Puebla, more formally known as Heroica Puebla de Zaragoza, is a city known for many things. Its churches, of which there are more than a couple dozen. Its architecture (see: the few dozen churches). Its wide array of music, dance, gorgeous pottery, and ongoing list of local, regional, and international performers. But most of all, and perhaps most importantly, Puebla is known for its food, for which there is no denying that it comprises some of the best palate in the country.
For this reason, and because there is simply so much to say about the food in such a wonderful place, I have decided to dedicate this entry to focusing first and foremost on that which I consumed throughout my stay. If I were a food writer, I could probably manage to a fill a short book with the intricacies of all that I ate and drank this week.
We were lucky enough to spend the last week in Puebla living (at least for the most part) like Pueblans. Our dear friend, and fellow Cornell alum, Joaquin got in touch with his family for us and they generously put us up for the entire week. I don't think we could have had a better experience if we tried. We spent much of the week with his family, reading in their home, sharing stories and tequila at nightfall, and going on short excursions throughout the city. But most of all, we ate like royalty. In typical Mexican tradition, the family ate dinner at 3pm. Joaquin's mom Socorro swore that she wasn't preparing anything especially out of the ordinary for us, but we could hardly believe they ate such feasts on the daily.
the courtyard within Joaquin's family's houseWe had barely taken the bags off our shoulders and grabbed a seat with the family around the dining room table when we were presented with a diverse array of snacks and steaming, hand-made clay pots. As we shared a bottle of wine, Joaquin's father Hernando introduced us to one of his favorite cheeses; packed to the gills with habanero peppers. One of the most enjoyable cheeses I've had (luckily, I later discovered that its a concoction of the Cabot Creamery Cooperative, just a hop away from the New York border. Hoorah). Soco had also made an enormous dish of yellow arroz Chino, packed with its share of vegetables. To top it all was a big pot chock full of big chunks of broccoli, carrots, onions, and beef. Apparently a Mexican adaptation of a Chinese dish, the brown sauce was full of flavor and Gabby and I couldn't seem to get enough.
We awoke the next morning and were given a quick tour of the Zocalo, a city center far more beautiful and relaxing than that of the capital. By comparison, the Zocalo in Puebla was small but covered from end to end in tall trees and beautiful greenery. As you can tell by fotos of the D.F.'s center, there wasn't so much as a blade of grass, the entire massive space filled with large blocks of concrete, and almost always completely devoid of any form of live. Save for, of course, the masses of people moving around the center, selling crafts and snacks, moving to and from the metro stops, but all in all appearing to do their best to avoid setting foot in the center itself. No shade, no green, no fun.
Hernando bought us each a couple churros, that we gladly wolfed while walking around the city center. I'm not sure how I avoided these tasty little sticks of sugar for so many years, but they are oh so delicious. Essentially a thin, crispy tube of fried dough, soft on the inside and covered with sugar and other various flavors on the outside, they were a delicious accompaniment to an espresso. Or, as the locals prefer, one of a few types of hot chocolate drinks.
[hilarity100.com]Gabby and I spent the next few hours exploring the center on our own. We walked up avenues and down side streets, bustled through markets and attempted to squeeze our way down a packed callejon. We stopped for little more than casual curbside conversation, and let ourselves be guided by the colors that flooded our eyes and the scents that caressed our noses. We did make one significant tourist stop, however, in the Church of Santo Domingo, in which one entire, massive room is covered nearly floor to ceiling in gold adornments. Unlike other Mexican churches, whose walls and decorations have long since been replaced with gold colored paint after the Spanish ransacked the original lavish decor, the one room in Santo Domingo still remains intact. And, as one might expect, it is beyond words.
We caught a cab home around 2:30, just in time to make it back for dinner. We were treated to quite a feast that day. The meal started off with sopa de fideo, a delicate tomato-based broth with noodles and the optional addition of the ever-present salsa verde. Accompanied by vegetable rice and black beans, the main course blew us away. Milanesa is traditionally either pork or beef (in this case pork), that has been pounded to the point of submission (and so that it's really quite thin), tossed in bread crumbs, and then lightly fried. Topped with black beans and salsa verde, we couldn't help but have a second plate.
