“Mexico is a country that says a lot just by looking at the coat of arms of the flag, where there is a mythological inscription: an eagle devouring a snake,” he said. Juan Villorohe mexican writerto explain in a sui generis gastronomy congress, how it is Mexico with respect to food.
He referred to the veneration and national dedication to food and preparations, the liturgy at the table, the after-dinner meal… He talked about everything, and so much so that he confessed to EL DEBATE that he still had many things in the pipeline, but he shared them in exclusive.
kitchen dialogues
He was in this northern Spanish city as a lecturer on kitchen dialogues. He was surprised by his magisterial eloquence about how chili and corn are the axes on which Mexican culture is sustained. “Protein is a garnish, a luxury,” he told the attendees, about 200: cooks, journalists, sociologists, philosophers, poets, musicians, and teachers.
It was in the Basque Culinary Centerthe Basque gastronomic faculty, an international benchmark, which together with Eurotoques and the chef Andoni Luis Aduriz, hold the meeting every two years.
“One is used to giving slightly longer conferences, and it is that Mexican cuisine is very rich, and its relationship with culture, enormous,” Villoro said, taking a breath to deliver an impassioned speech to EL DEBATE for more than 20 minutes. He cooks as an amateur, “but above all, I am a good collaborator. If someone says, chop, cut, I do it. Even washing dishes fascinates me, I find it sedative, it’s a yoga-like activity because it relaxes me a lot. I am a complement for those who cook for real. I prepare very simple things, I don’t intend to invent a recipe, but rather, to see how people enjoy it, they get excited. I have a sweet tooth for human representation.
“I write about soccer but I am not a coach; I have played but I did not stand out. I really like to observe, to see the congregations in the stadiums, the mythologies with the matches, to read the emotions.”
He writes about cooking because he likes how people gather to eat — he has texts on the Catalan Ferran Adrià and the Mexican Enrique Olvera. “Customs are defined by food. The character of people and countries has to do with certain stews.”
The cochinita pibil is for the author, a stew in which the ingredients are prepared in advance, like the actors in the theater: sour orange, oregano, pepper, salt, axiote.
The meat is seasoned, marinated and traditionally baked underground, which in Mayan is called pibil. Its preparation is slow, as is cooking, and tasting it should also be slow.
“Our meals compete with eternity. One of two hours is a failure, from the point of view of coexistence. Approximately, it should be seven hours: between the desktop and the rest. The meal is a story, and ours is an opera, because it lasts at least three hours and has everything: comedy, drama, there can even be tragedy.”
The hours
Likewise, this type of typical food presupposes, “to a certain extent, a slave-owning social organization because there have to be people dedicated to preparing it for days so that others can taste it in hours, and the mothers do it, for example, mine. She is from Yucatan and a pretty fundamentalist cook. To prepare the cochinita pibil she goes to Yucatán because she is convinced that the sour orange from Mexico City is not the same. Look for the ingredients with dedication, almost devotional. It is not by chance that a good part of the recipe book arose in the convents: the nuns had the time at their disposal or subordinates to make them orders”.
San Pascual and inspiration
He proposes to think about the relationship we have with mole, a stew for the holidays. In fact, when someone is getting married they say “it already smells like mole”, which means that there will be a celebration, and that is that, in some way, it is a stew of consecration in the sense that love is consummated and then you have to offer.
But where does it come from? There are a number of mythical explanations and one is associated with San Pascual the dancer, who probably, in his despair, when he was preparing a stew, some soap fell into the pot and he could not get it out. What do I do?, he asked himself and knelt down. “He asked God for inspiration and the divine breath came, which is probably the best ingredient a cook can have: inspiration, and he mixed all kinds of things, including chocolate, chili, and thus the mole was born. Of course it is an apocryphal story because in the pre-Hispanic universe there is the word mulli: sauce or mix”.
The journalist, playwright and professor, a reference in Latin America, who has presented his new book, The Figure of the World, where he refers to his father, the philosopher Luis Villoro, comments that he could not develop in his talk the topic of two fundamental ingredients of our country: vanilla and cocoa, the latter very interesting because of how it has traveled and through it cultures have been transformed. Nowadays, there are countries like Belgium, which are characterized by being chocolatiers, “and we, on the other hand, have the product of origin but not the cultural appropriation. We have not made our own what we already have but we have not done anything. The same happens with coffee, we have incomparable grains and internationally famous baristas, but we prepare it badly”, reflected the author, who lives between Mexico and Spainwhose gastronomy he likes a lot, above all, soupy rice with lobster and in terms of ingredients, he opts for Cantabrian seafood, a region also famous for its cider, but Villoro prefers wine.
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