” peppers.

 

 

Salpimentado (“salted and peppered”)

 

2 chickens

1 lb. pork, lean, cut up

2 summer squash

2 potatoes

1 chayote

1 plantain

3 cloves

1 stick cinnamon

1 tbsp. oregano

1 red onion

3 bunches of spring onions (scallions)

2 heads of garlic

2 mild chiles

Salt and pepper to taste

 

2 white onions

1 cup vinegar

Pinch of salt

1 habanero chile

2 Thai limes (bitter limes)

1 bunch cilantro

 

Cut up the chickens.  Set to boil with the pork.  Skim, then cook for 15 min.  Chop and add the vegetables  Grind the spices and add.  Cook 20 minutes or more, until all are done.  Meanwhile, roast the red onions, spring onions, chiles, and garlic.  Add them into the soup at the end; cook a minute or so.

For the relish:  chop the white onions very fine; add the vinegar

 

 

Turkey in Black Sauce

Here follow the traditional dishes of the four sacred colors.  Turkey, the only large domestic animal in pre-Columbian times, was the ritual food, and still is to some extent.  Chickens usually replace it now, being easier to raise.

 

1 turkey

1/2 lb. dried chiles

1 tbsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1 tsp. oregano

15 cloves

1 1/2 tsp. achiote

4 oz. lard

2 onions, chopped

20 leaves epazote

3 lb. tomatoes, chopped

4 lb. ground pork

2 raw eggs

10 hardboiled eggs

2 limes

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Seed the chiles.  Then toast them till they burn (literally catch fire).  DO THIS OUTDOORS, STANDING UPWIND; the smoke can seriously damage eyes.  Be sure no one is downwind.  When the chiles begin to burn, stop the fire by throwing water over them; let them just blacken.  Wash and grind with the spices.  Then blend all in water.

Heat the lard.  Then chop the onions and fry.  When they color, add six epazote leaves and a pound of tomatoes (chopped).  When fried, add the ground meat and half the ground chile mix.

Add the raw eggs and the chopped-up whites of the cooked eggs.

Meanwhile, clean the turkey and rub with salt, pepper and lime juice.  Stuff the turkey with the meat sauce and the egg yolks.

Cook in a closed pot over a low fire.  Add the rest of the ground chile, the tomatoes, the rest of the epazote, and some lard.  Cook till turkey is done.

To make sure the chiles aren’t overburned (producing bitter, scorched or sooty tastes), make them a day or two ahead of time, soak them, and discard the water.

Variant:  The village form of this uses a lot of masa (about 6 lb.), stirred into the soup to lengthen it and make it suitable for pib uses.  This makes a pretty stodgy dish, though.

Allspice berries can be added.

 

 

Turkey in Red Sauce

The red version of this quartet of traditional ritual turkey dishes.

 

1 turkey

1 tsp. black pepper

1 tbsp. oregano

8 cloves

¼ tsp. allspice

2 tbsp. achiote

2 oz. dried chile

10 tomatoes

3 onions (and/or several cloves garlic)

10 leaves mint

3-4 oz. lard

½ -1 lb. masa

 

Rub the turkey with salt and leave for several minutes.  Soak the dried chile.

Grind the spices (including the soaked chiles and the achiote) in a little water.

Roast the turkey till browned but not fully cooked.  Cut in pieces.  Simmer with the pork in 5 quarts water.  Add the recado.

Chop the tomatoes, onion and mint.  Fry in lard.  Add to the above.

Thicken with masa.  Cook till sauce thickens.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:46)

 

 

Turkey in Yellow Sauce

The recipe for the brilliant yellow k’ool is about the same, with half the achiote and without the tomatoes and mint.  Or use the very similar chicken stew from the mukbipollo recipe above.

 

 

Turkey in White Sauce

 

1 lb. pork ribs

1 turkey

1 branch oregano

10 peppercorns

3 garlic cloves (or more–up to one or two heads)

1 tsp. steak recado

1 tsp. red recado

Vinegar

Sliced onions

1 cup white corn meal

1 tsp. cumin seeds (optional)

1 tbsp. dried oregano

 

Boil the pork ribs in a large pot.  Add the turkey, cut up.  Add the spices, dissolving the recados in the vinegar.

Separate a few cups of the stock and dissolve the flour very carefully in it.  Cook slowly till it thickens.  Serve the turkey with this sauce poured over it.

Variants: it is possible to add quartered tomatoes, bay leaves, etc.

A much fancier version uses the classic Spanish combination of olives, capers, almonds, raisins, and a pinch of saffron.

A very interesting, and common, variant uses ground pork.  It is fried, and when the fat has rendered out, the spices are mixed into it.  (Some even chop tomatoes, onion, and chile peppers, and fry them in the mix, adding some of the almonds, capers, etc., but by this time we are dealing with a Spanish pork dish rather than a Maya turkey dish.)

If you can’t find white corn meal, yellow will do.  Some use white flour, but it merely thickens the sauce and makes it gluey, rather than adding the delightful texture and flavor of corn meal.

 

 

Turkey in Escabeche I:  Simple Form

In most of the Spanish world, escabeche—from Arabic, and originally Persian, as-sikbaj, food cooked in vinegar—is something one does with vegetables and sea food.  In Yucatan, it is first and foremost a poultry dish.

 

Marinate a turkey or chicken in a recado of cloves, cumin seed, cinnamon, black pepper, allspice, oregano, and garlic, mixed with a little vinegar (variants:  water, lime juice, bitter orange juice).

Boil with salt and a chile or bell pepper.

Serve with sliced onions (as in recipe following).

 

 

Turkey in Escabeche II:  Classic Escabeche Oriental

No one seems to have a conclusive account of what is “oriental” about this dish.  One theory is that the name comes from the fact that the dish is typical of Valladolid in the eastern part of Yucatan state.  However, a similar dish is called “oriental” in Spain, and it seems unlikely that influence from Valladolid (Yucatan) got that far, so I suspect “oriental” means “Moorish” or “Near Eastern” in this case.

 

1 turkey

1 tbsp cumin seeds

1 stick cinnamon

20 oregano leaves

8 cloves

1 tbsp. peppercorns

1 bottle vinegar

1/2 cup lard

8 xkatik chiles

2 lb. red onions

6 habaneros (!! Or fewer—or, if you can’t deal with even one habanero, one mild chile)

4 roasted heads of garlic

 

The turkey can be cut up or whole.  For the pib, it should be whole.  Boil the turkey.

Grind up the spices and make a paste with the vinegar.  Rub into the turkey.  Put the turkey in large pot with the lard, garlic, and xkatik chiles (roasted).  Bury in pib, or roast in the oven.

Cut up the onions and habaneros.  Marinate in vinegar or lime juice, salt, cumin powder and toasted oregano leaves.  Add some of the turkey stock.  Serve as garnish.

 

 

Turkey Escabeche III

A variant, which I prefer, of the above.

 

3 lb. turkey parts, or 1 chicken

1/2 stick cinnamon

3 cloves

3 black peppercorns

4 cloves garlic

3 tsp. dried oregano

1 cube achiote paste

1 tbsp. lard

Juice of 6 limes

3 purple onions

 

Boil the turkey (or chicken) with a little dried oregano.

Grind the spices (including the rest of the oregano).  Add 1/2 of the achiote cube and mix with juice of 1 lime.  Score chicken and rub in this recado.

Slice the onions.  Let sit for a while, then pour boiling water over them.  Leave a few minutes, then drain and add juice of 5 limes and 1/2 tsp. salt.  Or make the full Marinated Onions recipe with them.

Roast the turkey in a hot oven for 15 minutes, till skin is crisping.  Or, if you have a pib, wrap it and cook it in the pib.

Add the rest of the achiote cube to the stock.  Add 3 xkatik chiles (seeded and roasted) and a head of roasted garlic.  Then add an onion, quartered.

To serve, chicken can be cut up and returned to stock.  But, if one is eating it all with tortillas, the method is to take the meat off the bones, return the bones to the stock to boil some more, and eat the meat and soup separately.  The onions are a side dish to add onto the meat.

Serve with jalapenos in escabeche or habanero chile sauce.

Variant:  The above is a village form.  Urban forms are apt to include canned green Spanish olives, capers, tomatoes, bay leaves, etc.

Fanciest of all is to use a turkey stuffed with but’ (ground meat) and garnished with hard-boiled eggs.  Increase spices accordingly.

 

 

Turkey San Simon

This dish is Yucatan food history in a nutshell.  The turkey, tomatoes, chiles, and most of the spices are indigenous.  The recado using bitter orange is Caribbean, specifically Cuban (itself a mix, about which I know far too little, of African and Native American elements).  The bread thickening and the rest of the spicing is classic Moorish-Spanish.  The plantains are a solidly African touch.  The peas are a 19^th-century Mexican garnish, derived probably from French usage.  The roasted green peppers are a standard modern central Mexican garnish.  And so on….

 

Recado:

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 tbsp. cumin seeds

1 tsp. cloves

1 tsp. allspice

1 stick cinnamon

1 head of garlic, peeled

1 tbsp. oregano

 

Dish:

1 turkey (ca. 10 lb.)

Lard for frying (1-2 tbsp)

2 heads garlic

1-2 tbsp. oregano

1 branch mint

Juice of 5 bitter oranges (or 1 cup vinegar)

1 oz. achiote

3 plantains, cut into long thin strips

10 slices French bread (or less—or even leave out)

1 10-oz. package of frozen peas

6 tomatoes, roasted and peeled

2 xkatik chiles

2 bell peppers, roasted and peeled

Salt to taste

20 green onions, roasted till beginning to brown

 

Grind all the recado ingredients together, dissolve in the bitter orange juice, and rub into the turkey.  Marinate in refrigerator overnight.

Then, cut up and brown the turkey in lard with a roasted head of garlic, the oregano, mint and salt.   Add water and cook, covered, till the turkey is almost done.

Separately, fry the plantains till soft; toast the bread; fry the tomatoes (chopped), and the chile and bell peppers (cut up).

Blend the tomatoes with the roasted head of garlic.

Now combine all ingredients except the plaintains and bread.  Cook 10 minutes.  Then take the turkey pieces out of the sauce; serve the pieces and the sauce separately.  Garnish with the peas, cooked and put over the turkey.

Serve with the plantains and toast on the side.  Roast the green onions till soft and serve them on the side also.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:47)

 

 

 

VEGETABLES

In general, the vegetable section of a Mexican cookbook is the shortest, if it exists at all.  Yucatan is no exception.  Vegetables are eaten as part of mixed stews, with meat, or they are garnishes.  Still, there are a few vegetable dishes.  Chaya, in particular, has been monographed by Jose Diaz Bolio.  Some of the recipes below are inspired by his.

 

 

Alboromia

Another Arab dish–using Yucatecan recado! According to legend, Burun was a queen of old Baghdad, the wife of Caliph Al-Ma’mun, and she liked mixed vegetable dishes.  Her name, variously distorted, applies to such, all over the Arab and Spanish worlds. She is especially associated with eggplant.  Alboromia in countless forms is universal in Andalucía and Extremadura, and presumably came to Mexico very early, but one suspects, also, later Lebanese influence in this dish.

Such vegetable recipes as exist in Yucatan frequently turn out to be Lebanese.  They are ideal for a vegetable course in a Yucatecan dinner, because they make an interesting contrast to the Maya and Spanish dishes.

 

1 eggplant

1 summer squash

1 lb. potatoes

1/2 tbsp. red recado

2 tomatoes

2 onions

2 garlic cloves, roasted

1 bunch parsley

1/2 bell pepper

2 tbsp. vinegar

Oil

 

Chop and fry the vegetables, starting with the onions, garlic and parsley.  Add in the flavorings.

