Mexican Indigenous Cooking from Veracruz with Raquel Torres Cerdán

When we first started planning this trip Jan expressed a desire to cook with someone and the one person I knew would do it and do it well–Anthropologist Raquel Torres Cerdán agreed. So after we finished lunch at the Villa Rica, in Mocambo Beach, we drove almost 2 hours from El Puerto to the coffee town of Coatepec just outside the verdant capital city of Xalapa to our beautiful hotel La Casa Real del Cafe where I managed to score a lovely junior suite with a giant jacuzzi that actually worked. We were invited to dinner at her house so off we went to Xalapa, the capital of the state. That night indigenous cooking was on the menu and we were greeted with an agua fresca made of what she called berenjena, a name I’ve always used for eggplant but seems to be a tamarillo. It was tart and refreshing. In the coming days everywhere we went we would be served agua fresca (fruit and other cold drinks.)

Jan was anxious to start cooking and soon he was chopping button mushrooms.They prepared them with a sauce made of natas, the luscious creamy butterfat that forms on the top when unpasteurized milk is boiled and allowed to sit overnight in a cool place and with some pasta de chile seco, smoked morita chiles ground into a paste with oil (you can use chipotles instead.) Unfortunately, unless you have your own cow or are able to get unpasteurized milk, you won’t have natas but I’ve had some luck replacing them with reduced heavy cream

The table was set with a gorgeous hand-embroidered tablecloth and the menu was: Soup with chinchayote (the root of the chayote plant; chicken in pumpkin seed sauce (pepian) and tamales de masa agria. For these tamales the corn masa is allowed to sour and Raquel said that they often accompany mole dishes. In this case the unusual but delicious enmoladas (what enchiladas are called if you use mole instead of chile sauce) stuffed with slices of fried plantain, a cheese, and jalapeno, my favorite dish of the meal. Dessert was the traditional Day of the Dead calabaza en tacha.