What is authentic Mexican food? That's the question – or rather, the attempt to define the question – that Jeffrey Pilcher takes up in Planet Taco, his impressively well-informed and sprightly third book on Mexican food. Should one seek the answer by reaching back thousands of years to the domestication of maize and the ability of the ancient people of Mesoamerica to create a culinary regime able to sustain millions? Wasn't the elaborate banquet that Moctezuma served to the astonished Spanish invaders that autumn day in 1519 – a marvellous display of a varied and healthy indigenous cuisine, many elements of which are still consumed today – as ‘authentically Mexican’ as one can get?
Perhaps we should turn to another meal, staged a mere 20 years later by the conquerors themselves, when they sat down in the very heart of Tenochtitlan to gorge on roast kid and ham, stuffed chicken, boiled mutton, turnips, cabbages and chickpeas accompanied by casks of red and white Spanish wine. However, this meal also included, as Bernal Diaz noticed, local ingredients such as the exotic guajolote, frothy cups of chocolate and local fruit – harbingers of the mixed ‘creole’ food regimes to come.
Jeffrey Pilcher takes us through the many permutations of subsequent Mexican cuisine with a sure hand. His chapter on the Pastry War and Parisian mole demonstrates the almost comical fascination for French culture and food among the Mexican elite in the later nineteenth century, when, for example, 588 distinguished guests celebrated President Diaz's birthday by dining on ‘fish à la princesse, trouffled vol-a-vent [and] beef à la valencienne’, along with ‘over a thousand cases of wine including the great vintages of Pouilly and Mouton Rothschild and 450 cases of champagne’, a kind of culinary offshoot of France's globalising mission civilatrice that was irresistible to Mexican and South American elites.
On Mexico's far northern frontier and beyond, other kinds of food, particularly chile con carne, a dish that was vaguely Mexican and eventually came to seem ‘authentic’, came into existence in mid-nineteenth-century San Antonio, Texas. Later in the century the burrito, a conglomeration of meat, rice, beans and salsa in an oversized wheat-flour tortilla, became popular in the northern borderlands. Pilcher devotes two typically well-researched chapters to these subjects. And today, flocks of young people crowd into the Taquería Pancho Villa in the Mission District of San Francisco for bulging, aluminium-foil-wrapped burritos advertised on the restaurant's website as ‘authentic Mexican food’.
Finally we have the quintessential fast food, the taco. Most people would naturally believe that the history of the taco is nearly identical to the history of Mexico itself, but Pilcher points out that the first mention of this irresistible snack is in 1895. As a student in Mexico City in the 1950s, I recall the exquisite pleasure of waiting with my Mexican friends while street-side vendors facing an impromptu charcoal-fired grill chopped up generous portions of incredibly delicious carnitas or barbacoa and wrapped them in a soft, warm, fresh maize tortilla. There was nothing like it, not even in California – though it would eventually draw the attention of a sharp-eyed Los Angeles entrepreneur.
Glen Bell, a former humble hot-dog vendor in post-Second World War Southern California, opened his first faux adobe-walled, fast-food Taco Bell restaurant, crowned with a fibreglass mission-style bell, in 1962 (he was surely aware of the pun on his own name). He could not have imagined that he was founding a taco empire that now has over 5,800 outlets in the United States and would spread to such unlikely consumers of tortillas as Singapore and Poland, among many other countries. Nor could Mr Bell have imagined that the hard, pre-formed, tasteless U-shaped taco shells he invented to compete with McDonalds’ burgers would become part of a battle of tangled images portraying how foreigners think of Mexican food and how Mexicans understand their own national cuisine.
Professor Pilcher employs the explanatory concepts of ‘globalisation’ and ‘culinary tourism’ to frame his narrative. Few would deny that the simultaneous impact of global markets, massive migration, the flood of fast-food outlets, and the spread of a common television and internet culture have all helped to shape the nature and volume of the world's caloric intake. The onrush of globalisation consequently provides an effective way for the author to assemble a most impressive volume of research into a coherent interpretive scheme.
However, the concept of ‘culinary tourism’ seems to me less useful. Pilcher does not offer a definition of the term, nor does he examine just who the ‘promoters’ of the practice are – presumably travel agents, airlines and the tourist restaurants themselves. If a common definition of culinary tourism is ‘the pursuit of unique and memorable eating and drinking experiences’, how many of the millions of tourists who visit Mexico, I rather idly wondered, do so for the cuisine?
