Plaza de Liberacion, centro historico’s largest public square, sees a lot of things: mangers featuring terrifyingly large facsimiles of biblical personalities and hooved desert pack animals, the largest number of agave jimadores ever assembled in one place, countless mariachi concerts, and more.
On a recent weekend, the long rectangular plaza spanning the several hundred meters that separate Teatro Degollado and the city’s ornate cathedral was alive with the smells, sights and sounds of nine different regions of Mexico, each offering variations on a highly diverse and internationally recognized culinary patrimony.
The event, El Encuentro Regional de Comida Traditional y Popular Jalisco 2018, brought over 60 cooks (the vast majority of whom were stocky, compact women with flowing dark hair) from Aguascalientes, Colima, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, Nayarit, Queretaro, San Luis Potosi, and Michoacan for a weekend of state-sponsored culinary stimulation and education.
For people who need to know how the sausage is made, so to speak, the event no doubt proved an edifying experience. Women clad in traditional multi-colored garb made use of all sorts of cumbersome doodads as they went about a wide variety of culinary tasks, such as pressing and grilling tortillas, or tearing up tortillas and frying the bits to make buñuelos. Of particular interest to the public were the metate, a broad, concave stone slab used for grinding constituents of various sauces, and the molcajete, Mexico’s traditional mortar and pestle fashioned from volcanic rock.
Mexico, as was mentioned, has a wide breadth of food options, many of which are unknown to many foreigners, who when they think of Mexican food imagine a bowl of watery guacamole made with cream (gross), or a humongous burrito bursting at the seams with sour cream and – again – third rate guacamole. But region by region, the dishes on offer over the weekend painted a deservedly complex picture of the country’s syncretistic culinary traditions.
One of the items scrawled on Guanajuato’s white board, for instance, was camarones a la cucaracha, or cockroach shrimp. This dish, which in no way involves – fingers crossed – cockroaches, at least not intentionally, features fried or sautéed shrimp, accompanied by a fiery reddish sauce made primarily from butter, garlic, lemon and Salsa Huichol.
Michoacan was represented, vis-a-vis the University San Nicolas de Hidalgo of Michoacan in Morelia, by borrego en penca, a dish of lamb steamed in the broad leaves of the maguey cactus with vinegar, garlic, onions, cilantro and much more.
A soup featuring the temachaca plant, called, not unexpectedly, caldo de temachaca, topped Zacateca’s bill of fare. The soup is made with said herb, onion, chile, and is said to possess curative properties, especially for those who suffer from the after effects of libational overindulgence.
Jalisco, or more specifically, Tuxpan, was represented by coaxala, or coachala, a dish consisting of bits of chicken with chile papilla, onion, green onions, garlic, masa and lard. Commonly served in a broth, it smacks of the pure comfort of home.
Lest you thought all it takes to bring 60 cooks from around central Mexico to a single plaza for three days of cultural enrichment is a bureaucratic snap of the fingers, organizer Antonina Gonzalez Leandro was on hand to disabuse you of that notion.
Gonzalez’ interest in Mexican food is keen; in 2010, she journeyed to Kenya, where her country’s food received the title of Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. There she had the honor of representing the alimentary assets of her home state, Michoacan.
“All this is the result of a long process of research and field work,” said Gonzalez. “We worked with the different cooks, going to their homes to getting to know them and their humble food.”
People like Gonzalez, whose job it is to promote and protect traditional folk ways, see a threat in today’s digital world, worried that its hyper connectivity will kill hyper regionality. Events like these serve not only to reinforce the beauty – and deliciousness – of traditional food ways in Mexico to the public, but also to be a tangible reminder to its practitioners that they aren’t keeping the flame alive in a vacuum.
“We’re trying to preserve tradition through food,” said Gonzalez. “Traditional food is being re-evaluated – there’s a renewed appreciation for ancestral knowledge. I have a 12-year-old niece who loves cooking, she loves coming to these events to make tortillas. She does a little bit of everything.”
Aside from the cornucopia of cooked dishes in the offing – either sold or given out to the public in small samples – other products were available for perusal or purchase over the weekend. Those manning the stalls demonstrated an admirable depth of knowledge about these items. These included Señora Martha tortillas from Jalisco, used to make the aforementioned sugar-dusted buñelos; Cafe Ortiz Organic Coffee, from Amacueca, Jalisco; and from the same producers a lip-smacking conserva de pitaya.
As the adage goes, all things must come to an end. Sunday afternoon’s waning sunlight bathed the tired faces of cooks in a warm glow as they gathered pots and pans, comales, metates, molcajetes, et al, and made ready for departure. The women’s weary but dignified bearing as they wound things down evoked a sense of fierce pride taken in their trade, a job that isn’t just concerned with feeding people, but rather with refusing to let the old wise ways go the way of the dodo, an act of culinary heroism.