Variants: More spices and herbs can be added.

In both Spain and Lebanon, the ancestors of this dish lack the recado.  In Lebanon, they usually have more herbs–mint in particular, and sometimes tarragon.  These do not go particularly well with the recado.  Leaving out the recado and using mint, tarragon and oregano or marjoram makes a good variant, similar to ones found among the Lebanese communities.

 

 

Bean Chirmole

 

1 lb. beans

25 small dried chiles or 4 dried ancho chiles

1/2 onion

1 lb. masa

2 cloves garlic

6 tomatoes

1 tsp. oregano

Cloves, to taste

Allspice, to taste

Lard (optional)

Salt and pepper, to taste

 

Cook the beans until almost done.

Toast and boil the chiles.  Wash.  Grind them with the spices.  Add to the beans.  Add the other ingredients.

Meat can be added to this, as can abal fruits (sour plumlike fruits; substitute sour plums).  Both improve it quite a bit.

 

 

Black Rice

Chop and fry an onion and some leaves of epazote, and chile if wanted.  Fry in a little oil.  Add ½ cup rice and stir-fry.  Then add liquid from cooking k’abax beans (enough to cover the rice to depth of 1 inch), and simmer, covered, over very low heat till done.

This is one of those simple but wonderful recipes.

 

 

Chaya basics

Chaya is much like spinach or swiss chard, and these leaves can always be substituted for it or combined with it.  (Incidentally, “spinach” in south Mexico usually turns out to be New Zealand spinach or some other heat-resistant green, not “real” spinach.)

Boil chaya leaves.  Chop and fry with onion.  Salt, bitter orange juice, garlic, etc. can be added.

Variants:  Scrambling eggs in with this mix is wonderful.  Or an omelette can be made thereof.  Adding chorizo, cut-up (previously soaked) salt meat, chopped ham, or comparable flavorings is even more wonderful.

Chaya is also good in any bean dish.  Combining beans and chaya enormously increases the nutritional value of the dish, and tastes better, too.  Chaya can also be put in any soup or stew, especially the ones with mixed vegetables such as puchero.

 

 

Chaya and Plantains

 

1 lb. chaya leaves

1 large plantain

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 tsp. cumin

Juice of 1 bitter orange

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil and cut up the chaya.  Peel and boil the plantain and chop it up.

Chop up and fry the onion, garlic, pepper and tomatoes.  Then add the chaya and plantain and the other ingredients and cook till hot.

This is a wonderful dish, very good with tender young Swiss chard or even turnip greens.

 

 

Chaya Rice

 

Fry onion in a bit of oil.  Add the rice and fry.  Add chopped chaya leaves (raw small ones or blanched larger ones), chopped tomatoes, and any other flavorings desired.  Finally, add water to cover to depth of 1/2 “-3/4” and simmer.

Chaya Seafood Rice:  Add shrimp and/or other seafood to this, along with the chaya.

 

 

Chaya Salad

 

Boil the chaya, chop, and eat with sliced onions and vinagrette dressing.  Other vegetables can be added.

 

 

Chaya with Bacon

That old reprobate, Bishop Landa, when he was not torturing Maya to death in the Inquisition, was enjoying their food.  (It is to the credit of the Spanish that Landa’s cruelty earned him formal censure, even in that dreadful age.)  Among other things, he noted that chaya was “good with much fat bacon.” How did he cook it?  History does not record, but here are some worthy possibilities:

1. Parboil chaya. Meanwhile, fry chopped-up strips of bacon.  Drain off some of the fat.  Then fry the chaya in the remaining fat, with the bacon bits.

Adding garlic and dried chiles to the frying bacon improves this version.

2. Boil the chaya with bacon strips, garlic cloves, and dried red chiles.
3. Boil slab bacon. Skim off as much of the fat as you can.  Add chaya, garlic and chiles.

Being a Spaniard of his time, Landa probably went much more heavily into the bacon than we would do.

 

 

Chaya with Cheese

 

Boil chaya leaves in chicken stock.  Sprinkle crumbled sharp white Mexican cheese over them.

 

 

Chaya with Eggs

 

1 large bunch chaya

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 egg

 

Boil the chaya and cut up.  Cut up the onion and tomato.  Stir-fry the onion; add the tomato; then add the chaya; then add the egg.  Stir-fry all.

 

 

K’abax Beans (“Frijoles kabax”)

K’abax implies ordinary food without special seasonings.  This is the everyday bean dish of Mexico.  Cooked over a good wood fire on a Maya hearth, it is as fine a dish as anyone could want.

 

Put beans in water and bring to boil.  Turn off and soak a few hours.  Then (in the same water) boil till tender, adding salt, an onion, a sprig of epazote and perhaps some achiote.  Eat with a relish of lime or bitter orange juice with chopped onion, cilantro, radishes and habanero chile.

Further manipulations include:

Blended beans:  Cook beans as above.  Blend, with their liquid.  Add lard (Maya lard: see above) to taste.  Or, fry in lard chopped onion, epazote and chile, and add into the beans.  Boil.  (This produces something very like the black bean soup of traditional United States cuisine.)

Refried beans:  Mash the k’abax beans but without the liquid.  Fry in lard.  Add in above ingredients as desired.

 

 

Poor People’s Paté

One of the Lebanese contributions to Yucatan’s food.  It is a variant of the “poor man’s caviare” of the Near East and East Europe.

 

4 small eggplants

2 tbsp. chopped onion

6 chopped garlic cloves

1/2 cup chopped olives

2 bay leaves

3 tomatoes

2 cups cabbage, chopped

1/2 cup vinegar

1 cup yogurt (to serve separately)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Peel and slice the eggplants.  If you dislike the bitterness, leave in salted water for 20 minutes and then drain, but you lose some flavor doing this.

Fry the onion and garlic.  Then add the eggplants, olives, pepper and one bay leaf.

Put the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute, to loosen the peels, and skin them.

Blend all the above (discard the bay leaf) with some olive oil.

Separately, make a cabbage salad:  Cook the cabbage.  Add vinegar, pepper and another bay leaf.

Serve, separately, the pate; cabbage salad; and the yogurt.  Eat on pita bread.

Variants:  infinite.  Try leaving out the olives.  The yogurt is optional.

 

 

Squash with Squash Flowers

 

Cook very small summer squash for a very few minutes.  Add squash flowers and then maize kernels cut from fresh sweet corn ears.  Boil for a very short time, until all ingredients are just tender.  Serve with lime wedges.

 

 

 

DESSERTS

Fresh fruit and the universal Latin American flan are the commonest desserts in Yucatan, but they need no recipes here.

Yucatan produces excellent sorbets from local fruit; the best are guanabana, mamey, and chicosapote.  They are just fruit pulp, sugar, and water.  Use any sorbet recipe.

 

Candied ciricote

The ciricote is a small fruit that has to be cooked to be edible, rather like a small quince.  It grows on a large tree whose wood is among the most beautiful of all tropical woods, but now cannot be legally cut because of the rarity of these important food-producing trees.

 

2 lb. ciricotes

2-3 limes

1 lb. sugar

Domestic fig leaves

 

Cook the ciricotes in water with some wood ash (a handful or so, to tenderize them).  When cook, take out and grate.

Mix with lime juice.

Cook down in sugar syrup with some lime juice and the fig leaves.  (The fig leaves produce an enzyme that further tenderizes the fruit.)

Simmer for half an hour.  Take out the fig leaves and bottle.

This recipe will work for any firm, sour fruit.  It is similar to that for orejas de mico (“monkey ears”—preserved wild papaya), etc.

 

 

Chayote Pudding

 

1 chayote

3 eggs or 4 whites + 1 yolk (untraditional but healthy and good)

2 oz. butter

2 oz. sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. ground cinnamon (or less if preferred)

 

Cook the chayotes, peel, and blend with the eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon.

Butter a mold.

Cook in the oven till done.  (For a softer texture, some use a bain-marie.  Basically, this is a dish of water in which the custard dish is set high enough so that the water does not come in, but rather steams the custard.)  Doneness is indicated by a generally firm appearance.  Don’t wait till a knife stuck into the center comes out clean–if you do, the pudding is overdone.

In Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, where apples cannot grow, nostalgic French cooks have found that chayotes make a very good substitute (if you use enough butter and spices).  I have had excellent French apple cake, apple tart, and so on, using chayotes.  There is even a restaurant totally devoted to the chayote.  Admittedly, this is far from Yucatan, but the tip is too good not to pass on.  Yucatan, like Reunion, is a tropical land where apples do not grow.

 

 

Cheese Pie (Pie de Queso)

Another very common dish, especially in Merida.  Ancestrally, it is some unsung American’s variation on cheesecake, but is in fact much better than cheesecake.  The English word “pie” is invariably used.  Sometimes the spelling is localized to pay, which just happens to be the Maya word for “skunk.”

 

1 can condensed milk

4 eggs

1/2 lb. cream cheese or Cheddar cheese

1/2 cup sugar

Vanilla to taste (optional)

Piecrust (see below)

 

Blend the milk with the egg yolks, sugar and vanilla.  Beat in the cheese.  Beat the egg whites to peaks and add in.  Fill into a regular piecrust and bake till firm.

Low-cholesterol version of the pie filling:  1 ½ cup regular milk, 6 egg whites, 1 package cottage cheese, 1/2 cup sugar, vanilla.  Blend all.  Not very authentic, but good enough.

One might also try Jack cheese in this.

Piecrusts:

Standard version:  1 cup flour, 1 stick butter, tiny bit of sugar, ice-cold water.  Cut the butter into the flour and sugar; rub in a while.  Mix in the water–just enough to moisten–and roll out.

A Yucatan version:  1 cup flour, 1/2 stick butter, 1 tsp. baking powder, 1 egg, bit of cold water.  Proceed as above.

Another Yucatan version: 1 cup flour, 1 tsp. baking powder, 1 stick butter, 1 cup condensed milk.

Low-cholesterol version:  1 cup flour, 1/2 stick butter, 1 oz. sugar, cold water.

 

The other classic Yucatan “pie” is “pie de nuez,” but it is just ordinary American pecan pie, migrant from the American south.

 

 

Coconut Flan

 

1 lb. sugar

1 can coconut cream

8 eggs

1/2 quart milk

1 tbsp. lemon juice (optional)

Vinegar

 

Simmer 13 oz. sugar with coconut cream (cans of it can be found at any Asian-food market) till slightly thickened.  Cool.  Separately, beat the eggs.  Beat in the milk and lemon.

In a nonstick pan, melt 3 oz. sugar with a small amount of vinegar till the sugar begins to caramelize.  Pour into a buttered flan dish and pour int he ingredients.  Cook in a bain-marie till almost firm (about an hour).  Refrigerate.

Simple way (not to say cheating):  Throw milk, coconut cream, eggs, and sugar into a blender.  Blend for several seconds at high speed.  Line a pan with dark brown sugar (so you don’t have to caramelize it).  Pour the blended liquid into this and bake in the oven at 325o till almost firm.  Take out and cool; it will finish firming up as it cools.  Leaving it in the oven till firm, as most cookbooks advise, overcooks it.

 

Cocoyoles

An impractical recipe for anyone outside of a Maya village, but ethnographically too interesting to miss.  Cocoyoles—t’uk in Maya—are the fruit of a palm.  They are too hard to eat without treatment.  They are boiled with water and lime—not the citrus, but the result of burning limestone—to soften them.  The outer part becomes soft and sweetish.  It is then boiled down with sugar (traditionally, honey) until candied.  It takes very slow simmering for 12 hours to do this perfectly.

 

 

Corn and Squash Sweet

 

1 cup sweet corn kernels cut from very young ear, cooked very quickly

1 cup cooked meat from butternut or other sweet winter squash

Sugar to taste

 

Mix all while hot.

