caroline

I would guess so Maria. Just as long as the humidity is fairly low. Like all the dishes you describe, my experience is that this one is a matter of what is on hand and your favorite flavorings. I've made it perhaps half a dozen times but I know people who do it on a regular basis, Of course, as you know, there are restaurants that specialize Rachel

Internet cafes are much commoner than in the US because fewer families can afford computers and connections at home. You'll run across them everywhere. I've not used them but I have the impression their quality runs the gamut from quite excellent to fairly abysmal, Rachel

Am I really reading this? For heaven's sake! Rachel

My two cents worth. No local is not always best. Most of the history of food has been an attempt to escape the tyranny of the local. Sure local fresh vegetables in season are great, ditto fish etc. But the mantra of showcasing/depending on local foods as the be-all and end-all makes no sense. RAchel

Friends in Mexico who save and deep fry chicken skin call it chicarron de pollo. Of course it's not as fat and crispy fried pork skin (chicarron). Rachel

Well here's another take. According to the venerable and generally well researched Book of Miso by Shurtleff and Aoyagi, Albert Langgardt, a German who taught at the Tokyo Imperial University in the 1870s, studied shoyu production with some care and went back to Germany and tried to reproduce the seasoning. Hence Maggi (according to them a version of the name of the Mogi family who founded Kikkoman though this is a different derivation from one earlier on this thread). The general story makes perfect sense. The Brits, the Americans and the Germans spent much of the nineteenth century trying to emulate Asian sauces whether fish sauce or shoyu. Hence we have Worcestershire, ketchup, Maggi, etc. And I don't see Maggi being dislodged from the cooking of Mexico (where I happen to live) any time soon. Indeed fajitas restaurants here use it as the main seasoning. Rachel Laudan

FoodZealot, I couldn't agree more that Hawaii has a special food culture. I'd argue the most fascinating (if not the best) in the US. And one of the most fascinating world wide as well. One of the places were you can watch the creation of a new grass roots cuisine. I couldn't agree more that HRC did marvels transforming high end food in Hawaii. I'm going to tiptoe gingerly into this discussion because I am a home cook and not a restauranteur. Seems to me that HRC always catered to the visitor trade primarily. Sure locals loved to go to Roys and felt more comfortable there than with the "international" cuisine of the big hotels. But HRC remains (I suspect because I've been away from the islands for nearly a decade) high end. And for locals the economy has not been that good. The efforts that people have already mentioned to bridge high end and local food have not moved ahead nearly as rapidly as I expected when I left the islands. I'm going to have to think this through. But my suspicion is that one of the problems is that mainlanders and other visitors still haven't the faintest idea about what's going on in Hawaii. The Hawaii Tourist Board, Jim Dole et al discovered a marvelous formula for drawing visitors to the islands but it makes the local scene invisible. It does so quite deliberately. I think of the novelist James Michener. I'm not promoting his work but he was married to a Hawaii Japanese and did think a good bit about the problems of the islands (not always to the liking of people there). Anyway in his novel on Spain, he tells a story, true or not I don't know. In the 60s, the powers that were in the Hawaii state government decided to try a new kind of promotion. Hey, they said, we are a fascinating culture, great Pacific Island and Asian resources, one of the most mixed cultures on earth, an augury of the future. Let's promote this along with our great beaches. Result (according to Michener) tourism plummeted. Hula and natural bounty was what visitors wanted. So ever since, it's been computers for the locals, luaus for visitors (his phrase more or less). I don't think HRC has cracked this nut. Maybe no one wants to. May be no one can. Hawaii remains tiny so the visitor market has presumably to be included for any even modestly ambitious restaurant. What is needed is the entrepreneur who can sell not just food, not just a simplistic notion of fusion foods, but Hawaii's secret. And that, I think, is the sheer glory of what local people have achieved (well, are achieving): a real political and economic transformation of the islands since the 50s. And with it, and indissolubly linked to it, a real grass roots fusion cuisine. Now that would be revolutionary. But how to pull it off? Well I'm not a restauranteur. Rachel

