Culinary Art and Anthropology

Joy Adapon

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781847886064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Culinary Art and Anthropology is an anthropological study of food. It focuses on taste and flavour using an original interpretation of Alfred Gell's theory of the 'art nexus'. Grounded in ethnography, it explores the notion of cooking as an embodied skill and artistic practice. The integral role and concept of 'flavour' in everyday life is examined among cottage industry barbacoa makers in Milpa Alta, an outer district of Mexico City. Women's work and local festive occasions are examined against a background of material on professional chefs who reproduce 'traditional' Mexican cooking in restaurant settings. Including recipes to allow readers to practise the art of Mexican cooking, Culinary Art and Anthropology offers a sensual, theoretically sophisticated model for understanding food anthropologically. It will appeal to social scientists, food lovers, and those interested in the growing fields of food studies and the anthropology of the senses.

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Perceptions of Mexican Cuisine

Mexican cuisine is something like a historical novel which has a gorgeously wanton redhead on its dust jacket.

—Richard Condon, The Mexican Stove (1973, p. 13)

This chapter introduces the cuisines of Mexico in general, largely drawing from what I learned from reading food history and cookbooks and from my early fieldwork in the centre of Mexico City among chefs, students and researchers of Mexican gastronomy. This served as thorough preparation for the culinary life that I encountered later in Milpa Alta, on which most of this book is focused. Food writing colours our perceptions of other cuisines, and in my case, I became enamoured of Mexican cooking from what I had read prior to my first visit. In what follows I describe some of the ways that people think of and write about the cuisines of Mexico, starting with the all-important chile.

The Cultural Signi fi cance of Chiles

After the usual introductions, the first thing asked about me when I was brought to anyone’s home in Mexico was invariably, ‘Does she eat chile?’ The second question was usually, ‘And does she eat tortillas?’

Complemented with beans, chile and corn (most often in the form of tortillas) are the main ingredients of Mexican cuisine. The most culturally meaningful of the three is the chile. ‘Food and cuisine can characterize a culture, and ours has been and continues to be characterized by our daily and widespread consumption of chiles’ (Muñoz, 1996, foreword, my translation). In Mexico, chiles are used primarily for their distinct flavours and not only for their heat. It is in Mexico where the most extensive variety of chiles is used. In their green, ripe or dried states they have different flavours which are cooked or combined for different effects.

The chile is the heart and soul of Mexican food. To each broth or stew that does not contain chile, we add some hot salsa at the table. A very complex dish begins by roasting and/or grinding chiles, and it is the chile that gives the peculiar and definitive accent to many meals. It is the ingredient that can determine the flavour of a dish. (Muñoz, 1996, p. 10, my translation)

Some writings on Mexican cooking state that the ancient Mesoamerican victuals were based on a ‘holy triad’ of corn, beans and squash. The image of a basic culinary triad is tempting, except that with the exclusion of the chile, it fails to adequately describe Mexican cuisine. Food historian Sophie Coe (1994, pp. 38–9) asserts that ‘[t]his triad was invented by foreigners and imposed on the high cultures of the New World, and the proof of this is to be found in the omission of chile peppers, which the outsiders viewed as a mere condiment, while the original inhabitants considered them a dietary cornerstone, without which food was a penance.’

The possible reason that squash was included is because of the traditional style of planting milpas, cornfields, with beans and squash. Clearly these three crops are basic foodstuffs in the Mexican diet, but any Mexican interested in eating would place the chile above the squash in a list of priorities for the dining table. The power of the chile in this Mexican ‘culinary triangle’ is wonderfully described by Zarela Martínez, a New York restaurateur, who enthuses that

Chile is history. It has outlasted religions and governments in Mexico. It is part of the landscape, literally ... It belongs to the holy trinity that has always been the basis of our diet: corn, beans, and chile. Without each other, none of the three would be what it is. Corn is an incomplete protein, beans are difficult to digest. Together they would be good basic sustenance, but hopelessly monotonous. Chile makes the gastric juices run for a dinner of beans and tortillas. It also provides the vitamins they lack, especially vitamins A and C. The combination of the three makes a nutritionally balanced meal. It’s magic. (1992, p. 218, emphasis added)

Mexican cuisine uses many kinds of chiles in diverse ways, too numerous to list here,¹but even a brief perusal of Mexican cookbooks indicates that chiles are sig-nificant in Mexican life, and not just in their use as flavouring for food.²Diana Kennedy echoes Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote in the sixteenth century that without chiles Mexicans did not believe they were eating. ‘Indeed the chile has played such an important role in the economic and social life of the country that many Mexicans feel their national identity would be in danger of extinction without it’ (Kennedy, 1989, p. 460).

The Range of Mexican Foods

Since pre-Hispanic times, the cuisines of Mexico have been based on corn, beans and chiles, and we know that even then they were prepared in a number of ways to make them palatable or even edible.³In the sixteenth century when the Spanish first arrived, there was agricultural abundance. The Aztecs of central Mexico had sophisticated farming techniques (chinampas⁴ and milpas) and more sophisticated gastronomy. They also had military and political power over other groups in the region from whom they demanded tribute, mainly of foods, which added variety and breadth to their diet with comestibles that they did not grow themselves. Not all indigenous groups were equally affluent, but the availability of various foods impressed the conquistadors who came and saw the great markets of Tlatelolco, where all sorts of plants, animals and insects were being sold for food as supplements to the basic diet of corn, beans and chiles.

