Foodie Excerpts from

Beatniks, Tupperware, and Chiles en Nogada

I challenge you to try some of the family’s favorite foods!

comida poblana

No American would recognize comida poblana as Mexican food. Yes, as everywhere in Mexico, tacos and tamales are prized street foods. In Puebla, however, the food put on the family dinner table consists of spicy stews, similar to Indian food. Pick your sauce—say vindaloo, curry, or saag. Then pick your meat—I would opt for lamb. Like Indian cuisine, comida poblana also offers various sauces—adobo, chilate, pasilla, tinga, or mole. Each can be prepared with the protein at hand. But homemakers from Puebla must be artists as well as cooks. The colors of their palettes are created with the distinctive mixture of multicolored chiles employed to make each sauce—the rusty yellow of chilate, the rich coffee color of adobo, the deep maroon of pasilla, or the chestnut shade of mole poblano, that famous dish flavored with a hint of chocolate powder.

Barbacoas

Rosie’s family held frequent feasts. The most elaborate were the barbacoas. Forget the passing resemblance to the English word barbecues. For barbacoas, one must think ahead. First, dig a three-foot square pit, two-foot deep, in your backyard. Fill it with wood and other flammables. Light the fire the afternoon before the event. After the fire expends itself and is reduced to a mass of burning embers, add an enormous metal pot filled with garbanzo beans and carrots. Top it off with a whole dressed goat or a cow’s head spiced with big gobs of oregano, thyme, and laurel. Cover the pit with a thick layer of avocado leaves. Fill with earth and wait until noon the next day to uncover the cooked meat. Eat the flesh with freshly cooked tortillas slathered with salsa macha, a sauce made from chiles and peanuts ground in a traditional stone molcajete. Accompany with copious quantities of beer and mezcal, and a good time is had by all

Cemita

It was a challenge to find food fit for [Sasha]. Street tacos were messy; mole was too spicy. When Eric ordered a cemita, a Mexican sandwich famous for its toppings, she stripped it down to the bones before eating it, leaving a waste pile of avocado slices, pickled jalapeños, sliced onions, fresh cheese, and shredded lettuce carefully scraped from the sandwich. She had converted a favorite taste treat into a bland ham sandwich. She ate a few bites before leaving the rest on the plate.

Chiles en Nogada

Karla had invested the entire day preparing Puebla’s culinary specialty, chiles en nogada, an exotically complex traditional dish of Puebla that consisted of poblano chiles stuffed with shredded beef cooked with fruits and covered with a walnut cream sauce sprinkled with pomegranates.