Hey Alanamoana, FoodZealot, Tokrakis et al, Thanks for getting something started on one of the most interesting places in the world to eat. I guess I'm hooked on the middle level or may be it's the bottom level. But in the ten years I lived in Honolulu I didn't know how lucky I was. Oh for the pork buns at Kirin (no, not manapua but those little silver dollar shaped pita-like objects covered in sesame seeds and filled with chopped pork) or for the pot stickers at that place on King Street or for the Vietnamese food catty corner from Kirin. OK so the ambience wasn't always the top consideration. But a few months ago I went to the top Chinese restaurant in Mexico City. If I hadn't been English and uptight, the whole lot would have gone right back to the kitchen. And before that I remember a well known food expert taking me to a Korean restaurant in New York and expecting me to be bowled over. Cripes. And even Zippies. Now I can leave a Zip Pack without a whimper. But I would go back for their oxtail soup. Not the best but not bad either. And where else has anything Okinawan got on the the American fast food menu? My husband hopped on his scooter and went down to the one opposite Foster Gardens every midnight. He's missed it ever since. And you could bowl over mainlanders taking them to the Zippies in Hawaii Kai with its view of the water and saying this is how we do fast food in Hawaii. And if I were in Honolulu tomorrow morning, I'd be heading down to Chinatown to see if the lady in the food court in (what was) the new covered market is still selling that noodle soup topped with roast duck that was my Sunday breakfast for years. Ay, Rachel

As I understand it, and the whole topic can be a little confused, the corn in Mexico is flour corn (not dent, not flint, not popcorn, not sweet corn). Dent is the major field corn for general use (animal feed, industrial purposes) in the US. Mexicans, like Americans in the old days, used any kind of young corn for its sweetness. Thank the canning industry for the fact that Americans began breeding for sweetness that could be enjoyed from a can year round and fresh in summer. Corn grown on small plots in Mexico is still the whole changing slew of varieties of flour corn. I think this is what they usually use for eating off the cob. It's what people in small villages still use for making tortillas. For factory made tortillas, including the tortilleras now on every street corner in Mexico, hybrid dent corn (often from the US thanks to NAFTA) is usually used. Not such a good tortilla. And for my money the best way of preparing fresh corn in Mexico is grilled until almost blackened and plastered with ground chile and lime juice. One of my favorite lunches.

Well, since my name has come up on this thread, let me put in my two cents worth. I've not been to any "Mexican" restaurants in England but I've trawled through a few grocery stores on family visits. So let's start by clearing the undergrowth. Tequila was an almost unknown regional drink until about twenty or thirty years ago when clever entrepreneurs introduced French and Spanish brandy-making equipment and the invaluable notion of apellation controlle. Margaritas were invented in the US. When Mexicans drink tequila, which has become a symbol of national pride in the last decade or so, it is with a chaser of sangrita (very diverse recipes including tomato, chile, pomegranate juice, the end result being always red). Tacos are basically the fish and chips of Mexico. That's a bit harsh but the corn kitchen (as Elizabeth Ortiz an Englishwoman with a great grasp of Mexican food termed it) was all that was left after the destruction of Aztec High Cuisine by the Conquistadores. Just yesterday I asked a neighbor "What do you think is the best food (comida) in the street in Guanajuato?" She answered, "There is no comida only tacos. The stand at Dos Rios has great tacos of meat, brains and head meat." Tacos in Mexico are almost invariably soft corn tortillas. Those deep fried things are American. Only the very rich and the very poor can get good corn tortillas. The quality is plummeting and the tortillas in the US (corn, wheat don't count) are Wonder Bread standard. Hate to think about the UK. Salsa in Mexico is not canned tomatos with hot chiles. It is a whole and utterly wonderful system yet to be properly written up of fresh chiles and an acid ingredient or rehydrated dried chiles and an acid ingredient. It's as systematic and complex as the French system. These salsas are not very piquant (Mexican term to distinguish spicy from heated). Only the poor in Mexico eat searingly hot food. El Paso brand is Tex-Mex. Tex-Mex is an honorable tradition in itself, only now being fully understood. But it's not what Mexicans eat. Middle and upper class Mexican food derives from the food of Hapsburg Spain. It's reminiscent of Indian food as Octavio Paz pointed out. Not surprising. It was one end of a great chain of Classic Eurasian Cuisines that went Spain, Ottomans, Persia, Mughal, and up in to China. It was the food of the single most successful American colony that put everything to the north and south to shame. A colony of great architecture, music, and intellectuals. Come vis¡t. It's amazing and I'm proud to live here. Mexican moles and adobes and pipians are reminders of what European food tasted like before the French got going and chucked all that stuff out. Mexican upper and middle class food was then made further complex by their embrace of everything French in the late nineteenth century. So where do you eat this great stuff? That's a hard one because Mexico (like England and like India) did not have a great restaurant cuisine. A few restaurants in Mexico City are now trying to present great home/hacienda cooking. Well I've gone on long enough, Rachel