As the Spanish established themselves in what they called New Spain, they also established firm roots for the Catholic church. The Spanish friars were the first to learn the local languages for the purposes of evangelization, and it is through their writings that we have any knowledge of the social and culinary systems of the preco-lonial period. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1950–82 [1590]), a Franciscan friar who came to Mexico in the sixteenth century, meticulously collected material to describe the Aztec (Náhuatl) way of life, including everything that they ate. Sahagún recorded that along with maize and beans, the ancient Aztecs ate turkey, fish, small game, insects and a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, pulses, seeds, tubers, wild mushrooms, plants and herbs that they collected or domesticated for food use.

There are various accounts of how the Spaniards were impressed with the beauty and abundance of the Valley of Mexico, and also of the feasts that the emperor Moct-ezuma offered to them and ate himself. Cowal’s unpublished study, Food in the History of Central Mexico (1990), further shows how the Spanish who came during the Conquest were only partially forced to adjust to the foods of Mexico (pp. 90–9). The settlers eventually accommodated themselves within the existing culture. She states that ‘at first the civilization was too highly developed and the populace too numerous for the Spaniards to ignore the native cooking. Soldiers, used to a modest, bland diet of bread, mutton, lentils and a few vegetables, adapted to the Mexican diet, partly out of necessity and somewhat because of taste choice’ (p. 93).

Food historians assert that Aztec cooking was developed to high art, and this notion is reiterated by writers until today, though there is some disagreement amongst researchers and cookbook writers. Spanish sources of the period attest to gastronomic abundance, but Sonia Corcuera (1981) points out that the basic ingredients were still limited, so the variety of foods recorded by Sahagún was actually a result of culinary expertise.⁵The foods still boiled down to being variations of chiles, tortillas and tamales. Without question there was creativity, imagination, and culinary artistry (Corcuera, 1981, p. 30).

Cuisines evolve as cooks experiment with ingredients and learn new ways to process and combine their raw materials for different occasions and effects. New foods and cooking techniques are incorporated, tasted and tested during meals. Those fla-vours which are favourable are repeated and remembered, and culinary knowledge and expertise grow. The repertory of Mexican cuisine expanded with the addition of ingredients and cooking methods which were introduced during the Spanish colonial period. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, milk and its products were unknown, as were cooking methods using fats, such as frying. The Spaniards introduced pigs, cows, chickens and sheep to Mexico. They also brought onions, garlic, coriander, cinnamon, cloves and many other herbs and spices that are widely used in Mexican cookery today. At the same time, within the convents, Spanish nuns had to learn to use the local products, as much of what they were used to cooking could not all be imported from Spain. The idea of an ‘emerging mestizo cuisine’ (Valle and Valle, 1995, p. 62) or of ‘baroque cuisine’ comes directly from the convents. The convents were wealthy laboratories of gastronomic experimentation where the sharing of culinary influences flourished during the colonial period. ‘The excesses and inventiveness of convent cooking reflected Mexico’s diverse flora and fauna, the omnivorous appetites of its inhabitants, and, above all, the power and wealth of its religious orders’ (Valle and Valle, 1995, p. 63). Yet in spite of this, the basis of Mexican cuisine remained the same as it had always been—corn, beans and chiles.⁶‘But among the Aztec elite maize appeared in so many forms that it is hard to imagine them suffering from the monotony which we envisage when told of a culture which has a single staple food and eats it every meal of every day’ (Coe, 1994, p. 113).⁷

Given the sophistication of both the native and foreign colonial cuisines, the process of mestizaje is not a simple fusion of Indian and Spanish, therefore.⁸Cowal points out that ‘Spanish cooking was already a mixture when it got to the Americas. Eight centuries of Arab influence had left their mark’ (1990, p. 90). What exists in Mexico is what food historian Rachel Laudan defines as a local cuisine, made up of different components that

have now blended together to form ... a new and coherent cuisine ... That is, not by the gradual evolution of some original cuisine rooted in the soil (though that does happen) but by the shocks and changes of immigrants ... Not just the Spanish but the French, the Lebanese, the Germans, the later Spanish refugees from the Civil War, the Mennonites, the Italians, have all had much more impact than the usual indigenous/colonial story would lead one to believe. (Rachel Laudan, personal communication)

By the nineteenth century, Mexican cooks sought the essence of their art in popular traditions rather than in formalized techniques (Pilcher, 1998). These popular traditions partly consist in the culinary techniques and gastronomic knowledge that have been passed down the generations through the family kitchen. Historian Cristina Barros states that contemporary Mexican cuisine is 90 per cent indigenous and 10 per cent other influences. ‘The most delicious cuisines [in Mexico] are those with more indigenous influence.’⁹She asserts that the indigenous cuisines of Mexico did not undergo the miscegenation that most people claim. There were few Spanish who arrived during the Conquest, and though they did influence the local cuisines, which integrated the new flavours and foodstuffs, the bases remained Mexican. On the other hand, Juárez López (2000) argues that the base...