Allspice, cinnamon, vanilla and other appropriate flavorings can be added.  Brown sugar gives more flavor.

This very traditional Maya sweet would originally have been made with honey, or simply relied on the sweetness of the young corn.

 

 

Fruit Salad with Xtabentun

 

Cut up tropical fruits.  Melon, mango, papaya, mamey, banana, and citrus make a good combination.  Squeeze lime or orange juice over them and sprinkle liberally with Xtabentun, the Yucatan aniseta liqueur.  Of course you can use any liqueur, or dark rum.

 

 

Guava Paste

A universal Latin American delicacy, developed from the quince paste of Spain.  Quinces don’t grow in the tropics, but settlers quickly found that guavas are a perfect substitute.

 

1 lb. sugar

1 lb. guava juice (cook lemon guavas; strain.  Force some of flesh through sieve)

 

Cook slowly, stirring constantly, till the mixture forms a paste (soft ball stage).

 

 

Mamey Paste

Local version of the above.

 

1 lb. sugar

1 lb. mamey flesh

 

Mix sugar and mamey meat.  Simmer, stirring constantly, for several minutes.

This can also be made as in preceding recipe, but-unlike the guava–the mamey does not really need the cooking and straining.

Mamey is quite sweet enough without sugar, so this recipe is for preserving the fruit.

 

 

Posole with Coconut

 

1 lb. nixtamal kernels (corn kernels boiled in lime)

Juice of 2 limes

Meat of 2 small coconuts

½ c sugar (or less, to taste)

 

Boil the kernels in water with juice of 2 limes added.  Grind these with the meat of the coconuts.  Boil this with sugar, till thoroughly hot and sugar thoroughly dissolved.

Nixtamal kernels are available canned at any Hispanic market.

 

 

Queso Napolitano

The “national dessert” of Yucatan–the one you actually see everyone eating.

 

2 cans of milk

10 eggs

Vanilla extract

3 oz. sugar

 

Blend all except the sugar.  Caramelize it.  Turn out into a baking dish and pour in the liquid.  Cook in bain-marie for an hour (or bake till firm–this one you don’t take out early, as with the preceding).

It is possible to use only egg whites in this, and thus keep the cholesterol down to virtually nil.

 

 

Ruined Dessert

Atropellado means “totally messed up.”   The name honors the appearance of the dish.  Fortunately, its taste is as good as its looks are messy.

 

1 lb. sweet potato

Meat of 1 coconut

¼ lb. brown sugar

1 stick cinnamon

1 tsp. ground allspice

 

Cook the sweet potato.  Peel and mash.

Blend up the coconut.

Mix the sugar with some water and add the cinnamon.  Put on fire.  When it begins to boil, add the sweet potato and mix into the syrup.

Add in the coconut.  Chill.

I’m usually too lazy to grate coconut.  Canned coconut cream works fine!  Store-bought grated coconut is okay too.  Best is to use both.  Standard in Yucatan is to soak grated coconut in a can of condensed milk.

 

 

Squash with Honey

The traditional Maya sweet.

 

1 winter squash

1 lb. honey

 

Cut small holes in the squash.  Pour in the honey.  Bake in pib or oven for 2 hours.

This dish is sickeningly sweet.  A tiny amount is quite enough.  More than that can produce severe hypoglycemia after a sugar “rush.”

 

 

Spanish Cream

 

1 quart milk

6 eggs

1 lb. sugar

2 oz. cornstarch

1 tbsp. vanilla extract

 

Blend all.  Cook in a nonstick saucepan over a low fire, stirring constantly.

Low-cholesterol variant:  leave the eggs out.  (Yes, this is traditional.)

 

 

Yucatan Marzipan

 

1 lb. sikil

1 lb. sugar

10 oz. water

Flavorings as wanted

Food coloring

 

Dissolve the sugar in the water.  Simmer until a syrup forms.  Slowly work in the sikil, stirring constantly.  Add any flavorings.

Cool thoroughly.  Now, model into small animal, fruit and vegetable shapes and paint with the food coloring.

This recipe is of purely ethnographic interest, to show the ingenuity of the Yucatecan culture.  Almonds were far too rare in the old days to waste on marzipan-making.  Thus, this form was evolved.  It finds its chief use in providing pretty modeled toys and small items for children—something the ordinary person can buy for practically nothing in the market, to pacify a young child.  This sikil marzipan is only marginally edible, like the flour-and-water marzipan of the rest of Mexico, and is more the equivalent of Play-Doh than a food.

 

 

DRINKS

The usual round of licuados (fruit smoothies) and alcoholic drinks occur, but are as elsewhere in Mexico.

 

Atole nuevo (green corn drink)

Kernels from an ear of fairly well matured sweet corn, soaked a day, then blended with a bit of sikil.  This is often sweetened with honey, or otherwise flavored.

 

Baalche’

The sacred ritual drink–still as important as in ancient Maya times.

 

Water

Honey, preferably of native stingless bee (much more flavorful than European bee honey)

Bark of baalche‘ tree (Lonchocarpus longistylus; sometimes closely related spp. are used)

 

Mix ingredients, bottle, and let stand until honey ferments.

Today, the drink is often made with regular honey cut with sugar, and the bark is reduced to a bare minimum.  The gods are said to be highly annoyed with this, and some would say the results are such events as Hurricane Gilbert and the droughts of the early 2000s.

If you are not given to brewing, but want to put on a Yucatecan dinner, be advised that Ethiopian t’ej is basically the same thing (flavored with Ethiopian hops instead of baalche’ bark, but the difference is not earthshaking) and can be bought in markets carrying Near Eastern or African products.

 

 

Chaya Drink

This is a very common, popular drink.  It is made quite sweet.

 

20 chaya leaves, boiled but not too soft

Juice of 3 limes

Sugar to taste

Water

 

Blend in a blender till a thick drink is produced.  Serve cold.

 

 

Chocolate

 

2 lb. cacao (chocolate) beans

2 oz. cinnamon sticks

1/2 lb. flour

1 package sweet biscuits

 

Toast the beans till they begin to color.  Heat the cinnamon stick.   Toast the flour till golden.  Grind up the cacao and cinnamon, and the biscuits.  Form tablets and store.  For drink, beat up in water, with sugar to taste.  Note that commercial Mexican chocolate tablets are mostly sugar, while these tablets are unsweetened.  Moreover, the taste will not be much like commercial chocolate; fermentation is needed to bring out the “chocolate” flavor known to the world outside Mesoamerica.

 

 

Coconut Pozole

 

1 kg. nixtamal kernels

Juice of 2 limes

Fresh meat of 4 small coconuts

1 cup sugar

Water

 

Cook nixtamal (whole kernels) for one hour with juice of limes.  Grate the meat of the coconuts.  Add this and the sugar to the mixtamal.  Chill.

 

 

Tan Chukwaj (“thick chocolate drink”)

 

The traditional Maya ritual drink, still served at festivals, often with mukbipollos.

Tan Chulwaj is almost certainly what was in those Classic Maya chocolate cups with the owners’ names on the rim, but it would have had chile then—if anything—instead of the modern cinnamon and sugar.

 

1 tablet Mexican chocolate

1 lb. toasted corn meal, or ground-up sweet corn kernels

1/2 tsp. allspice powder (or more)

Cinnamon stick

Sugar to taste (traditionally, none was used; today there is usually some sweetening)

 

Mix up the tablet with the corn and spices.  Heat.  Serve hot or cold.

Variants: Other flavorings can be added; anise is traditional and good.  The ancient Aztecs used chile powder, and one supposes the ancient Maya did too.

 

Water:  Sacred Trust or Resource to Waste

 

1. N. Anderson

Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Anthropology,

University of California, Riverside

 

“Bless the Lord….

He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.

They give drink to every beast of the field:  the wild asses quench their thirst….

He watereth the hills from his chambers:  the earth is satisfied…..

The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted;

Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.

The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies [rock hyraxes].”

Psalm 104:1, 10-18, based in part on Egyptian originals such as Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun

 

“For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for the habitations of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that none can pass through them; neither can men hear the voice of the animals; both the fowl of the heavens and the beast are fled; they are gone….

The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah concerning the dearth [drought].

Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish…

And their nobles have sent their little ones to the water: they came to the pits [wells], and found no water; they returned with their vessels empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads.

Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads.

Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass.

And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no grass.”

Jeremiah 9:10, 14:1-6 (the sad touch of the deer deserting her young is based on solid observation, as is so much of Biblical natural history; the “dragons” sound impressive, but are probably jackals mistranslated, and jackals do sniff for water)

 

“Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting.”  Mark Twain

 

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry,

You don’t miss your sweetheart till she says goodbye.”

Traditional blues verse

 

“Demand for water is projected to grow by more than 40% by 2050.  By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions in which water is scarce, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in conditions in which the supply of clean water does not meet the demand… 750 million people do not have access to safe drinking water.  Roughly 80% of wastewater is discharged untreated into oceans, rivers and lakes.  Nearly 2 million children under the age of 5 die every year for want of clean water and decent sanitation….  Two and a half billion people do not have adequate sewage disposal.”  (Eliasson 2015; imagine it in 2050, with 10 billion people and all fresh water resources tapped out or depleted.)

 

The quotes give several views of water.  In abundance, it gives life.  Drought is the starkest and most terrifying symbol of death and loss.  Water is for fighting, and for cold economic calculations that imply all the horrors Jeremiah saw.

The western United States has a water problem.  Its water resources are exceedingly limited by climate and geography.  It is expanding rapidly.  Its citizens love lawns and gardens.  All models show that the American Southwest will be one of the most drastically drought-stricken areas of the world as global warming progresses (Overpeck and Udall 2010).  The climate we now associate with Arizona’s southwest border will move northward.   Arizona’s reservoirs will run dry.

Groundwater is overdrawn in Arizona, as elsewhere (Glennon 2004).  There is little recharge of Arizona’s groundwater basins today; the water is essentially fossil water, left over from the Pleistocene.

Arizona’s water is seriously overcommitted already.  The Colorado River is overcommitted by at least 50%.  It does not reach the sea; in fact, it is essentially dry below the Arizona-Mexico line, in violation of treaties with Mexico.  The Gila, Arizona’s major tributary of the Colorado, no longer comes even close to the Colorado except during abnormal flow.  Indeed, most of Arizona’s rivers are now dry washes for at least part of their length.  I remember when the Santa Cruz River still ran through Tucson, feeding mesquite thickets and the occasional cottonwood.  No longer.

At least Arizona is not, so far, forced to draw on poisoned wells, like the citizens of Bangladesh whose wells are increasingly contaminated with arsenic from groundwater.  Development has forced people to dig deeper wells, diverted and spread out aquifers, and introduced alkalinity and carbon that mobilize the arsenic, making water deadly in Bangladesh and parts of Vietnam (Daigle 2016).  Everywhere, though, agricultural and industrial wastes, including extremely toxic ones, are percolating into groundwater.

Arizona and drought-stricken California are typical of an emerging problem.  Worldwide, the situation is bleak.  Several excellent reviews of the situation exist, The best include Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry (2007) and Peter Gleick’s biennial reviews of world freshwater resources (e.g. Gleick 2006; see also De Villiers 2001; Fagan 2008; Glennon 2004; Oki and Kanae 2006; Postel 1999; Rogers 2008; Shiva 2002; Strang 2013.)

