My first Oaxacan Cooking Teacher: Concepcion Portillo de Carballido

Photo Mercado Juarez, Oaxaca by Laurie Smith,   www.lauriesmithphoto.com

The first thing I do when I get to a new place is go to a bookstore and get all the local cookbooks. The main bookstore in Oaxaca had two that immediately caught my eye: Maria Concepcion Portillo de Carballido’s Oaxaca y su Cocina and c by Ana Maria Guzman de Vasquez Colmenares. Only after reviewing them, do I go to the market, shopping list in hand. But in Oaxaca I did not know what any of the names of the ingredients in the cookbooks referred to. There were chiles I’d never heard of: chile chilcosle, chilhuacle, pasilla de Oaxaca and things like asiento, hoja santa, hierba de conejo, cecina and clayudas so after trying unsuccessfully to get information from the vendors, I decided to try to contact one of the authors and hire them to guide me.

Ms. Vasquez Colmenares was the wife of the ex-governor and seemed to be out of my reach but I was able to locate Mrs. Carballido, a kindly older lady whose recipes were clearly written by someone with lots of practice in the kitchen.She agreed to take me to the market, answer all my questions and come bring me back to her house to prepare the lunch meal for her elderly husband and spinster daughter. The important thing was not just to identify the ingredients but develop a flavor-memory of some of the dishes that I hadn’t seen on restaurant menus in my short tour of the zocalo the night before.

Mrs. Carballido had taught cooking at a local high school but did not know a lot about the history of the dishes or the botany of the ingredients, but she was a good cook and I ended up working with her for three days. When I left, I felt confident that I would be able to duplicate them back home. You wil find some of her recipes in my book The Food and Life of Oaxaca. So if you’re a serious cook or doing research in a strange place heed my advise nd you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble. Plus you’ll make a new friend!

I’ll put up some of her recipes later.