Well to make a belated entry to an old discussion, I'd plump for the out-migration and entrepreneurial theory. In Argentina and Brazil middle eastern restaurants are Lebanese. Habib's, Brazil's massively successful Lebanese fast food chain, offers tiny esfijas (silver dollar sized pizzas), stuffed veg, and baklava-type things with hamburgers and pizzas, a Kit Habib's based on you-know-what, with a logo of a winking middle-easterner plus fez. Habib's is now in prime locations in Mexico City and has plans to open in a neighborhood near you (if you happen to be in the US). Until Habib'scomes to provincial Mexico, Wal-Mart offers pita (tortillas arabe), drained yoghurt (yocoque seco), and hummus. Every market has a stand selling tacos al pastor aka tacos arabe (gyros plus local touches such as pineapple). Seem odd? Well ponder Carlos Slim, reported as the richest man in Mexico, and Lebanese. And then there's always Salma Hayek . . . So my collection of Lebanese-mexican cookbooks is not perhaps so odd, Rachel

Sounds like a great idea. And I should be here in January. Just send me a personal message when you know your dates, Rachel

Hi Jaymes. I'm in Guanajuato. Making cecina is standard practice in small villlages around here. Town people go to the mountains on weekends to eat at restaurants that specialize in "country" food such as cecina. So far as I can tell from their comments, for most of them (town people that is) the thinness is the key issue. So thin it almost shatters as you pick it up.

I bet a dehydrator would work. Or come to that, residual oven heat. And obviously semi freezing the beef helps in cutting those paper thin slices.

Hi Schaem, What a great idea. Just had a Belgian guest who was suffering horribly. Tortillas no. Salsa no. Mole no. Finally I offered cecina and after a few tentative nibbles, she wolfed down several slices. One death from starvation averted. Whew. Round here, the trick is to get incredibly thinly cut beef. Season it. In this region (north central), that means salt, lime juice and perhaps crushed cumin. Good sense determines the proportions. Then hang it in a dry place where the flies can't get at it. That's another tricky bit. I make cats' cradles of string between two high backed chairs in a pozo (like a tiny green house). The bits of meat look repellent for a day or two, like the most disgusting dirty grey underwear. But then they dry out and turn dark reddish brown (and sadly shrink to a fraction of their size). Eaten as is or after pressing in a hot cast iron pan, I don't have to tell you how good the flaky brittle salty spicy bits mouthfuls are. How to adapt this to a steamy NY kitchen I'm not sure. I've fiddled around with very low settings on the microwave and not had terrible results. Good luck, Rachel

Ahh...dripping on bread or toast, salted, another treat the food police deny us. Needlessly, according to Dr Atkins Rich, savoury, and with the jelly bits and the crispy scratchings (or grattons). EVOO is no substitute. Wonderful stuff. I miss it

De veras. (Mexico City) DF is THE Capital. But because Guanajuato is the name of the state capital and the state, se habla de Guanajuato capital y Guanajuato estado. And because San Miguel de Allende is in Guanajuato and everyone assumes every gringo is from there..well, it's useful to make it clear it's not SMA. It's a great city and the mummies still draw huge crowds. To make it clear this is a food posting, I should admit that everyone agrees that Guanajuato is not, absolutely not, a culinary capital. We've been here six years, Mexico almost ten. And where are you from? Rachel

Greetings Sandra. Hope you enjoy England as much as I enjoy Mexico. I live in Guanajuato (capital) and spend a good bit of time in Mexico City,

I'm beginning to feel about a million years old because when I was growing up in England (and it wasn't the dark ages, just before the ubiquitous bottle of cooking oil) lard was the cooking fat when dripping ran out. Dripping was the fat rendered by cooking roasts or bacon, carefully preserved in separate bowls and only used for the meat in question. I could go on about lard but this is a Mexico thread. So to get back to Mexico. Here you can buy three lard-like things. (1) what seems to me a fairly nasty white lard substitute--Mexico's not-so-good (n my view) equivalent of Crisco which itself is a lard substitute. (2) regular white lard which is fairly hard to come by though it lurks in the big grocery stores such as Wal-Mart. (3) Brown lard which is, I think, lard heated to cook carnitas and chicharron and which is available from butchers who prepare these wonderful things. I use it for refried beans. But the bottle of oil is as ubiquitous here as elsewhere. Those who can afford it use it all the time. Those who can't don't make many refried beans.