The Colorado River is not the only major river that no longer reaches the sea.  The Nile, the Yellow River of China, and many other rivers now share this dubious distinction.  The drying of the Yellow and other rivers in China has left 300 million people without adequate water for irrigation, sanitation, or locally even drinking (Smil 2004); there as in more and more parts of India, water must be trucked to villages.  Deforestation led to huge floods in China and elsewhere (Laurance 2007).  The Chinese belatedly tried to stop logging, but were too late; illegal logging is rampant (according to many reports I have heard, including studies ongoing by my students).  The Three Gorges Dam, in addition to its countless other problems, is already silting up because of deforestation (Stone 2008).  Droughts have brought down civilizations, including the ancient Maya (Gill 2000).  They have also depopulated whole areas of the United States, as in the dust bowl or the Oregon desert (Jackman and Long 1967).  Agriculture now uses 2/3 of the world’s available fresh water, and population is growing; desalination is still expensive in money and energy (Schiermeier 2014).

A recent review in Nature (Vőrősmarty et al. 2010) finds that river overuse and misuse is leading to a collapse of freshwater biodiversity.  Only 0.16% of the world’s rivers do not show this deterioration, and they are in isolated Arctic areas.  No area with water overdraft has avoided biodiversity problems.  Areas where dams and water systems have enabled consumers to have enough water in spite of short supply have done so at the expense of biodiversity; the dams and diversions dry up wetlands and distort the ecology.  A huge percentage of the world, including most of the United States, and virtually all of Mexico, China, India, and the drier parts of Africa, is now stressed.  As is expectable, the Nile is a particularly scary situation, with 180 million people depending on one relatively small (if long) river.  Most of its course is degraded, and from Cairo downstream it is basically a sewer.  Some short rivers now flow entirely within urbanized areas and have become urban drains (e.g. the Ogun River in Lagos, Nigeria) (Vőrősmarty et al. 2010:557).  Vast water transfer projects have dried up rivers.  The biggest of all, in China, transfers water from the Yangzi drainage to the north.  It is inadequate, but is causing major ecological and social disruption including displacement of millions of people (Barnett et al. 2015).

Deltas are also in extreme danger (Cooper et al. 2015).  Global warming is adding to existing problems by raising sea levels and causing more intense storms.  Groundwater withdrawal, pollution, poor dyke maintenance, poor erosion control, and similar problems are endangering the world’s deltas, in which a large percentage of the world’s population resides.

Global warming increases rainfall—rain has increased about 1% already and will increase 5% more before the end of this century (Smil 2008:401).  However, this rain will be largely over the ocean or in already-rainy areas.  On average, global warming is already drying up the land, worldwide (Jung et al. 2010).  It will increase drought in areas like the American Southwest.

Indeed, in spite of overall rain increase, the dry parts of the world are rapidly getting drier.  This is already happening in western North America and the Middle East.  The driest rainfall year in southern California history, as of 2000, was a year in the 19^th century that gave Los Angeles about five inches and Riverside three.  Since 2000, 2001-2 gave Los Angeles four and Riverside less than three, and then 2006-7 only three and two respectively.  The winter of 2014-2015 was virtually rainless throughout the whole states of California and Nevada (figures from ongoing daily totals in the Los Angeles Times).  Projections of enormous rains the following winter were not fulfilled; southern California was drier than ever.

Population is rapidly expanding.  Agriculture is taking more and more.  The really productive agriculture of the world is typically irrigated.  The world’s best soils, irrigated ornot, are being rapidly urbanized and rendered unavailable for farming.  Cities have naturally been located where agriculture was most productive; in this age of urban sprawl, that has become, ironically, a recipe for disaster.  Urbanization pushes more and more agriculture out into increasingly marginal irrigated lands.

Some 66% of the world’s people do not have reliable access to fresh water (Bellware 2016), and the number is growing.  Extreme cases include Egypt, wholly dependent on the Nile, with a rapidly growing population not only in Egypt itself but in the upriver countries from whence the Nile comes.

Water use for agriculture is far greater than most people realize.  Agriculture takes 80-90% of California’s water, though supplying only 2% of the state’s monetary wealth; of course it provides food, something impossible to do without, so it is far more important than that 2% figure indicates.  A single almond requires 1.1 gallon of water; of course this can all come from rain—almonds are not irrigated in much of Spain or northern California—but almonds are heavily irrigated in much of California.  A head of broccoli takes 5.4 gallons, an orange 13, a single walnut 4.9, a tomato 3.3.  One strawberry requires only 1.9.  Only a grape is lower, at 0.3.  Again, these figures refer to products 100% irrigated (Park and Lurie 2014; see also Appendix).

Smil (2008) reports that rice requires 2300 kg (liters) of water to produce 1 kg of rice; beans, 2000; wheat, 1300; corn, 500; vegetables, 100 up; chickens, at least 4000; pork meat (muscle tissue—not whole pig) 10,000; beef 15,000.  Cotton and coffee are in the range of pork and beef, not in the range of grain.  Smil also notes that Americans “waste” 35-45% of the food available in the US.  (This is a bit harsh.  A lot of the “waste” is spoilage and other storage loss, which could be avoided but only with difficulty.)  This is a huge waste of water.

Households use a lot of water also, and they use much more if they are rich.  Rich people like huge lawns and water-sucking landscaping, as well as large swimming pools.  Thus communities differ.  In California overall, households and their outdoor landscaping use 360-400 gallons per day on average.  Turfgrass covers an estimated 11,000 square km of the state, consuming incredible quantities of water in California’s extreme drought of recent years; the water could all be saved by substituting dryscaping (Lees and Bowler 2015).

Consumption strictly within the house varies greatly.  In southern California, north Tustin’s Golden State Water Co. reports that its domestic user households (apparently not counting outdoor watering) average 281 gallons per day.  Next is La Cañada-Flintridge, with 191; East Orange County, 174; Arcadia, 173; Malibu, 165.  At the other end is Covina, 27; Vernon, 35; and Santa Ana, 38.  The Los Angeles overall figure is 70, the United States average 98.  Of course, the water use in southern California communities generally tracks wealth, but Covina is an interesting standout; it is a pleasant middle-class community that simply has economical landscaping.  Vernon, by contrast, is a desperately poor industrial ghetto, and Santa Ana is largely apartments.  A problem with the water economy in poor neighborhoods is that they are covered with asphalt and concrete, so the rain that falls on them goes directly into the sea instead of sinking into groundwater.  Thus, ironically, they waste far more than they consume.

Manufacturing takes more and more water.  Contamination is very rapidly increasing everywhere, and includes some horrific problems unknown till recently, including an explosive increase of drugs in the water.  Everything from cocaine to birth control pills is contaminating water supplies, with rapidly mounting serious effects.

Cities are rapidly expanding and using more and more water.  Much is lost to storm drains, leaky pipes, and evaporation (Larsen et al. 2016).  Sewage goes untreatred in much of the world.  Most of Africa lacks improved drinking water sources (Larsen et al. 2016:930).  Updating the world’s water systems simply to eliminate massive leakage would take billions of dollars and more will than current governments seem to have.  The problems of water supply take a back seat compared to war, crime, disease, and political conflict.

 

Peter Gleick, with Meena Palaniappan (2010), has shown that the world has plenty of fresh water, but not where people want it and not always in usable form or situation.  About 70% of it is tied up in ice sheets (rapidly melting with global warming).  Most of the rest is in groundwater, much of it too saline or deep-down to use.  These two authorities describe three types of peak water.  Renewable peak water refers to river flow and renewable groundwater.  This will reach peak when drafts on the water equal inflow, as on the Nile and Colorado now.  Nonrenewable peak water will occur when withdrawal of fossil groundwater becomes more expensive than the water is worth.  This is close to occurring in much of the world, including parts of the Ogallala Aquifer in the United States.  Ecological peak water occurs when damage to ecological services exceeds benefits from the water.  This is a sliding economic scale and very hard to calculate.

Also typical is waste of water by the rich, for trivial purposes, to the ultimate suffering of everyone.  Vast lawns and golf courses take up a huge percentage of the water in urban and developed areas.  In California, water withdrawn by giant agribusiness for very low-value agriculture (irrigating wild hay, potatoes, and the like) has destroyed extremely productive and high-value fisheries as well as wetlands that had less quantifiable but no less real values.  California now faces a huge water crisis that will send water prices sky-high for everyone—though no one really benefited from the hay and potatoes.

Water use for cities and irrigation tends to remove the water from the aquifer recharge system, thus leading to faster reduction of aquifers.  Where irrigation causes buildup of groundwater instead of drawdown, the buildup is often salty, making the water unusable.

 

Access to water should be about the most basic matter of environmental justice, and thus has been addressed by Meena Palaniappan et al. (2006), and by Wutich and Brewis (2014) in a long and important article.  They raise the usual cases of big dams, water privatization, and water waste by large-scale schemes, in the context of environmental justice, particularly for minorities and people of color (see esp. pp. 120-122, a statement on environmental justice).

Ismail Serageldin, former World Bank vice-president and a leading resource economist, said in 1995—as reported by Wendy Barnaby in an article in Nature—that “the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water” (Barnaby 2009).  This was overstated on both counts.  As of 1995, the main war over oil was still to come: the Iraq war in the next century.  And there has still never been a war over water.

Wendy Barnaby started out to write a book on the coming water wars.  Her research showed that no country has come even close, as of 2009.  Countries will deal over water.  It is not nearly so limited as oil; most countries have plenty of it.  The few dry countries can import water-demanding products (from fresh fruit and meat to paper).  She thus predicted that there will not be wars over water in the 21^st century.  Many are not so sure.  Several letters to Nature about her article argued against her position.  Since her book appeared, there have been more and more dire predictions, but still no war over water.   Countries find treaty-making far preferable to fighting.  But local conflicts have erupted, and, as one letter says, “the potential for water conflict is on the increase, as populations in water-stressed areas continue to grow and the demand for water increases to improve living standards with better sanitation and a water-intensive diet” (Kundzewicz and Kowalczak 2009).

Detailed and thorough studies of transboundary water conflicts, now and in future, by Aaron Wolf and his group (Di Stefano et al. 2012; Wolf 2007) come to the same conclusion.  They emphasize the fact that even countries in serious conflict—and not just a few, but many—have managed to come to agreements about transboundary rivers.  They foresee a world of much more conflict, with at least 61 river basins short of water by 2050 and in potential conflict (Di Stefano et al. 2012), but provide full details on how new treaties could be negotiated to solve the immediate problems—though not the longer-term one of sheer exhaustion of freshwater resources.

Some countries are truly desperate:  Tunisia, Afghanistan, Jordan, and many others.  Some are very close to the edge, and will not be able to carry out current development plans without extremely major changes in water management; this includes China, India and Iran.  Some are in desperate straits because they are downstream:  Egypt, Syria and Iraq depend almost entirely on river flow from other countries.  Barnaby points out that Egypt has treaties with its upstream suppliers, but those are Sudan and Ethiopia, countries with no history of honoring such scraps of paper.  At present, Egypt has its armed forces on the ready.  Syria and Iraq are in worse shape, since their supplier, Turkey, has a military that could beat both of them (and several other countries) at once with ease, especially given their current chaotic state.  Big dams under construction in Turkey could cut off water to those nations.  My interviews with experts in Turkey in 2000 indicated that the government had little or no concern over that.  The same appears to be still the case.

 

The world’s fresh water is exceedingly limited.  Almost all of it is used to capacity.  Much of it, including the Colorado River, is overcommitted.  Much of the United States is under some form or other of English common law, variously adapted.  This guarantees riparian rights: people on a watercourse have rights to the water.  In this context, it is well to remember that the English word “rival” derives from Latin rivus, “riverbank,” as does the word “river.”  Twain’s famous comment on water in the west, quoted at the head of this paper, emphasizes the point.

This has been widely extended to water allocation, including a “first in time, first in right” principle that is the greatest bane of California water law.  Agricultural interests that descend, legally, from those established in the 19^th century dominate the state, and sell, rent, or otherwise profit from their rights.