Perhaps adventurous travellers from Shaker Heights or Park Slope are drawn to sautéed grasshoppers in Oaxaca or even long for the succulent corn smut (huitlacoche) served to the cognoscenti at the San Angel Inn, but it's hard to imagine that these exotic items, or the indigenous recipes inspired by the widely-read Diana Kennedy, or even the new upscale and original cuisine of tourist restaurants clustered within the districts of Polanco or Colonia Condesa, would attract flocks of tourists or alter the ageless consumption habits of the great majority of 120 million Mexicans. Most tourists in Mexico can be found on the beaches, not around the table. That said, none of these quibbles should detract from an originally conceived, broadly researched and engagingly written book.
Miguel de Unamuno once remarked that the two great creations of the Basque people were the Jesuit Order and the Republic of Chile. Had the legendary philosopher been able to read Robert Weis’ sharply focused and illuminating Bakers & Basques, he would no doubt have added the bakers of Porfirian Mexico.
From the 1880s into the 1940s, with a peak in the 1920s, a small but steady stream of Basque immigrants, nearly all from the 14 small towns and several hamlets of the isolated Baztán valley in the Spanish Pyrenees, settled in Mexico City, bringing with them their conservative Catholicism, a fierce loyalty to their echea or household lineage, a tightly-knit family culture and their daunting, inscrutable language. Their traditional occupation was shepherding and small-scale agriculture, but as Weis points out, this generation of migrants was determined to leave their beautiful, rugged homeland to ‘hacer la América’ in urban commerce, to ‘trade their plows for countertops’ (p. 46).
Moreover, Porfirio Diaz's pro-investment, authoritarian capitalist regime (1876–1910) offered enticement for the entrepreneurial spirit, attracting such a man as Pedro Albaitero. Of humble origins, he opened his first bakery (panadería) in 1869, and soon married a well-off Mexican woman, Luisa García Rejón y Piñón, whose sister in turn married Albaitero's fellow immigrant and early business partner, one José Arrache. Then, in a further example of family connection, Albaitero reached back to the Baztán valley to bring his nephew, Juan Irigoyen Echartea, to Mexico City. The two of them built La Florida, one of many state-of-the-art steam-powered mills imported from the United States, featuring cylindrical steel rollers from Budapest. The new technology cut milling costs from 2 to 4 pesos to 12 to 15 cents per unit of flour, permitting the newcomers to dominate the bread trade.
The Basque immigrants soon developed a vertically integrated business, acquiring wheat-growing haciendas, constructing the best flourmills and establishing the most successful bakeries in Mexico City. And, unlike in the countryside and in the smaller towns, where the eternal diet of the maize tortilla reigned, in Mexico City the consumption of wheat bread reached deep into the working classes, who were consequently dependent upon that cereal and vulnerable to shortages.
As for the organisation of the individual bakeries themselves, the Basques and their descendants owned the panaderías and often sat out front interacting with mostly female customers gathering at day break and evening to buy bolillos (Mexico's French rolls) and bizcochos (sweet breads). However, in the back rooms Mexican workers carried out the actual kneading, baking, cleaning and maintenance, often in primitive conditions and earning extremely low wages.
During the three decades following the insurrection against the Diaz dictatorship in 1910, Mexico erupted into revolutionary turbulence. The country fractured into several competing political parties, factions and ideologies. Labour formed independent trade unions such as that of the militant panadería workers, while overarching union organisations such as the CROM, CTM, and the Casa del Obrero Mundial – often divided among themselves – came into existence supporting the revolutionary state. The passionately held views of the communists, fascists and anarchists added to the often contentious mix, while in the case of the bread industry, the rancour opposing the ‘Spanish Monopoly’ that had begun in the later nineteenth century lingered on. The presidential regimes of Carranza, Obregón, Calles and Cárdenas were fraught with social and political upheaval, tentative alliances and personal vendettas.
Weis threads his way through these tangled times in a deeply researched, closely argued and lucid analysis that makes an original contribution to the understanding of Mexican politics. The thorny question of policy toward the bakers’ union strikes and the Basque panadería owners provides a good early example. Had the revolutionary government come down on the side of one of its most militant trade union allies, it would have gained important support for a still precarious and contested state. However, in reaction the Basque owners would most likely have shut down bread production, creating scarcity of a fundamental commodity and thus leading to severe unrest and a popular sense that the revolutionary state lacked authority and legitimacy. It would have been exceedingly difficult for the still fragile state to support the popularly reviled ‘Spanish Monopoly’ against the union-led strikers.
Weis takes us through the sharply contested, even chaotic politics of the time by a people with scant acquaintance with democracy. Because political opinion and ideological manoeuvring were so complex, so finely tuned and frequently realigned, his subtle and nuanced dissection of revolutionary ideology creates a narrative not always easy to penetrate, but there are rich rewards for the patient reader.