I am a big fan of Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. When I first moved to Mexico her Complete Book of Mexican Cooking proved much the most practical introduction to Mexican cooking. She married a Mexican diplomat and learned to cook the kind of food that (say) Madeleine Kammen made famous for the French, Marcella Hazan for the Italian, or Julie Sahni for the Indian. She clearly distinguishes the corn kitchen with its indigenous origins from mainstream middle class Mexican cooking which helps begin to sort out the various threads of Mexican cooking. The recipes are short and practical for a working household. She is well thought of by those Mexicans who know her. So it's a book still worth looking up,

Rachel aka Caroline, I just had to ask: are you now working on a book on Mexican Cookery? How long have you been in Mexico?

Diana Kennedy's cookbooks are a treasure trove of recipes. But they are hard for the beginner. Sure, she lists the sources but she doesn't give someone who lives outside the country much clue about whether these are the recipes of the rich or the poor (very important in Mexico), festive or everyday and so on. Many of them come from families with servants and are very labor intensive. If you want to start cooking Mexican food I have two recommendations: (1) Start boiling. We don't do this much. But Mexicans demand a caldo at the beginning of the midday meal, a broth, and the meat is used in other dishes--mainly beef or chicken. (2) Master two basic salsas. Rojo y verde. They vary widely but at least in Central Mexico feature in endless recipes. They keep at least two weeks in the fridge. Red sauce. A core recipe might be guajillo chiles toasted, deveined and deseeded blended with tomates verdes (tomatillos) boiled until soft. Green sauce. A core recipe might be tomates verdes, chiles serranos boiled together and blended (in that indispensable blender) with some cilantro. Hundreds of variants of both. Now, dinner. first course, broth. Second course rice or noodles. Third course, pork simmered in salsa verde, bits of tender beef with salsa roja, chicken cooked in salsa roja, steak with a salsa on the side, etc etc. Then dessert. With these salsas, guacamole, chilaquiles are a snap, ditto enchiladas, ditto breakfast dishes of eggs and salsa in various forms, ditto chicarron in one of the salsas (food of the gods). You could go weeks with just these two recipes. (And of course they'd help your chile con carne, goulash, rogan josh, beef vegetable soup and tons of other non-Mexican dishes.

Well, I admit I'm twenty five years out of date and that I'd be a fool to recommend any specific restaurant. But in my youth bread was the great basic British food and often great. Bread and cheese, toasted cheese and bread, toasted cheese on bread (wonderful cheddars of course), sandwiches of all kinds, always made with butter not mayo and always thin (no need for a huge mouth big enough to gobble up Little Red Riding Hood. Favorites included cold scrambled egg with cress on bridge rolls, thinly sliced ham or roast beef and proper sharp mustard on regular bread, cheese and onion, potted shrimp for the up market, even just good bread and butter and fresh watercress, celery or green pepper on the side with salt. Not bread but in the same tradition are sausage rolls and cornish pasties, both quite unbeatable if well made. Problem is, as always, this was largely home food though some bakeries made up such things. Recent trips show that in small rural towns they still do though you have to pick and chose.

The going rate for a three hour class in San Miguel runs between 30 and 40 dollars (there are a number of people who teach there). This would normally either cover a topic (salsas, for example with half a dozen different kinds) or the preparation of a complete meal. I'm sure there are discounts if you want to take a course.

If you are interested in San Miguel, you might consider María Ricaud. I've lived in a nearby town for several years and sent a variety of people to her ranging from complete amateurs to professionals. Her family is from Oaxaca on one side, Michoacán on the other, so you get two great Mexican traditions. She specializes in homestyle cooking and draws on family manuscript cookbooks going back two hundred years. She's been teaching for a decade, is personable and very knowledgeable, and would tailor classes to your interests. More information from cocimari@hotmail.com