This leaves groundwater in a legal limbo.  Normally, anyone who owns the surface of the land owns the right to pump the water—in striking contrast to the rules concerning oil and minerals.  As a result, groundwater reservoirs are rapidly being exhausted.  Global warming is causing drought in arid parts of the world, including California and the southwestern US, and this has led to massive withdrawals of groundwater—many times more than could be recharged even in a good year, let alone in the horrible droughts that have followed on global climate change.  Until 2014 California (unlike other western states) had no regulations on groundwater use.  In late 2014, the Legislature finally recognized that catastrophic drought was forcing their hand and was here to stay, so even the most obstructionist Republicans agreed to pass a groundwater regulation law (George Skelton, 2014, decribed the micropolitics).

We cannot easily get more water.  Towing Antarctic glaciers north and desalting sea water are the only possibilities. This being said, more efficient use of water is imperative.  This is especially true of drylands agriculture (Cleveland 2014; Rockström and Falkenmark 2015).  There are two particularly fine books about how to do this:  David Cleveland and Daniela Soleri’s Food from Dryland Gardens (1991) and Gary Nabhan’s Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land (2013).

Sewage treatment is the most obvious and immediate need worldwide.  It would free up a great deal of water for better use.  Another need is dealing with waste of water in irrigation.  Drip irrigation instead of sprinklers, natural landscaping instead of lawns, and control of golf courses are familiar themes.  Common now is the use of dryscaping in place of grass lawns.  The total area of lawns and related water-demanding landscaping in the United States is greater than the area of Pennsylvania.  Lawns and ornamental gardens take a wholly disproportionate amount of water, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Few people seem to realize that human use of water for drinking and bathing is utterly insignificant relative to the use in agriculture and industry.  Personal use is less than 1% of all water use.  We should all take short showers, but it won’t matter much in comparison to even very water-sparing industrial processes, let alone agriculture.

Meat and milk are the worst problems (see Appendix).  Cows are fed on irrigated feed, and demand huge amount of water themselves for drinking and washing; then processing their meat and milk takes yet more water.  I have seen a wide range of figures for the water requirements of this process, but all are in the range of hundreds to thousands of gallons for a pound of beef or bottle of milk.  We need to go back to eating cactus fruit, mesquite beans, and prickly pear pads.  Or at least feeding them to the cows—there are areas of the world, including south Madagascar, where cows get along with essentially no water by living on spineless varieties of prickly pear.  Cotton is probably second; it is grown in dryland areas by irrigation, and is an incredibly thirsty crop.

People are very poor estimators of their water use.  Shahzeen Attari (2014) found that people underestimate household water use; they use about twice what they think they use.  Moreover, they think of saving waters in terms of curtailment (shorter showers and the like) rather than more efficient devices (low-flow shower heads, better toilets), though the latter would make far more difference, in most households.  Thomas Dietz (2014) placed this finding in a context of human cognition and decision-making, noting that it is all too typical of human understanding of environment and of factors influencing environment-affecting decisions.

Water experts are now talking about “virtual water,” a concept developed by John A. Allen in the 1990s (Barnaby 2009; Smil 2008).  It takes into account the water needed to produce goods.  All agricultural commodities and all manufactured goods require large amounts of water.  My consumption of such goods uses water indirectly.  If I buy a cotton shirt, I am probably not using any American water to speak of, but I am using enormous quantities of Egyptian and Chinese water—assuming, as if often the case, that the cotton is grown in Egypt and the shirt is made in China.  The horrific case of cotton in Uzbekistan is entirely export-driven.  Whoever gets the good quality cotton items made from Uzbeki cotton is ruining that desperately stressed nation, but is probably quite unaware of the fact (see Globalization of Water [Hoekstra and Chapagain 2008])

On the other hand, Barnaby (2009) points out that a dry country can spare its limited water resources by importing food and not growing crops with high water requirements.  Most of the water used to produce grain and coffee comes from rainfall, but most of that used to produce meat, cotton, and many vegetables is irrigation or piped water.  Thus, by eating lower on the food chain, and by wearing clothing more economically, we could save enormous amounts of water.

In China, water could be saved most easily by giving up irrigation in really water-short areas like Inner Mongolia and around Beijing, where groundwater is depleting at dramatic speed.  Agriculture drives 65% of water withdrawals in China, 59% worldwide (and 80 in California).  Inner Mongolia loses the most virtual water, in the form of agricultural products exported to the rest of China.  China imports 30% of its virtual water in the form of soybeans, beef, and similar products from other countries (Dalin et al. 2015).

An example of unconventional solutions comes from Peru.  Lima is essentially rainless, but very foggy (especially in winter), because of the cold water of the Humboldt Current just offshore.  In ancient times, this fog sustained lomas—areas of dense vegetation, even forests, inhabited by animals as large as deer.  Today, there is an attempt to restore these.  Large, dense nets have been set up, on which the fog congeals into water.  This is directed down to young trees.  When the trees are old, they will strain their own fog, thus restoring the old lomas forests.  The drought-tolerant local tree Caesalpinia spinosa is being tried, because of its useful fruit and timber (Vince 2010).  This idea could be used in many other places where cold currents run along desert shores:  Baja California, Morocco, South Africa and elsewhere.

 

Governments mismanage water because of incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic paralysis (see Ascher 1999 for the best discussion of the general problem of government mismanagement of resources).

Mismanagement of water resources not only leads to loss of water; it leads to poisoned soil.  Salts of all kinds leach out from upstream or leach upward from deep in the earth.  I have seen thousands of acres in Australia rendered unusable because farmers cleared off the forest and planted wheat.  Without the deep roots of the trees, the groundwater from deep underground moved upward, carrying salt.  The ground over millions of acres of Australia is now white with salt and will be unusable for millennia.

Public relations campaigns endlessly “spin” the benefits of pollution, the need for rampant and unregulated economic growth, and the inexhaustibility of fresh water and other resources (Stauber and Rampton 1996).  The western United States has been repeatedly fooled by inflated figures, using, for instance, far-above-average river flows as baselines.  Agriculture has changed from careful management of water to considerable waste, partly due to the rise of big agribusiness (see Monks 1998 for a rare critique of this).  There is some hope of changing back.  Meanwhile, Arizona and California cities buy water rights from farmers.

 

The poster child for water mismanagement is the Aral Sea (Kobori and Glantz 1998; Micklin and Aladin 2008; Varis 2014).  The Aral Sea is a vast lake in a closed basin in central Asia.  For millennia, it was sustained by model water management.  Some of this management was developed by unlikely heroes, including Genghis Khan and Tamerlane the Conqueror.  A rich economy producing wheat, barley, silk, melons, vegetables, and livestock developed along the Amu and Syr Rivers.

The Soviets changed all that.  They planned to turn the whole basin into a vast cotton source.  The resulting monocrop agriculture has been a disaster.  It takes many times as much water as the old economy did.  Also, cotton uses more artificial chemicals than any other crop; one-third of all the pesticides in the world are used on cotton.  Wheat is also intensively irrigated.  The result is that the nations in question use more water per capita than any others on earth; Turkmenistan is far ahead of others, followed by Iraq and rice-growing Guyana and then by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, the United States,Tajikistan, Estonia, Canada (water-rich), Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (Varis 2014).  In water use per dollar of GNP, the situation is even more extreme.  The nations that use the most water per dollar of GNP are, in order, Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Madagascar, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan.  All are central Asian and dependent on the Amu Darya drainage, except for rice-dependent, impoverished Madagascar.

The Amu Darya now does not get even close to its former mouth into the Aral Sea.  A toxic mix of natural salts and accumulated pesticides and fertilizers blew over the desert plains.  Infant mortality in the Amu delta reached 10% and locally 50% (Micklin and Aladin 2008; Paul Buell, pers. comm. on basis of wide reading of the Uzbekistan press).  The huge fishery of the Aral Sea disappeared as the sea dried.

There remains a small salty puddle in the lake basin.  Most of the basin is now owned by Uzbekistan, which is trapped in a vicious circle:  it cannot stop growing cotton, the source of most of its income, and cannot make enough from cotton to do much.  The north end of the Aral Sea is more fortunate; it is owned by Kazakhstan, which is richer and has a more diverse economy.  Kazakhstan has dyked off its end, which includes the Syr River delta, and is slowly restoring that end of the sea (Micklin and Aladin 2008).  But there is no hope of real restoration.  The Aral basin is ruined forever, and will never produce more than a tiny fraction of the wealth it produced in Tamerlane’s time.  Meanwhile, the irrigated lands become ever more salty and poisoned by pesticides, so they will soon go out of production permanently.  The other rivers that water Turkmenistan and Afghanistan are in the same situation.  How long irrigation will last in these formerly rich lands is an open question.

Lake Urmia, in northwest Iran, is rapidly following the Aral Sea into oblivion.  Only 10% of it is left.  The irrigation is this case is for sunflowers and other water-demanding crops.  These replaced water-sparing vineyards when Iran’s extremist government banned wine production in 1979.  Religion has strange side effects, and, as will appear, it is particularly strange when Islam is the religion in the case.

Humans not only tolerate large amounts of salt but must have it to live. Plants, however, cannot stand more than tiny traces of it in the soil, with the exceptions of certain highly specialized forms.  The only major cultivated crops that tolerates much salt are barley and sugar beets, and even they do not tolerate much.  The world needs to think seriously about domesticating edible forms of saltbush, salicornia, and other marginally-edible salt-loving plant species.

Arizona’s current scene has an unpleasantly suggestive antecedent in the fall of the Hohokam civilization.  The Hohokam and their neighbors constructed an incredible network of canals in the Gila and Salt drainages.  Some of these were as large and long as major modern irrigation canals.  They fed an intensive agriculture based on maize, beans, squash, agaves, and many other crops.  Sophisticated terracing and check-damming added to the water management picture.  Yet, after devastating droughts in the 1200s, the Hohokam fields dried up or salted up (Abbott 2003; Redman 1999).  The Salt River deserves its name, and thus was not a good river to use for irrigation.

The Little Ice Age came, and the rivers refilled.  The Pima arrived and made the land fertile and well-irrigated again.  Unfortunately, the Spanish and then the Anglo-American settlers devastated this blissful scene by developing intensive irrigated agriculture, with increasingly severe water drafts.  As in the Aral Sea case, the Pima had been using the land carefully and sustainably, with drought-tolerant crops.  The early-day anthropologist Frank Russell and the contemporary botanist Amadeo Rea have provided possibly the best accounts of traditional small-scale plant and water management in the entire world (Rea 1983, 1997; Russell 1975).  Thus we have a solid baseline of knowledge here.  The Anglo-Americans planted a great deal of moncrop cotton.  Finally,

the Gila River went dry from Phoenix onward (Dobyns 1981; Rea 1983; Webb et al 2007).  The Pima were left high and very, very dry, in violation of treaties as well as common decency (Russell 1975).  Ironically, Phoenix takes its name from the Hohokam ruins.  The English developer and “character” Darrell Duppa, seeing huge ruins there, planned a city that would rise as the phoenix bird rose from its own ashes.  The settlers were better prophets than they knew.  The phoenix cyclically burns up and has to rise again.  We are about to witness the next fire.

An even more incredible part of the story of water mismanagement is the great beaver massacre.  Hats made of beaver-fur felt were the fad in 1820s England.  It is estimated that as many as a million beaver were taken out of the lower Colorado drainage (including the Gila drainage) in the early 19^th century (see e.g. Hilfiker 1991; Pattie 1962 [1831]; Rea 1983).  The result was arroyo cutting, floods, and general disaster.  The Gila and its tributaries had been sluggish streams draining through vast beaver ponds, sloughs, and water meadows, with scattered trees growing from lush mesquite, rushes, grasses, and sedges (Rea 1983).  Much of the damage to Arizona’s hydrology and soils that has been blamed on overgrazing, climate change, and so forth was actually done by beaver trapping.  The beavers had controlled flooding by their thousands of dams.  The damage each year from flooding alone, let alone loss of water conservation, in Arizona is probably greater than the value of all the beaver skins.  There is now no going back; the rivers are dry and the land is urbanized.

