A Cook's Tour (32 page)

     Video gold.

     After two hours of useless and unproductive floundering in the sea, the underwater camera rig having filled up with water – after about six miles of footage of my concave chest wheezing on the beach while Leo, our hired fishing guide, continued, without success, to catch even a stunt fish for a faked shot – we gave up. Matthew settled for frozen fish at a nearby tourist strip, and the always popular ‘Tony gets drunk on local beverage, then sits in sullen silence, hating himself and everybody to do with this production scene.’

     I never wanted to eat iguana. ‘Yes you do,’ insisted the TV masterminds. I had no particular curiosity about iguana. I knew from talking to my cooks that people eat iguana when they can afford nothing else. It’s cheap and plentiful. Even Leo, talking about how he went out a few times a week with his dog to sniff out iguana, admitted he did it only because he had no money for real food. I had no expectation that a big lizard would taste good – and I was not anxious to have one killed so I could find out for sure. But Matthew seemed to feel that the ‘iguana scene’ would be must-see TV, a guaranteed cable Ace for Best Reptile Scene in a Continuing Cable Series.

     Now, maybe somewhere they’re making delicious marinated, then barbecued iguana with crispy skin and well-grilled but tender meat. Maybe if you sear it and then braise it long enough and infuse it with enough other flavors, it might make a meal interesting to adventurous palates. Maybe. I didn’t see it.

     The owner of our hotel was dispatched to wrangle up a nice plump example of iguanadom at its very best. But after three or four hours of investigation, he came up as empty as Leo’s fishing line. Instead, he decided to sacrifice the poor hotel mascot, a ten-year-old wrinkly, leathery, liver-spotted thing – he looked paralytic – with a bifurcated tail and a troublingly agreeable nature. I took one look at the creature and tried very hard to weasel out of the meal.

     ‘Matthew! Jesus Christ, man! He’s a pet, for fuck’s sake! Let the thing live! How good can he be? Just look at him!’

     The hotel proprietor was no help. Stroking the iguana’s belly, he insisted, ‘Look! He is ready. He wants to die.’ I was appalled.

     What arrived later were iguana tamales: the hotel pet, boiled, sectioned, then simply wrapped in corn husk with
masa
and sauce. Next to
natto
, it was maybe the worst thing I’d ever had between my teeth. The iguana was undercooked. When I unwrapped my tamale, I found that I had been honored with the head and a forearm – still on the bone. The texture was like chewing on GI Joe – if Joe had been resting at the bottom of a long-neglected turtle tank. There was almost no meat to speak of, just tough, rubbery skin, knobby, slimy little bones. When I managed now and again actually to winnow out a little meat from between bones and skin, I was sorry I had. It was dark, oily, and viscous, with the pungent aroma of steamed salamander.

     In the thankfully brief scene you see in the edited version, I look like I’m eating at gunpoint.

I hit the city of Oaxaca next, a place justifiably famous for its food. It’s a beautiful town: lovely hacienda-style hotels, exquisite Spanish churches and cathedrals, a picturesque
zócalo
where you can sit at a café table and watch the world go by, a fabulous
mercado
, nice people. It is also, unfortunately, a magnet for the world’s ugliest tourists. Herds of squinting, sun-blotched fanny packers in black socks and sandals shuffled by, snapping pictures. Extravagantly pierced backpackers, filthy from the road, sat in the park, ineptly strumming old Dylan tunes on clapped-out guitars. Thick-ankled German women looking for love, and hordes of doddering tour groupers and serial shoppers, fanned out to buy the inevitable tonnage of papier-mâché figurines, hammered tin, cheap silver, ponchos, serapes, funny hats, T-shirts, and pottery. College kids, fresh from the donkey show in Tijuana, sulked noisily on benches, broke and frustrated, waiting for a Western Union money order from mom and dad. But as it got late and the tourists drifted off and the locals began showing up in clean white guayaberas and frilly dresses, filling the café tables around us, Martin, my driver, and I started to enjoy ourselves.