The next morning Socorro and Hernando decided to drive us into town and give us a proper tour of the city, for we had apparently managed to miss all of the important sights on our previous visit. We arrived first at a small panaderia and comedor, of which the smell of fresh baked bread and sweet rolls drifted halfway down the busy block. Outside the bakery's opening to the street -- a large mouth that seemed to consume a few passersby every couple minutes -- we were greeted by a common sight at such an establishment. In the mornings, and only sometimes on into the early afternoon, the entrance to such comedors and panaderia is occupied by a few women huddled about a number of tall, steaming metal pots. Inside the pots reside a varying number of different kinds of hand-rolled tamales in large stacks. We still have yet to try all of the many flavors, for I've gotten quite intimate with the salsa verde and rajas options, both of which provide a pleasantly spicy center inside the warm corn meal. If you'd like to know more about our wonderful friend the tamale, please consult wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamale
And so we each got a salsa verde tamale, but fashioned as a torta and smushed in between two hot slices of a freshly baked roll. Hernando got the same, but instead of salsa verde the tamale had chicken mole inside (we'll get to mole a little later). Socorro ordered a similar tamale, but instead of being steamed inside of corn husks, hers was wrapped and cooked in big, slick sheets of plantain leaves. Spicy chicken maize goodness. Gabby and I shared arroz con leche to top it off, as would any university student on a lunch break, said Socorro. Quite literally what it sounds like, arroz con leche is a hot, sweet drink with both rice and milk (go figure), but much more delicious than it sounds.
From there we visited the house of the Hermanos Serdan, at whose house began the Mexican revolution against the Spanish forces. Like stepping back in time (high school Williamsburg trip anyone?), much of the large house appeared similar to how it was left at the time of the revolution. Facade complete with bullet holes and rooms still adorned with utterly destroyed furniture, the little tour was quite a trip.
More satiating of my love for travel, however, was the fact that we had authentic mole Poblano that night. Socorro went all out with this one. Mole is a traditional Mexican dish that reigns from the might streets of Puelba itself (Poblano=Pueblan). Always cooked with chicken, mole is a curious blend of twenty ingredients including chocolate, crushed almonds, a number of types of peppers. The chicken hangs out in the thick sauce (though surely not as fun for it as us), which is all traditionally prepared in a large, earthen, hand-made pot called a cazuela. Paired with rice, black beans, and tortillas, of course, this incredible dish is at once both sweet and savory and always calls you back for seconds.
[perdue.com]To our surprise, mole is also often reheated and served in a mix of scrambled eggs in the morning (hey, it's still chicken isn't it?). Large chunks of scrambled eggs are thrown in the chocolatey sauce and heated up, then eaten with fresh rolls and fruit. Gabby and I made mini mole-egg sandwiches with the rolls. I had to eat two.
After breakfast that morning I helped Socorro start to prepare for her dinner creation by ripping open various types of hot peppers -- guajillo, ancho, and chipotle, among others -- and pouring all of the seeds out, leaving only their soft, leathery exteriors in a pile. Unfortunately, I made the grave mistake of going right back to reading my book afterward without washing my hands. It only took about thirty seconds for me to reach up and rub my eye before I regretted helping altogether. The pain was something that my eye has truly never experienced, so much so that I couldn't even pretend to open it for a good five or ten minutes. It wasn't until Socorro put a few drops of some foreign substance in my eye that I was back to normal and no longer doubled over on the ground, clutching my head and thinking how incredibly stupid I was.
We had adobo that night. Very similar in appearance to mole, but entirely different in taste. In fact, at first we thought we were being treated once again to mole for dinner until we remembered all the trouble my eye had gone through in the morning to bring us a big bowl of adobo. Think chipotle, but not too spicy. Rather, just try to imagine an explosion of flavor in your mouth -- sweet, spicy, salty, and everything in between. Again with rice, beans, and smokin' hot tortillas, of course. I came back for another round about 5 hours later.
Appearances are, in fact, deceivingWhile strolling around the maze of streets that comprise the center of Puebla, Gabby and I found Barra Beer -- a little bar that boasted one of the most impressive beer lists in the country. It certainly did have a fair share of European beers, and quite a few Mexican beers that I'd never seen before as well. The American beer list was more than disappointing, containing the usual suspects: Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller, and Old Milwaukee, which to our enjoyment was the most expensive American beer on the menu. True class. We settled on Bayernbau, the only beer we'd seen that was brewed in Puebla itself. It was quite pricey for a beer down here -- about 6 American dollars -- so we just shared the bottle. To say it was disappointing would be an understatement. It was honestly the worst beer I've ever had. We weren't sure if it was made to be that sour, or if something had gone incredibly wrong in the brewing, but the small "commemorative edition" bottle had both of us struggling to get through it. When we finally choked it down, we had no more appetite for beer and settled on a tamale instead.