Peter Skene Ogden was paid to wipe out the beaver totally in eastern Washington and Oregon, so as to deny the resource to American trappers (Ogden 1987 [1827]).  Of course the result was billions of dollars in damage every year in most years since, though at least the beavers are coming back in some of that area.  Similar things happened in Colorado’s Front Range (Wohl 2005).  And all this so some rich men could wear funny hats for a few years, until the style changed to sustainable silk.

Beavers are incredible water engineers (Hilfiker 1991; Morgan 1868). If people were as good at water management as beavers, there would be no world water problem.  The 18^th-century French zoologist Charles Bonnet half-seriously and half-wistfully expected that evolution would produce beaver architects as great as Vauban, the leading architect in Bonnet’s time (Foucault 1971:153).

Lewis Henry Morgan, who invented modern anthropology, also in his spare time invented modern animal behavior studies.  He got interested in beavers and produced what is still the best monograph on their behavior (Morgan 1868).  Of course he did not fail to compare them to humans.  He pointed out that they are not very bright; instinct guides them.  Modern studies confirm this.  At least according to biologist folklore I have heard, biologist tested a beaver by playing the sound of running water.  The beaver carefully covered the sound-system speakers with mud.  This must have been cute to watch, but it certainly shows blind instinct rather than rational calculation.  Still, I have seen beavers show considerable ingenuity at working sticks into their dams.

The point is that simple beavers manage water infinitely better than smart but foolish humans.  Humans that make dams frequently make a bad job of it (Chamberlain 2008; Giles 2006; Scudder 2005; Stone 2008).  Ellen Wohl has done a particularly superb, sensitive, and historically sophisticated account of the superiority of beavers and the idiocy of humans in managing Colorado’s water (Wohl 2005).

The Aswan high dam brought schistosomiasis to all Egypt, wiped out the fisheries of the Nile and the eastern Mediterranean, and loses 25 to 40% of its water to evaporation (Chamberlain 2008:96). Most desert-country dams are similarly wasteful.  It is doubtful if any big dams in the Third World have positive cost-benefit accounts (Scudder 2005; W. Partridge, pers. comm.).  They drown good farmland, displace millions of farmers and other productive citizens, spread disease, waste water, and destroy fisheries.  The benefits they supply are often illusory, or confined to the rich.  Benefits of undammed water can range from 50 to 400 times as high as those from the same water, dammed (Katz 2006:41).  These are probably extreme cases, but, in the Third World, no clear cases of even slight advantages for big dams have been reported to balance them out.  In the First World, many dams are now clearly costly rather than beneficial, and many older and smaller dams are being removed.

The fashion for large dams owes everything to one man, John “Jack” Savage.  A Wisconsin farm boy who rose to become the world’s expert on dams, he designed the Hoover…, Grand Coulee, Parker, and Shasta Dams and the All American Canal system” (Sneddon 2015:29), and then went on to further designs and to world efforts when the “Cold War” between the US and the USSR made it expedient for the US to “help” other countries by building big dams (Sneddon 2015).  Fortunately, in those days the US had a conscience, so few of these were actually built; the social and economic costs were actually taken into account (as they have rarely been since).  Savage’s dams in the US were in fact seriously needed for flood control and irrigation, did not displace many people (none in most cases), and did not cause huge immediate effects (though the Colorado in Mexico was ultimately dried up).  The next great step in dambuilding was the TVA, far more ambitious, organized, and region-wide; it has had a mixed legacy.  It initially paid, in flood control, electricity generation, and transportation (allowing rivers-turned-lakes to bear heavy shipping traffic), but at current prices the value of the enormous amounts of prime farmland and world-class hardwood forests drowned would probably outweigh the benefits.

Unfortunately, the US found it expedient to design and build more and more dams, and many of the countries where the US pulled out found other backers to do the dubious work.  Thus vast numbers of countries now have huge dams inspired by US efforts, but not judged by US standards of cost-accounting.  Whether any of these dams are a benefit is a very open question.  The politics behind them, and the whole political economy of dams, is a complex and involved subject (Sneddon 2015).

Perhaps we should take the big dams out and bring the beavers back.  They have been reintroduced to Scotland—the first beavers in Britain since the 17^th century.  The common name Beverly means “beaver meadow,” and was originally the name of an estate based on one such in England.  That estate now has no beavers.  Hopefully there will soon be as many real beverleys as girls bearing the name.

Fish, of course, suffer even more than beavers.  Wild salmon are now a rapidly disappearing resource everywhere except Alaska.  The steelhead runs of southern California are down to a few fish; the only one south of Los Angeles is in San Mateo Creek, and it was down to one female fish in a recent drought (Hovey 2001; this run will surely not survive the current droughts).  Many, if not most, of the freshwater fish, amphibia, and shellfish of America are threatened or endangered.  Caviare will soon be a thing of the past; fishing for it is out of control, and sturgeons are succumbing to pollution and dams even where they are not fished.  The only healthy sturgeon populations in the world are in the major rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and even here they are declining fast.  Aquatic birds are also declining fast.

 

However, anthropologists and other social scientists have recorded many success stories in water management around the world.  They reveal very clearly what is wrong with our system in the world today, and what we can do about it.

Most of the interesting work has revolved around questions of common property resource management.  Water, by its very nature, is usually owned in common.  One would think that it would be thus wasted, because people so often treat a common property resource as something to use without care—Garrett Hardin’s classic “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968).  However, as Hardin saw (Hardin 1991), if a common resource is owned by the group as a corporate entity, and managed by them, it can be excellently managed and sustainably used.

Water is an open-access free good only in situations of extremely low and transient population.  Otherwise, water is almost always owned by communities—tribes, villages, cities, states.  In the ancient Near East, irrigation was life, and thus many excellent irrigation systems and methods were developed (Drower 1954—still an excellent source).  Mesopotamia had to build canals, some hundreds of miles long.  Egypt could simply wait for the Nile flood, but it varied from very low to very high.  The ideal was a 16-cubit rise as measured at Memphis.  There is “a Hellenistic statue of the Nile god in the Vatican” with 16 children, each 1 cubit high (Drower 1954:539).  Under 12 cubits—a cubit is about 32 cm—meant devastating famine; over 18 meant devastating flood.  Yet, normally, the Nile was reliable, and made canal irrigation necessary only in small, marginal areas.  In China, most agriculture was rainfed or fed by very local streams, but eventually—once the empire was established, and locally even before—large canal systems were developed to control whole river systems.

Governments and rulers worked out various bureaucratic systems for managing all this.  All had to have specialized water managers.  In sharp contrast to the famous “irrigation hypothesis” of Wittfogel, this rarely led to absolutism.  Irrigation has to be managed locally, and top-down control of anything except major basic canals merely interferes with necessary local decisions.  In Mesopotamia, China, and the Indian subcontinent, absolutism really came from conquest of irrigation societies by hordes sweeping down from rainfed or very locally irrigated areas.  In China, conquests and absolutism were more apt to come from nomadic herding societies.  In Egypt, absolutism developed within an irrigation society, but the pharaoh had little real control over the river.

In the Middle Ages and locally since then, lords owned streams and lakes, but they could be said to be owning them as feudal lords—that is, administrators—rather than as private citizens.  Recently, a drive to privatize water has allowed corporations, large and small, to control water sources as well as sales, but this is an unusual development from the point of view of history.  It is an exceedingly ominous development (Chamberlain 2008).  It often drives up the cost of water severalfold, while lowering availability.  If there were actual competition this might not be the case, but such schemes involve governments cutting deals with big firms to have local monopolies.  Corruption is endemic.  All the abuses of monopolies and mercantilism immediately surface.

Thus, water has been prudently maintained as a common-property good until now, even in the most capitalistic societies, and especially in the Middle East.  Water thus becomes a fascinating study.  Traditional and more recent Jewish spiritual attitudes toward water, and the world in general, have been introduced in the service of water management in a brilliant article by Aaron Wolf (2012).

Some of the most interesting researches on water in the Middle East refer to Muslim or Muslim-influenced local irrigation systems.  This is in large part because Muslim law, developed in arid lands, is quite specific about water.  Gary Chamberlain, synthesizing a number of sources, reports:  “Muslim law codes…forbid private ownership of water, at least in its natural state.  There is a hierarchy of uses…first is the right of thirst…no one can be denied the water necessary to drink…then all are allowed water for their daily needs of bathing, cleaning, cooking, and so forth.”

This is a priority partly because Islam enjoins cleanliness, making thorough washup and bathing a religious duty.  However, even ritual cleaning must not be wasteful.  Muhammad once saw his early follower Sa’ad “performing the ablutions…using a lot of water, he intervened, saying:  ‘What is this?  You are wasting water.’  Sa’ad replied asking: ‘Can there be wastefulness while performing the ablutions?’  To which God’s Messenger replied:  ‘Yes, even if you perform them on the bank of a rushing river.’”  (Cited Özdemir 2003:14.)

Then “next comes the right to provide water to livestock; and last comes the irrigation of crops, which consumes the most water.  Only when water has been placed in a vessel…is water considered a private good” (Chamberlain 2008:54).  “Water distribution has very clear-cut legislation in Islam.  In general terms its rules are based on the principle of benefiting all those who share its watercourse” (Dien 2003:116; details following).  The duty to provide water for livestock is taken very seriously, Islam having originated among desert travelers.  Accounts describe careful management of flocks at the wells, with the most water-needing animals drinking first.

This emphasis on common property led to intricate but efficient and enforceable common property regimes being established in Muslim lands.  The Muslims could build on earlier systems that were often extremely intricate and highly developed.  South Arabia—today’s Yemen—had a vast system involving a huge dam across the major wadi; this system died when weather patterns shifted, drying the wadi except for occasional damaging floods (Scarborough 2003).  The Nabatean system in the Negev Desert had harvested water by incredibly sophisticated means in Roman and pre-Roman times.

Most spectacular of all were the qanat systems of Iran and neighboring areas, including the slopes around Mesopotamia.  A qanat is a long tunnel dug back into an alluvial fan.  It is set at a very slight upward slope.  Water percolates in from the alluvial material, so the qanat produces a live stream that can be directed to irrigation.  Otherwise, the water would evaporate through the porous fan material and be lost.  Qanat systems extend east as far as west China (Xinjiang), where they are called karez.  Major innovations in qanat irrigation, dam-building, and integrated irrigation system engineering were made in Central Asia in the medieval period (Hill 2000).  This was a little-known golden age of engineering innovation, especially in systems design.  The Persians and Mongols introduced this technology to the western world, and it may lie behind some of our modern “systems thinking.”

The Arabs brought them to Spain, Italy, and elsewhere.  They grade into ordinary water tunnels that merely convey water to cities with minimal evaporation.  Qanat systems are maintained by local communities.  A fee is charged for the water.  Specialists maintain the water tunnels.  It is a dangerous job, since cave-ins are hard to prevent and generally fatal.

Arab systems survive everywhere in the Middle East and in much of North Africa.  I have observed them in Morocco, where they have blended over many centuries with indigenous, related Berber traditional systems.  The latter in turn may go back to the Roman Empire, when North Africa was a key part of the empire, producing agricultural products of all kinds.

