A private culinary tour of Veracruz and Oaxaca

Monte Alban photo by Manu Bastien www.manuphoto.com

When I had finished writing The Food and Life of Oaxaca, I thought I’d never want to write another cookbook. Not only was I exhausted from the work of getting a complex book into print, but my heart and mind were still full of Oaxaca.  I felt that the state somehow summed up the entire Mexican experience — its beauty, its sorrows, its infinite layers of history, its incredible natural splendors, the deep inner life of its many peoples.  All this I found expressed and consummated in the story of Oaxacan food.

Of course I had traveled to Veracruz and loved it immediately for the good food and the welcoming ways of the jarochos, as Veracruzans good-naturedly call themselves — its means something like “insolent so-and-so.”  (I tell the story of my initial brief visit in my first book, Food from my Heart.)  But I wasn’t dying to go back again.  I was puzzled at the way all my Mexican friends — Veracruz is a favorite tourist destination of Mexicans — kept telling me, “Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing!”  Finally I gave in, and I have to admit my friends were right.

The atlases and guidebooks will tell you that Veracruz State is a long, skinny strip of green tropical lowland running northwest to southeast along the Gulf of Mexico, between the states of Tamaulipas and Tabasco, rising inland to steep mountains through which its western border twists in a jagged outline.  They will say that it gave birth to Mexico’s oldest civilization, the shadowy Olmecs with their mysterious jaguar cult.  That it was the gateway to Europe’s first full-scale Mexican campaign — Cortez’s 1519 invasion, which destroyed Moctezuma and the Aztec empire.  That it contains Mexico’s highest peak, the dormant volcano called  Cetlaltépetl  or Pico de Orizaba, as well as Mexico’s first and greatest seaport, Veracruz City.  That it has a coastline about as long as the Atlantic coast of Florida, now studded
here and there with the huge rigs that harvest Mexico’s most lucrative twentieth-century resource, oil from the Gulf of Mexico.

What the sourcebooks don’t tell you, and what I didn’t understand at first, is that Veracruz is also a microcosm of everything that makes Mexico Mexico.  Oaxaca reveals so many sides of the Mexican identity that for a long time I couldn’t imagine its equal.  I had to meet a place that was just as complex but incredibly opposite in its way of being Mexican.  Here is just a partial list of contrasts:

•        In most parts of Oaxaca people tend to be dignified, reserved, almost austere; the Veracruzans are the most joyfully `    extroverted people in Mexico.

•        Oaxaca was the last part of “New Spain” to be subdued by the  Spanish; Veracruz willingly let them in before anyone else.

•        Oaxaca is the greatest Mexican stronghold of unassimilated     Indian peoples jealously guarding their ethnic legacies against     the outside world; Veracruz is the most racially mixed state of     the country.

•        Oaxaca is a magnet for tourists seeking unique and lovely     native crafts; despite the best efforts of the tourism office,     Veracruzans are not terribly interested in making a living from     pottery or weaving.

•        Oaxaca is one of the very poorest Mexican states; Veracruz is  one of the richest.

To sum it all up:  Oaxaca is almost a world to itself on the far side of
the great mountains that divide Mexico into east and west, while Veracruz belongs passionately and lustily to the Caribbean.  In its music, its rhythms of life, its climate, it can make you feel as if you were in Hispaniola or Jamaica — or Cuba, the place that came closer to being Veracruz’s spiritual sister than any part of Mexico. (Frequent good-will missions and declarations of mutual loyalty take place between Veracruz and Havana.)  One key to the affinity between the two places is the huge African presence mingling with Indian and Spanish traditions in the era of slavery and that still strikes any observer.

Again I feel that food crystallizes the whole culture of the region.  To see the extraordinary cuisine of Veracruz in full perspective means understanding it in the context of the state’s physical setting and history.

Callejon en Naolinco Photo by Secretaria de Turismo Veracruz

LAND AND PEOPLE

Nearly all of Veracruz State is humid, tropical, and green, green, green.  The land is doused with constant rains that make it plain why Tlaloc the rain god was so important here.  Fed by as many as forty rivers cascading down to the Gulf Coast lowlands from the mighty Sierra Madre Oriental in the west, it is a region of dramatic waterfalls, caves, and numberless lakes as well as marshes and deltas.

Most parts of the state have unusually rich soil, a legacy of now extinct volcanoes.  The perpetually moist jungles yield some of Veracruz’s oldest and most distinctive ingredients: a great range of wild greens (collectively called quelites), wild mushrooms, herbs, forest fruits, and edible flowers (one of the marked regional preferences).

photo by Manu Bastien, http://www.manuphoto.com

The waters teem with red snapper and other snappers, pompano, snook, grouper, and mojarra (a prized local fish with noEnglish name), a profusion of oysters, shrimp and crab; and varieties of freshwater fish and shellfish not known elsewhere.