To Cholula (not the hot sauce)On our second to last day we were lucky enough to take a trip with the family to nearby Cholula, which is essentially a suburb of the massive, sprawling Puebla. While Soco and Hernando waited for us in the Zocalo, Joaquin's younger sister Fernanda guided us up the mountain to the large Catholic church that overlooks all of Cholula and Puebla. As one might expect, the mountain was once home to expansive indigenous ruins, which were all but destroyed when the Spanish built their massive church on top of them -- they needed to show them whose religion was boss. The Catholic church was indeed quite beautiful, but our thoughts were nonetheless tainted by the gruesome history upon which it was constructed.
On the way down the mountain we were greeted by the usual throngs of artesans and other sales. We carefully avoided nearly all of them until the very end, when we were presented with rather large baskets of a very foreign substance. Upon closer inspection, the young woman selling the various types of snacks noted that what we had been staring at were chapulines -- little grasshoppers (which are apparently harvested one by one as they leap out of the high grasses of fields to avoid the wary steps of their captors) -- that are toasted with lime, garlic, and salt containing an extract of agave worms. I felt as though I had to try them. When else was I going to have the opportunity to munch on cooked grasshoppers? Once was enough. They were incredibly salty, much more so than I care to remember, and I unfortunately had a leg or wing or something stuck in my teeth for far too long. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapulines)
We strolled around the downtown area for a while with Fernanda before heading back to the Zocalo where her parents had been waiting. We joined them at a table in the courtyard of the largest building along the Zocalo's edge and had a few snacks while we watched various groups of professional dancers perform on a stage that is thrown together every Saturday evening. Fernanda herself is quite the dancer, having had dance practice nearly every night that we were there, and she later hopped up on stage to dance with a friend when it opened up to whomever would like to enjoy the music. Danzon, Salsa, Cumbia -- they were all incredible to watch and listen too, especially as Fernanda was having such a blast and we'd heard so much about her dancing.
The following night we were treated to another feast, much like our concept of a barbecue, but with incredibly tender, thin slices of beef and Mexican chorizo. We shared drinks with Joaquin's family one last time, as well as a couple of their friends, and listened to music for hours as the sun set behind the mountains on the horizon. Hernando is quite the musician, performing as a mariachi nearly every weekend at public and private contracted events. With an incredibly strong and vibrant voice, he treated us to a handful of the many songs he knew throughout the time we were there. I had planned on recording a song or two to share, but by the time we had shared a few glasses of tequila and mezcal every night, I somehow forgot to grab the recorder. Instead, we played guitar and piano together a couple of times, including the last night, and enjoyed showing each other various types of music that we adored.
It was, by far, the best week we've had in Mexico so far. Of course, we haven't been here that long, but there was something incredible about the way in which we were so quickly welcomed into their home and made part of their family. To Joaquin and your family -- a heartfelt thanks for opening the doors of your home and your hearts to us for a whole week. We'll be missing them all dearly (and their cooking, of course).
End. Notes.We actually ate a lot more that week than I had the energy to write about. Here are a couple other bites, in lesser detail:
Quesadilla: Take what you know about quesadillas and throw it out the window. Replace it with a fatter, yet smaller, handmade tortilla, crumbly cheese, either spicy salsa verde or the mild ranchero sauce, and ground pork or beef. No more oozing cheddar and crispy flour tortillas. That's just garbage.
Cemita: A large sandwich stuffed between two halves of an enormous fresh-baked roll. Choose milanesa, chicken, cold pork, or cheese. Add tomato, super stringy thick cheese, half an avocado, lettuce, and mayonnaise. Now try to fit it all in your mouth. Yeah, we struggled too.
[one of the more tame beaches]
[the best part of our PE hostal: empty, sedated, with a view]
[Locals watching the protesters from safer ground]
[the pretty stuff]
[mountains, hidden highways, frozen waterfalls]
[Gabby+mountains+frigid boiling water=smiles]
[during the time of Spanish conquest,
[she's smiling because we escaped the crocodiles unscathed]
[San Cris from a Christly hill]
[Chiapas-style gym: body weight, open air, free, atop a mountain]
[Gabby during/after a cheap feast]
[cabana+Nico]
[road to ruins]
[big tree and friends]
[Catalonians love waterfalls]