Excellent systems survived till late.  The Arab irrigation systems of Yemen (Varisco 1996) and elsewhere are legendary.  Egypt’s superb irrigation system long predated the Arabs, having been developed in ancient Egypt (see Butzer 1976), but it was continued by the Arabs, later by the Ottomans (Mikhail 2011), and finally by independent Egypt, up until the extremely ill-advised Aswan Dam destroyed the old system.  Today, slow but sure salinization is adding to global warming, delta subsidence, and other ills.

The Arabs supplied Palermo, Sicily, through aqueducts cut into rock in the 9^th and 10^th centuries (Maurici 2006); these still supply Palermo today.  Sicily still uses them to irrigate crops, especially those the Arabs brought, such as lemons, sugarcane, eggplants, and high-quality melons (Pizzuto 2002).

In Spain, the “Reconquista” conquered Spain from the Moors after 800 years of Moorish rule.  Most of the Moors were expelled, to Spain’s permanent and major loss.  However, a few villages hung on in areas so remote that they could avoid exile by superficial conversion to Christianity.  The most significant of these for our purposes were in the Sierra de la Contraviesa area southeast of Grenada, studied by Gaston Remmers (1998) among others.  Remmers describes an incredibly sophisticated system for making sure that everybody has fair access to irrigation water, no matter how wet or dry the year.  The village social organization is based on water management.  (Spain has other successful irrigation systems without obvious Moorish ancestry, too; Grove and Rackham 2001, Guillet 2006.)  Another important study, from Morocco, was carried out by Hsain Ilaihine on the Ziz River (Ilaihine 2004).  It describes careful maintenance of canals and allocation of water in a dry drainage from the Atlas Mountains.  I have examined almost exactly similar systems above Marrakech.

Many of the Moors converted to Christianity but were not quite trusted, and were sent to remote parts of Mexico, where they could not do much damage by rebelling. Converted Moors and Spanish who learned from them gave us qanats in Tehuacan, where they flourish—or did when I was there in 1996—in the dry Tehuacan Valley.

From here they were introduced to San Bernardino, California, and until not long ago San Bernardino was supplied by this ancient Iranian technology. The ditch that brings water to Redlands, California, is still called “the Zanja” (the old Moorish term), and the city water manager is officially the Zanjero.

San Bernardino, the neighboring city, also benefited from ancient Chinese technology, via “Pedley dams,” huge sausage-shaped bundles of rocks done up in ropework (or wire) and used for instant levees.  Pedley was a 19^th-century water engineer.  He had seen them in China, where they were invented in the far past.  (At least this is what locals told me when I was young.)

In New Mexico and extreme south Colorado, Arab systems flourish.  A local farmer turned anthropologist, Devon Peña, is not only studying them anthropologically but also using them to irrigate his own farm in a Hispanic community there.  He has used water management as a natural symbol, or entry point, for his excellent discussions of environmental justice (Peña 1998, 2000).

Perhaps the most remote extension is into Zuni Pueblo.  The famous waffle gardens of Zuni are indistinguishable to my eyes from those of Sicily, and are often used to grow the same crops (melons, cucumbers, etc.).  The Zuni are creative and brilliant gardeners and water engineers in their own right, and surely there is some parallel innovation here; one wonders if the Zuni gardens were influenced by conversos—converted Moors—in northern New Mexico.

Moorish systems also went to South America, where they fused with the ancient and formidably competent systems of the Quechua and Aymara.  The Incas and their predecessors in Peru had constructed canals up to dozens of miles long, through some of the harshest and most difficult country in the world.  They had terraced mountain slopes up to two miles high, and run irrigation systems throughout these terraces, perfectly controlling the flow of water on slopes up to 45% or so.  They had integrated water systems all the way from glacier snouts 18,000’ above sea level down to the edge of the Pacifc.  The Nazca, around 500 CE, constructed systems to tap groundwater, similar to Old World qanats, but with the added sophistication that they built spiral excavations that caused the wind to spin round, creating a low-pressure zone that brought water to the surface (see Proulx 2008).  These nonliterate people, with little metal, no wheeled vehicles, and limited animal power, had carried out some of the most spectacular water engineering jobs in the world.

Naturally, they quickly saw the value of metal tools and European draft animals.

They also saw the value of  Moorish technology and organization (Gelles 1995, 2000; Trawick 2001a, 2001b, 2002).  Traditional Quechua society is organized dualistically:  there is an uphill group and a downhill group, or some comparable split, in every village.  This has had a real but uncertain amount of influence from Moorish and Spanish customs.  The water hierarchy in a village is more clearly influenced by Moorish-Spanish usage, with water officials and titles similar to those elsewhere in the Hispanic world.  Each half of the village has its water organization, and the two must cooperate and distribute water fairly.  They tend to keep each other honest.  Also, typically, the two halves of the village are not really separated; plots belonging to members of the uphill half are scattered through the downhill side, and vice versa.  This is partly a matter of inheritance and marriage, but partly also a matter of geographic necessity.  Warm-weather crops have to be downhill, cold-weather crops uphill, in canyon villages.  Some villages have fields extend for a vertical mile, for instance in the Colca Valley, a canyon twice as deep as Grand Canyon (Gelles 2000).

Critical to the operation of the system are the fiestas.  Every village has, or had, its huge party, usually in the summer.  This brought everyone together and allowed everyone to have a good time.  It also allowed some working out of conflicts, because both sanctioned competitions and unsanctioned fights naturally occur at fiestas.  Occurring in a public, mostly happy gathering, such fights are quickly stopped and mediated.  This would not be the case if the fights occurred on a dark night out in the watershed.  Better have them in the open, at the fiesta.

The astonishing level of honesty in these village systems would certainly be devastating to any disciples of Thomas Hobbes, the 17^th-century Englishman who saw humans as individuals in permanent conflict.  Honesty depends on several factors.  First, the water managers are vigilant.  Second, neighbors too are vigilant.  However, all a water thief needs is a dark night and a spade.  It is very easy to turn the village canal into one’s own fields for a couple of hours.  This can help one’s own prospects greatly, but, of course, at the expense of others’.  Yet people rarely do it—intimidated not only by popular opinion and the revenge of gods and spirits, but also by their consciences.  Humans want to cooperate, and will sacrifice a lot to do so.

Paul Gelles’ village had to cooperate beyond usual levels back in the 1990s (Gelles 1995, 2000).  The Peruvian government built a water project that brought water to lowland cities, but, apparently inadvertently, preempted the water supply the village.  The town faced disaster.  So the most intrepid young men went out and tore a hole in the water project canal, directing the village’s proper flow back to it.  They did not wreck the whole project or the canal.  The government came with warrants and police, but the entire village stood up against them.  Arrests, threats, cajoling, and bureaucratic foot-dragging all failed.  The village got its water back.  Quite a few similar stories could be told, from Spain to New Mexico (see e.g. Chamberlain 2008).

Another system maintained by religious organization holds in Bali.  Stephen Lansing studied this system over many years (Lansing 1987, 1991, 2006).  Irrigation on that Indonesian island is derived from water coming from the crater lake at the top of the island, which is a single giant inactive volcano.  The water is sacred.  The head priest of the island, the jero gde, lives at the lake outlet, and oversees the water system.  Apparently he is appointed more for his hydrological expertise than for his religious devotions.  A hierarchy of priests, progressively farther and farther downstream, oversees the breakup of this stream into tens, hundreds, and finally tens of thousands of channels.  These feed a vast system of rice paddies; the island is one huge farm, growing mainly rice but also dozens of tropical crops.  Water is timed so that there is no one pulse of irrigation.  That would not only take too much water; it would allow insect pests to multiply out of control.  Instead, each field has its schedule of irrigating and drying off.  The World Bank came in with sophisticated technology in the late 1980s to improve this system, and promptly caused disaster.  Their computer-assisted plans led to water shortages, local floods, and insect outbreaks.  Control promptly went back to the jero gde.  Lansing modeled the traditional system with his own computers, and found it to be about as perfect as could be achieved in the real world.  (Criticisms of his scenario exist [Vayda 2008], but are sufficiently refuted by Lansing’s material.)

Similar, if less comprehensive and perfect, local systems of terracing and water control are well documented from elsewhere in Indonesia, as well as from the Philippines, pre-American Hawaii, New Guinea, and indeed most of Oceania and the rest of the montane tropical and subtropical world (Scarborough 2003).  Usually, religion is marshalled to help maintain them.  Often they are also maintained through kinship systems, as in Luzon and among the Toba Batak of Sumatera (studied by my former student, the late Richard Lando, in the 1970s).  Often they produce fish and other animal protein as well as staple plant foods.  India has countless religiously maintained irrigation systems too (a particularly superb account is by David Mosse, 2003, 2006).

The irrigation systems of south China are well known (the best descriptions are in Marks 1998 and Ruddle and Zhong 1988, but see also Anderson and Anderson 1973 and Wen and Pimentel 1986a, 1986b).  They too have religious representation, via the guardian spirits and gods of the localities involved, though they are largely secular concerns.  They are usually administered by village elders.

Typical in this area are lineage villages, where all males are related by direct descent from a single founding ancestor.  The lineage elders are then all kin.  Such villages can have thousands of people and be hundreds of years old.  They can thus manage irrigation on a substantial scale.  However, much more impressive were the vast water systems that the Imperial governments maintained.  The most famous was the one in the Chengdu Plain of Sichuan, designed by the Li family of engineers more than two thousand years ago.  Their advice—“keep the dykes low and the channels deep”—should be learned by every water manager.  They split the Min River into three channels, so that the river could be directed into two of the channels in order to allow local people to clear rocks and silt out of the other one to keep it deep.  This system has been maintained and repaired over the centuries, and is still in use.  A fine and very old temple to the Li engineers has survived even Communist abuses.

Where water fails, people are incredibly innovative about doing without it.  The Chinese of dry north China were as sophisticated in water harvest as the south Chinese were in water management, and many incredibly sophisticated techniques were known more than 2000 years ago (Anderson 1988).   We of western North America have a lot to learn.  Some of my colleagues at the University of California, Riverside proudly and helpfully told a group of West Africans, many years ago, that UCR had developed crops that could grow on 12 inches of rain.  The West Africans calmly answered that their crops grew on four inches of rain.  We of UCR thought we would be the teachers, but we became the learners.

Among Native Americans, the Tohono Oodham of Arizona also had crops that grew on four inches of rain.  They also shared with the West Africans a trick of following recent runoff channels, making fields in areas recently flooded.  By the time the water has dried up and the soil is dry, fast-growing crops have yielded a harvest.  The Hopi had varieties of maize that were planted a foot deep to take advantage of soil moisture.  The Hopi and most other traditional maize cultivators hilled up soil around the growing stalks, saving yet more water.  The ancient cultivators of the Muddy and Virgin River area of Nevada allocated and managed water carefully, maintaining a dense population without salination (Haines 2010); they were probably the ancestors of the Southern Paiute, who maintained successful intensive agriculture in that area well into the historic period.  Haines compares their water management with Near Eastern systems noted above.

This sort of agriculture did not develop in a laboratory.  Like other traditional, efficient management strategies for water, it required people to take water and crops very seriously.  It was religiously represented.  The Hopi, like almost all other Native American corn farmers, worshiped the maize god.  Saving water requires reverence for water, for the irrigation process, and for crops.  It will require planning based on respect for people and for water resources.

Common property management works in today’s world.  Elinor Ostrom (1990) studied water management in my home area, the Los Angeles basin.  She found that the dozens of cities sharing the basin had been forced to work together to manage the small rivers that provide water and carry away sewage.  I well recall the days when Riverside’s water was unsafe to drink and the city sewered into the Santa Ana River.  Orange County cities were richer and more powerful, however, and thus forced more and more treatment on Riverside, till its sewage is now safer than its drinking water used to be!