   
Mezcal
was served like tequila, in shot glasses, accompanied by chasers of
sangrita
, a spicy tomato juice concoction. With the de rigueur wedge of lime came a mix of salt and dried, powdered, chili-roasted maguey worms – an unexpectedly delicious accompaniment. Martin and I sat in the café, nibbling on
tortas
(sandwiches) of fresh cheese and ham, drinking beer and
mezcal
, a mariachi band strolling from table to table. Behind us, a man in his fifties, with a face scarred by a youthful bout with smallpox and the fists and brows of a former pugilist, sat alone at his table, drinking Modelo Negro, his straight black hair plastered down over his forehead, staring into space with a look of infinite sadness. After a long while sitting in silence with the same brooding expression, he motioned the mariachis over to his table, handed them a few pesos, and made a mumbled request. They played beautifully, and when they were done with the song, the man, though outwardly unmoved, handed them more pesos and asked for another. Again, his demeanor remained impassive as he monopolized the six-piece band.

     Then suddenly, mournfully, without raising his eyes from the table, he began to sing. Still seated, looking at no one else, he sang of love and loss and broken hearts, his voice rich, deep, and beautifully modulated. Every customer in the café listened with rapt attention. More pesos, another song. The sad-faced man in a guayabera shirt, eyes almost shut now, sang and sang, the crowd cheering wildly after each song ended. He seemed oblivious to their roars of approval, focused through slit eyes on some point far away – or deep inside his battered skull – his voice carrying over the now-empty
mercado
and into the night.

     I ate well in Oaxaca. I had chocolate
atole
, a thick hot chocolate beverage with the texture of Cream of Wheat, made from local chocolate, cinnamon, and cornmeal. I tried an ice cream made with
leche quemada
(burned milk), which is surprisingly delicious. I sampled the mysteries of the seven
moles
, watched
queso fresco
being made – a fresh farmer cheese – saw how one batch can be taken along to make a drier, aged variety, and a soft-curd version. At the
mercado
, I bought
morcilla
and chorizo sausages from one of the butchers, had them grilled with the garnishes and tortillas available from the many ‘make your own’ taco stands. I had a marvelous
menudo
, a spicy tripe and offal soup/stew, returning later to try
pozole
, a similar dish with chick peas. Outside the
mercado
, I found a busy taco stand, packed with Oaxaqueños sitting on benches. A cook and an assistant were hard at work hacking up a freshly cooked pig’s head, rolling up still-warm portions of tender pork in corn tortillas, then drizzling them with
salsa verde
.

     I squeezed in between some locals and ordered a few. Best tacos ever. I could have sat there forever under a naked lightbulb, surrounded by enthusiastically eating Mexicans and their children. But there were people waiting for a spot. I returned the next night, and the next.

Off a dirt road in the farmland around Oaxaca de Juárez, the state’s capital, Dominga made me tamales. She cooked in a small outdoor kitchen: a charcoal fire, clay saucepan, steamer, a
comal
for toasting, a mortar and pestle, and a stone rolling pin. Chickens and roosters wandered around the dusty back lot and small garden, near the pigpens.

     We were going to the
molino
, the community mill, where for centuries Mexicans have gone, often every day, to grind their dried corn for
masa
, their dried chilis for
mole
, and their chocolate and their coffee beans on stone wheels. Dominga was a short, wide woman with mestizo features and strong arms and hands, which had seen a lot of work over the years. The corn soaking in a plastic bucket in one hand, a tub of chilis and garlic in another, she walked the few blocks in the hot sun to a small shed with a tin roof, where a line of women in similar frilled dresses and aprons waited for one of the two generator-powered machines to become available. Inside, the
molina
’s owner carefully fed handfuls of chilis into one machine and corn into the other, a rich, smooth paste issuing from both.
Mole
,
masa
,
atole
,
café
– made fresh every day by mom.

     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, nutty-tasting, with a mealy feel and a lingering woody aftertaste. But the order of
chiles en nogada
, the national dish of Mexico – stuffed
poblano
peppers, loaded with ground beef, walnuts, dried fruit, and cinnamon, served with two sauces (the colors of the nation’s flag) – had been terrible beyond words. I don’t like beef with cinnamon, particularly accompanied by a sauce. Sitting in the
pulquería
, swilling bucket after bucket of the mildly hallucinogenic low-rent beverage of choice for Mexicans in need of an affordable buzz, I was all too aware that underneath the roiling hellbroth of
pulque
even now beginning to bubble in my belly was a less-than-solid foundation of ant eggs, worms, and that horrible
chiles en nogada
. The ride back to my room in Izúcar de Matamoros was agony.