Photo by Laurie Smith, www.Lauriesmithphotos.com

The first peoples who lived here, the Olmecs and the Maya, drew on this wild bounty and also cultivated the classic Mexican crops: corn, beans, squash, and chile peppers.  The Spanish colonists made an already rich region richer.  Close to the original launching site for Cortez’s invasion they founded the first European city on American soil, the “Rich Town of the True Cross” (Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz — the name commemorates Cortez’s landing on Good Friday, and was later given to the entire province).

The best route between the new settlement and the colonial capital, Mexico City, passed directly through the center of what is now Veracruz State.  Naturally, many settlements thrived along this road, and much treasure passed over it.  In almost no time the “Rich Town”
was not just a port city but the port city — the only official port on the Gulf Coast of the New Spain, protected by a Spanish monopoly.  It was the gateway to Europe from Mexico City, the Pacific Coast of New Spain, and even the Far East where galleons set out for Acapulco laden with silks and spices.  But the port of Veracruz was only part of the Veracruzan success story.  Almost at once Cortez had started clearing ground in the fertile new province to plant cash crops — especially sugar cane– while bringing in African slaves to grow them.

THE MELTING POT:  THOSE WHO EMERGED

Fast-forward to the 1990s:  The descendants of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans are living today in the same lush green land that the invaders marched through nearly 500 years ago.  People with fair complexions and pure Spanish features still dwell here.  So do members of some indigenous groups who have kept their identities alive since the Conquest; they mostly live in the higher western regions and include the Huastecs (who speak a language of the Maya family), Nahuas (Aztec-descended), Populacas, and the largest distinct group, the Totonacs (the first people Cortez met in Veracruz).  And especially in Veracruz City and close to the coast, striking African faces leap out at you from the many-shaded spectrum of mestizos, or people of mixed blood.

The city epitomizes the contradictions of Veracruz State.  It is home base for the Mexican navy as well as the site of the national naval academy.  It is also home base for many free spirits who ignore officialdom.  In its steamy, not terribly picturesque streets you feel the atmosphere of a sophisticated international gateway that has seen momentous comings and goings.  After Veracruz let in the Spanish and became their great port, it was raided again and again by English pirates like Francis Drake and John Hawkins.  After it let out the Spanish (in 1821, the last colonial viceroy embarked from here when Spain accepted Mexican independence), it was ground zero for one national crisis after another.  Here the slippery General Antonio López Santa Anna, a native of Veracruz State, carried out some of his odder adventures.  Here the French lost one campaign (the 1838 “Pastry War” with Santa Anna); paraded Maximilian and Carlota through the streets in 1864 as new rulers of Mexico; and beat a quick retreat three years later.  Here United States troops landed in 1847 when President Polk was conducting the Mexican-American War, and again in 1914 when President Wilson blockaded Veracruz while trying to topple the regime of Victoriano Huerta..

With this history, it’s not surprising that the jarochos face life like resilient, world-wide survivors.  Always the streets have been filled with sailors, merchants, and adventurers from the ends of the earth.  Always the city has looked more toward the Caribbean and Europe than the interior.  (Before the first railway in Mexico was built in 1872 to link Mexico City with Veracruz, it was easier for wealthy Veracruzans to sail to Cuba or Europe than to attempt the mountainous overland trek to Mexico City.)  Somehow its dramatic ups and downs over centuries have created not a weary, wary population but one that says hello to all comers with brash exuberance.

WHERE POETRY COMES NATURALLY

When I try to put my impressions of the Veracruzan character in a nutshell, I always remember my first astonishment at realizing that everyone here loves to speak in rhyme — not reciting poetry, but making it up on the spot in contests of wits!  From an early age, people take part in a game or art of improvising jokes, compliments, insults, and even carefully reasoned commentary on ideas and events in the form of four-line or ten-line stanzas.  Each person spontaneously caps the others’ efforts by picking up the last contributor’s verse ending and going on from there.  The local newspaper used to carry a verse column by the late, beloved, Paco Píldora (Francisco Rivera Avila), who also published a historical portrait of Veracruz couched in a poem-cycle.  And the skill isn’t confined to Veracruz City.  When I recently went to the pretty colonial town of Xico in the north central part of the state, I was amazed to be greeted by the official Xico historian — Amado Manuel Izaguirre Viruéz, a courtly descendant of the town two oldest Spanish families — relating the story of the community in fluent, delightful verse.