Without such powerful downstream users, however, upstream users can progressively degrade the water resource (Murphy 1967), and by ruining the downstream users they can de-fang their political power, and thus prevent any recourse from affecting them (Wilkinson 1992).  Elinor Ostrom also studied the Mojave River, just outside the Los Angeles Basin.  Here, powerful mining interests control the headwaters.  Next downriver are the relatively well-off towns of Hesperia and Victorville.  The river dies in the desert just past Barstow.  This unfortunate town, always poor, has become poorer and poorer as its water source is sucked away.  Having less and less political-economic clout, it progressively loses to the mines and the richer towns.  Barstow is slowly strangling to death.

Even people who do not plant or irrigate may have an important and valuable water ideology, religiously supported.  Katherine Metzo (2005) reports on the ideals of pure water among the indigenous peoples of the area around Lake Baikal in Siberia.  These ideals are now the main thing standing between this deepest and most copious of all lakes and its ruin by Russian pollution.

 

It is, indeed, hard to avoid worshiping water if one has any religious regard for nature.  One of the striking facts about humans is that, everywhere, they seem to honor and revere waterfalls.  Major falls are parks and pilgrimage spots in the United States and China and elsewhere.  Traditional small-scale societies everywhere seem to have worshiped them.  The Shuar (“Jivaro”) people of Ecuador and Peru call themselves the “people of the sacred waterfalls” (Harner 1972).  In my research in China and with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest I found that these disparate peoples still have high religious regard for waterfalls, eddies, rapids, and other areas where the power of water is evident.  Native Americans often went on vision quests at such places.

The sheer force of the water at such points is hypnotizing.  One can stand looking in a sort of trance for minutes or even hours.  Lakes and deep pools, and above all the vast ocean, have a different kind of spiritual sense:  peaceful and calm, yet evidently extremely powerful.  The power is latent.  One knows that a storm or a break in a water barrier could unleash it at any moment.  Legends of lake monsters, maelstroms, and bottomless pools seem to express some of this feeling.  The Greek god Triton and the Roman Neptune are more explicit statements of it.  Yemaja, the mother goddess of the Yoruba of West Africa (and many of their descendants in Brazil), is a sea goddess and can be stormy at times.

The Chinese see the ocean not so much as a god but as a vast universe in which or on which gods, dragons, and other supernatural beings play.  The Chinese were aware from very early times of islands forming from deltas, and of fossil seashells on mountaintops, so they early developed a story that the seas and lands had changed places many times.  The seas had been mulberry fields, as they expressed it.  They were aware that life-giving rains came from the sea, and were all too aware that these could come in the wake of typhoons (ta fung, “great wind” or “striking wind” depending on what character is used). The Chinese thought that dragons caused these storms.  Some of my fishermen friends had seen dragons in the rolling, boiling stormclouds.  Indeed, in the dim light and driving rain of a typhoon, one can easily imagine one sees these giant reptilian beings riding the wild winds.

It is also hard to avoid seeing the contrast of land and water, or land and sea, as one of those basic dichotomies around which people love to organize their thought.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1963, 1964-1972) discussed this in great detail.  Often, such dichotomies symbolize the dichotomy of male and female, which in turn may involve wife-giving and wife-accepting groups.  The Northwest Coast peoples contrasted land and sea, and many of their stories turn on progress from one to the other.  This can symbolize creation, or marriage, or a hero’s journey to wisdom, or tribal trade and interaction, or anything else involving such moving through landscapes.  Of course, salmon and other sea-run fish are the staple of subsistence there, and they run from fresh waters to the sea and then back again.

Animals that easily cross the boundary between water and land, like river otters, are sacred and powerful.  Otters are believed to lure humans to come into the water with them; the people then drown and are converted into otter-men, as scary to the Haida as werewolves were to medieval Europe.  The fear of otter-men (gagitx or “gogeet”) has actually spread to some Whites on Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands; I discovered this during my research there).  Otters are playful creatures, and do, in fact, try to lure humans into the water to play with them.  There is no mistaking their intent; they are as obvious about it as any puppy.  I have personally observed this several times.  I resisted the temptation.

Most powerful are those beings that can interact between water, land, and air:  the raven, eagle, and kingfisher (Jonaitis 1981).  The kingfisher nests in a burrow in the underground—or underworld, flies in the air, and fishes in the water.

Not only the Northwest Coast peoples attribute special power to anomalous creatures that are able to live in two different worlds.  It is a worldwide characteristic.  Consider the scary, uncanny nature of frogs, toads, and newts in Shakespeare.  African and South American peoples have similar attitudes toward lungfish.  And scientists show great fascination with the perfect intermediates between fish and land life-forms that have recently emerged from Chinese fossil beds.

Whales and porpoises are naturally uncanny, since they look and act like fish but breathe air and are obviously intelligent.  My fishermen friends on the Hong Kong waterfront would not touch them, for these reasons.  A recent fascinating book, Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett (2007), tells of a trial in New York in 1818.  New York State enacted an inspection fee on fish oil.  Inevitably, a shrewd New York fish-oil dealer refused to pay on whale oil, since the whale had recently been declared by science to be a mammal.  This led to a trial.  The dealer called to witness the leading American ichthyologist, Samuel Mitchill, a genuinely great scientist.  However, the trial went against him, since it was pretty clear that the law had been intended to cover whale oil as well as other “fish” oils.  The law was, however, subsequently rewritten.

In any case, the controversy was not easy to settle.  This was long before Darwin, and there was really no obvious reason to privilege lungs and live birth over fins and aquatic lifestyle.  The trial played ordinary people, with their functional view of the world, over laboratory scientists, with their structural and abstract view.

The whale remains anomalous among water creatures.  Americans want to save whales because they are intelligent mammals.  Many Japanese still see whales as essentially fish, and see American attempts to stop whaling as an imposition on fish-eating peoples.  It is, however, worth noting that most Japanese will not touch whale meat any more, and the government has to store in freezers the whale meat its fleets bring home.

 

It would be very hard to imagine a moral or religious code that denied water to those dying of thirst.  Yet, modern governments do exactly that, by wasteful and corrupt development schemes, privatization of water, permitting contamination, displacement of impoverished people, and many other practices.

Gary Chamberlain (2008) reviews the status of water in all the world’s major religions, and finds that all of them are quite specific about enjoining us to treat water as a common good to share with all who need it.  Certainly, of all human needs, water is second in immediate importance only to oxygen.  Water is needed every day, in fairly large quantities, by every human.  It is needed directly for drinking and washing, indirectly in much greater quantities for food production and manufacturing.  It is irreplaceable; the economists’ notion of “infinite substitutability” breaks down totally here.  Water has to be reasonably pure to be useful—the purer the better.

This being the case, all religions have made a point of insisting that water be made available.  All seem, also, to have used it as a symbol.  Water is soft and flowing, yet wears away rock.  It is pure, yet can be contaminated.  It is meek and unprotesting and always ready to serve, yet it is arguably the most valuable thing in the world.  It is often ignored and devalued, yet is absolutely necessary to life—every faith seems to have made the obvious comparison with religion here!  Probably nothing else has been such a universally used symbol and metaphor, for so many things.  Rivers are goddesses in India, and had a human feminine form before they descended to earth.  (Chamberlain quotes a wonderful story of the sea and the Ganges on p. 17.)  In Indian art, rivers such as the Ganges, Narbada and other rivers are beautiful women in the prime of life.   Their long, flowing hair and supple bodies recall the flow of the rivers.  In Bangladesh, Islamic norms prevail, but local water culture involves much management and associated ideology about water (Hanchett et al. 2014).

Water is most notable in religion for its cleanness and its purifying qualities and for its tremendous power, but Zena Kamash (2008) has recently emphasized its terrifying aspects.  Floods, whirlpools and fast rivers kill countless people.  Religions recognize this, and pray for protection, but also see water and the water surface as liminal.  They are boundaries between life and death, and water is both lifegiver and deathbringer.  Kamash’s own work is on the Roman Empire, and from Anatolia to England she has found Roman shrines that link these two aspects.  She finds similarities elsewhere, and I certainly saw plenty of this in China, where my fishermen friends lived by the sea but often died by it.  They loved it and feared it.  Cultivators in land villages had a similar view of fresh water; it kept them alive and irrigated their crops, but floods were frequent, and killed millions by starvation as well as hundreds by direct drowning.  Temples took full note of this, and so did prayers and ceremonies.

Religions have also insisted on the moral necessity of giving water to those who need it. Chamberlain reviews a wide range of sources.  I have mentioned the most graphic—the Islamic injunctions—above.  Chamberlain goes on to give us a powerful call to renew our faiths, whatever they may be, and work to make water freely and universally available in today’s world.

Even if one is not religious, any concern for anything outside one’s own narrowest self-interest simply has to include concern for water.  Even one’s narrowest self-interest, in fact.  The future for all of us is bleak unless immediate action is taken on a global scale.

Indeed, we need to bring religion and ethics into the picture.  At the very least, we need to see that water is literally and figuratively the water of life.  Denying it is murder.  Polluting and wasting it are potential murder.  I doubt if anything short of a concerted effort by all religions will save the world from a water shortage that will be catastrophic beyond imagining.

 

 

 

Based on a talk at the Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, AZ, 2008; amended since.  Thanks to Sandy Lynch and Gary Chamberlain for help.

 

 

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Appendix

“…On average, the water we use in our households is about 98 gallons a day, says a U.S. Geological Survey. The industrial goods we use — paper, cotton, clothes — that’s about another 44 gallons a day. But it takes more than 1,000 gallons of water a day per person to produce the food (and drinks) in the average U.S. diet, according to several sources. More than 53 gallons of water go into making 1 cup of orange juice, for example.

Just to get a sense of how much water goes into growing and processing what we eat, here’s a list of the water footprint for some common foods, via National Geographic:

A 1/3-pound burger requires 660 gallons of water. Most of this water is for producing beef (see below).

1 pound of beef requires 1,799 gallons of water, which includes irrigation of the grains and grasses in feed, plus water for drinking and processing.

1 slice of bread requires 11 gallons of water. Most of this water is for producing wheat (see below).

1 pound of wheat requires 132 gallons of water.

1 gallon of beer requires 68 gallons of water, or 19.8 gallons of water for 1 cup. Most of that water is for growing barley (see below).

1 pound of barley requires 198 gallons of water.

1 gallon of wine requires 1,008 gallons of water (mostly for growing the grapes), or 63.4 gallons of water for 1 cup.

1 apple requires 18 gallons of water. It takes 59.4 gallons of water to produce 1 cup of apple juice.

1 orange requires 13 gallons of water. It takes 53.1 gallons of water for 1 cup of orange juice.

1 pound of chicken requires 468 gallons of water.

1 pound of pork requires 576 gallons of water.1 pound of rice requires 449 gallons of water.

1 pound of sheep requires 731 gallons of water.

1 pound of goat requires 127 gallons of water.

1 pound of corn requires 108 gallons of water.

1 pound of soybeans requires 216 gallons of water.

1 pound of rice requires 449 gallons of water.

1 pound of potatoes requires 119 gallons of water.

1 egg requires 53 gallons of water.

1 gallon of milk requires 880 gallons of water, or 54.9 gallons of water for 1 cup. That includes water for raising and grazing cattle, and bottling and processing.

1 pound of cheese requires 600 gallons of water. On average it requires 1.2 gallons of milk to make 1 pound of cheese.

1 pound of chocolate requires 3,170 gallons of water.

1 pound of refined sugar requires 198 gallons of water.

1 gallon of tea requires 128 gallons of water, or 7.9 gallons of water for 1 cup.

1 gallon of coffee requires 880 gallons of water, or 37 gallons of water for 1 cup. ‘If everyone in the world drank a cup of coffee each morning, it would ‘cost’ about 32 trillion gallons of water a year,’ National Geographic notes” (Hallock 2014).