A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [109]
You may think you’ve tried Mexican food. Unless you’ve been to Mexico and eaten in a home, you haven’t. Mexican food is not that sour two-day-old sludge foaming and fermenting in the center of your table next to a few stale corn chips, a little limp cilantro turning to slime among the long-gone onions. It is not graying or packaged guacamole, whipped in the food processor until it achieves the consistency of baby food. It is not heaped with cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese (you won’t see any of that in Mexico) and served with allegedly refried beans. In Mexico, everything is fresh. Dominga owns no Cuisinart. She doesn’t have a freezer. Her salsas do not arrive in jars, and her recipes are not faxed from Central, portion-controlled for multiunit use. Mexican food is not particularly hot and spicy. It is not soggy, frozen chimichangas, already haemorrhaging ingredients into the deep-fat fryer. It is not the dull, monochromatic slop you see all over America and Australia and the UK.
Dominga made me Oaxacan-style chicken tamales – instead of wrapping the chicken and masa and sauce in a corn husk, as is usually done all over Mexico, she wrapped them in banana leaves. When she returned from the mill, Dominga removed a simmering freshly killed chicken from a pot and pulled the meat off in shreds. (Pollo pelado.) She mixed and kneaded her fresh masa with some rendered pork fat (packets of which are an essential ingredient around here), lightly toasted the banana leaves on the comal, and stirred her intoxicating-smelling mole negro, which had been simmering for hours and hours.
Proximity to livestock and animal feces, I have found in my travels, is not necessarily an indicator of a bad meal. More often than not, in recent experience, it’s an early indicator of something good on the way. Why is that? It might have to do with the freshness question. Still living close to the source of your food, you often don’t have a refrigerator or freezer. Equipment and conditions are primitive. You can’t be lazy – because no option other than the old way exists. Where there are freezers and refrigerators, laziness follows, the compromises and slow encroachment of convenience. Why spend all day making mole when you can make a jumbo batch and freeze it? Why make salsa every day when it lasts OK in the fridge? Try a salsa or a sauce hand-ground with a stone mortar and pestle and you’ll see what I mean.
Dominga’s tamales were marvelous. I ate them hot out of the steamer under a small palapa, among the flies and the chickens and the pigs – and it was damn near a religious experience.
Martin, Eddie, and I stopped at a pulquería outside of town. It was a sky-blue hovel with a distorting jukebox and a lone addled drinker. The pulque – the fermented sap of the maguey cactus – sat in fifty-five-gallon vats behind the bar, smelling sweet-sour. The bartender ladled the thick, viscous, milky-looking sap into two plastic beach pails – the kind kids make sand castles with. We sat down at a weatherbeaten picnic table and poured ourselves drinks in tall, not particularly clean glasses. ‘Ewww!’ said one of the TV crew, watching Martin enthusiastically insert and withdraw a finger into the pulque to check consistency, a long mucuslike strand coming along for the ride. The finger test wasn’t doing much for my stomach’s sense of well-being, either. I’d dined earlier on generous portions of fried worms and sautéed ant eggs – a specialty of the area. The worms had been OK – buried in enough guacamole and salsa roja, and the ant eggs had been . . . well, OK,