Photo: Veracruz Tourism Department

To me this is a key to something unique about Veracruz.  Unlike many Mexicans the people don’t have the kind of visible, concrete heritage that brings North Americans flocking to behold tangible monuments and buy hand-woven cloth. (However, Veracruz is starting to be known for adventure tourism and some valuable ecological preserves.)  The jarocho heritage is complex, and it depends heavily on fascinating intangibles — resourcefulness, invention, and a talent for loving something as transitory as daily speech enough to polish it into a vibrant performance medium like popular dance or music  (By the way, Veracruz comes close to being Mexico’s epicenter for both those arts, too.)  It’s another expression of the same spirit that created Veracruz cooking.

A KITCHEN CROSSROADS

I first experienced the cuisine in the port of Veracruz — but here I should go back to the story of the already mentioned foods that came from jungle and countryside and those that were brought here by the conquerors.  Sugar was only the first of many experiments, nearly all successful and lucrative.  Because of its fine soil, Veracruz soon became a land of plantations.  To this day its main commercial products aside from petroleum and tobacco are foods — foods that eventually formed the basis of a rich art.

The pre-Hispanic foundations — the wild gifts of the waters and the forests, the great Indian crops — were rapidly supplemented by new ingredients.  The Spanish put thousands of acres into sugar throughout Veracruz.  They planted rice fields — the only major commercial ones in all Mexico — in the coastal swamps of the province.  They established the only successful cattle ranches in these tropical climes, producing both meat and milk.  (It is not easy to raise cattle south of the dry border states.)  They turned the lower mountain slopes into coffee plantations that are among the world’s finest.  They planted coconut trees and beautiful groves of citrus fruits.  They also cultivated New World products for which Europeans had developed a taste — pineapples, cacao for chocolate, and the magical plant vanilla, a tropical orchid that grows only near the town of Papantla.

The union of New World and Old World ingredients that took place in this green garden state has various features in common with all Mexico.  But it has two others that set Veracruz cuisine apart from other Mexican cooking:  it is unusually Spanish and unusually African.

From my first meals in Veracruz City I sensed an intensely Spanish character in the cooking.  Later I saw that this was not confined to the city.  When the colonists adopted the ubiquitous native chiles, beans, squash, and corn of their new home, they retained more of an Iberian touch with flavors than in other provinces of “New Spain.”  In a way it’s ironic that the jalapeño chile, that popular symbol of Mexican or anyway Mexicanized food, takes its name from Jalapa or Xalapa, the state’s capital city.  Veracruzans do cook with chiles, but they don’t use a vast range of different types and they don’t think hotter is always better.  Their official culinary emblem could well be olive oil — they use it as enthusiastically as anyone from the Mediterranean basin.  They love to cook with capers, olives, citrus accents, rice, bay leaf, and almonds.  Their passion for seafood recalls the coast of Spain.  The most internationally famous dish of the state, pescado a la veracruzana (Veracruz-style fish, usually red snapper).is a triumphant example.  It’s a fundamentally Spanish concept (fish gently cooked in a sauce of olive oil, garlic, onions, green olives, and capers) with two inspired New World additions — tomatoes and pickled jalapeños or banana peppers.

The African element goes back many centuries, starting when slaves were brought in to work the colonial plantations because so many of the Indians had died of European-introduced diseases,  Like the strong Spanish influence in cooking, the African influence underscores Veracruz’s ties with the Caribbean and especially Cuba.  Both here and in Cuba, the slaves developed fondness for American black beans and well-seasoned rice-and-beans combinations.  They reproduced the nourishing starchy mashed dishes of West Africa by using a medley of foods brought from Africa, found here, or even picked up from the Far East:  plantains, West Indian-type pumpkins, yuca, taro, the white sweet potatoes called “boniatos.”  Eventually their best dishes crossed boundaries of race and class to become part of the overall Veracruzan heritage.

I am reposting this article from 2010  that was originally called Falling in Love Again because in a few days I will be taking Chef Jan Birnbaum on a private tour of Veracruz where I have not visited since my book , Zarela’s Veracruz and PBS series, ¡Zarela! la Cocina Veracruzana! were released in 2001.  It will be interesting to see how things have changed in the interim and, frankly, I need to have current information to relay to you.  I will then go on to Oaxaca for the same purpose. I’ve been back once or twice since publishing my book The Food and Life of Oaxaca but need to get up to date there as well so get ready! I’ll have some good articles to post when I come back or maybe even on location.

I got this comment from a tour operator  that I very much appreciate:

I just ran across your most recent article about Falling in love again … Veracruz. I have to say, of all the history articles I have read about this beautiful state, I believe your short 4 pages gave a superb account of the  historical reasons that makes the state of Veracruz unique in Mexico. You also added just the right amount of “cultural attributes” to get people thinking that this might be a very interesting place to visit.
I have already made a copy and will show it to my friends in Catemaco, the city of Veracruz, and Coscomatepec when I see them soon. I leave from Chicago for Veracruz tomorrow and will bring your article with me.
I look forward to looking at some of your other entries in the near future.