A plentiful repast was served up in the Spanish style, in a house built of sticks. Of the greater portion of the dishes I could not learn the component parts; but one striking feature was a pig three months old roasted whole, and stuffed with walnuts, which I thought an excellent dish and well cooked.
—A NINETEENTH-CENTURY DESCRIPTION OF A RURAL DINNER OUTSIDE JALAPA, FROM W. H. BULLOCK, Six Months Residence and Travel in Mexico
In my early days in Mexico, Saturday mornings for me meant markets. I would start off early and go first to San Juan and then stop off at Juárez on my way home. By that time Señor Raúl, the butcher, was preparing his almuerzo; you could smell it the moment you entered the market almost a block away, and he used to make everyone very hungry and very envious. He loved to cook, and this almuerzo of his was no ordinary “brunch.” A little girl would come by, always at the same hour, with a large, thick tumbler full of milky coffee and a bag of the pan dulce that has a rounded top latticed with cinnamon sugar; an old crone would push some steaming, flabby tortillas across the counter and we would all peer curiously toward the little stove to see what he was cooking that day. Quite often it would be a piece of carne enchilada—meat seasoned with a paste of guajillo chile—or a pork chop in adobo that he was preparing for his clients.
Once he was beating eggs and adding cooked and shredded flank steak. He dropped the mixture by spoonfuls into the hot fat and very soon the little tortitas were all puffed up and golden and ready for the tomato broth in which they were to be served.
He taught me how delicious veal kidneys could be; but his were not as large as those we are accustomed to. The whole kidney in its fatty sheath would be no more than about 2½ inches (6.5 cm) across, and each ripple about ¼ inch (1 cm). He would slice them, fat and all, and fry them lightly. At his suggestion, I would buy these little kidneys and bake them, complete with their fatty casing, until the outside was crisp and brown while the inside was still juicy and very tender.
Señor Raúl also taught me how to cut the filet for carne asada and how to prepare the adobo for pork chops. Since he didn’t sell veal I would go to a nearby stand, where a group of cheerful and energetic young men would cut scaloppine to perfection and slice a whole calf’s liver—pale reddish brown and weighing no more than two pounds—into paper-thin slices. I can never eat liver anywhere else. So even if you couldn’t get the best roast beef or lamb chops, there were so many other things.
The Mexicans are great pork eaters, especially the country people, who will often fatten up a couple of pigs in their back yard as an investment. Our maid Godileva always did, and no household scraps, potato peelings, or outside lettuce leaves escaped her eye; they were carried home along with the neighbors’ stale bread and dried tortillas for the pigs.
The butchers’ stands in the markets in small villages and country towns are hung with yards and yards of thin meat—moist, drying, and dried tasajo or cecina. I wanted to learn how to cut it, so one Sunday morning on a trip to the Sierra de Puebla I went to the almost deserted market in Huauchinango, right on the border between Veracruz and Puebla. The two friendly butchers would take a rump of beef or pork, or a huge lump of ox lung, and with a long, thin knife cut a first fine layer, then turn the meat and cut the other way, backwards and forwards, turning it over and over until, in no time at all, the piece would be flattened out into one long continuous strip. With a flick of the wrist, they would throw on a fine layer of salt, squeeze plenty of lime juice on it, and fold the meat up into a basket pile of laundry, where it was left to season overnight. The next day they would hang it up in an airy place to dry. Broiled over charcoal and eaten with a green tomato or cascabel chile sauce, it is very tasty.
The beef country is in the north of Mexico, and Chihuahua City has some of the most opulent steak houses in the whole of Mexico. They say the beef has an extra-good flavor there because the animals feed on wild oregano. To the west, in Hermosillo, you were served the biggest steaks of all in the large open-air restaurants, where they are cooked to order over wood fires. Then they go to the other extreme and have the flimsiest beef jerky—carne machacada—pounded to a fluff.
I have eaten cabrito—kid—in many places, but nowhere is it as good as in Monterrey. The kid must not be older than thirty days, for after that time it ceases to be milk fed, and as it starts to browse the flavor of the flesh becomes strong and goaty. Preferably it should be cooked, and eaten, out of doors, over a fire of huisache branches—but I would settle any day for the cabrito so carefully cooked in the Restaurante Principal or El Tio in Monterrey. The tender animal is opened out flat and impaled on a stake set at a 70-degree angle at the edge of the fire. It takes two hours to cook, and every half hour its position is changed. The cooking follows a strict pattern, and when there are at least ten cabritos being cooked at once you wonder how the cook remembers exactly which way each one should go next—but he does. The riñonada, the choicest part, is the lower part of the back, where the drippings from the fatty kidney sheath continually baste it. It is brown and crisp on the outside, but the flesh inside is as delicate and tender as the finest veal.
But there are other things that went along with the cabrito: a bowl of frijoles rancheros quite strongly seasoned with cumin; a sausage of intestine stuffed with liver and kidney called machitos. And, most delicate of all, the steamed head of the little goat, the tongue of which is the delicacy of all time. Or you would have a stew of cabrito thickened with the blood—fritada, which is more of an acquired taste.
The meat stands in the Culiacán market are piled with brick-colored chilorio, a ready-made filling for tacos of shredded, crisp pork seasoned with ground chiles and spices, and cuts of beef called gusano for the local Asado Placero Sinaloense. Curiously this is not roasted meat as the name implies, but boiled and then fried in cubes with potatoes, smothered in a tomato sauce, and topped with zucchini, carrots, onion rings, and lettuce. It is a very popular supper dish, especially in Mazatlán when the day has cooled off a little and you have eaten a light seafood lunch.
In Guadalajara the most touted meat dish is Birria, and throughout the central plateau of Mexico the Sunday marketplaces are full of lamb and pancita or montalayo barbecued in pits lined with maguey leaves. The pancita is lamb’s stomach stuffed with chile-seasoned lamb’s liver and kidney as well as the intestines of the lamb. In Hidalgo and Tlaxcala you can nearly always be sure of getting mixiote, which is lamb seasoned with dried chiles and cooked in little packages covered with the membrane stripped from the outside of the maguey leaves. In Oaxaca, the barbacoa is of sheep or goat cooked on a bed of crushed maize, which absorbs the juices and is wonderfully savory.
You used to go to the upper floor of the Mérida market to find every imaginable cut of cooked venison; they say it had been cooked in a pib in the ground. The flesh of the small deer that abounded in the Yucatán is light in color and delicate in flavor, much more like veal than the gamy dark-red venison we are more accustomed to. It is often served in a pipián made of very tiny pumpkin seeds that are toasted and ground, hull and seed together. Or it is shredded finely and mixed with minutely chopped radishes, onion, and cilantro and moistened with Seville orange juice to make a salpicón for tacos.
Saturday still seems to be the day for slaughtering cattle in Campeche, for chocolomo is the Saturday night special. It is made only with freshly killed beef and offal. It is one of those hearty soup-stews that are found all over Mexico, but with a difference: along with the meat, the brains, kidney, liver, and heart are cooked with toasted garlic and onion and flavored at the last moment with the bitter lima that gives its name to the typical lime soup of the Yucatán.
One could go on forever. The variations are enormous, as can be seen by the following recipes.