His kitchen is Mexican and it is from Texas but do not tell him Tex-Mex
Houston - The second neighborhood of the city is full of temptations for Adam Medrano, a writer and chef who lives a few kilometers southwest there.
That mexico -American area houses perfectly flaky tortillas in Doña María Mexican Cafe, handmade - of corn or flour - and ready to rolling, stuffed with eggs with fine strands of dry meat, or crushed.It has original tamales tamales, with the leaves that wrapping them blackened and the shores of dough and caramelized meat.And there is also the Taquería Chabelita, where the owner, Isabel Henríquez Hernández, makes beans pintos of a smoked intensity that does not come from pork fat, but from a slow charcoal or carbonized charred in a hot pan.
For Medrano, who grew up in San Antonio and has generations of relatives on both sides of the Rio Bravo, all this is his culinary heritage, comfortable food: Mexican homemade food.
But, he said, we must not call her Tex-Mex.He prefers to describe her as Mexican of Texas, which is the same way that Medrano describes himself.
Texas Mexican cuisine is native to southern Texas, according to Medrano, which is 71 years old and whose second kitchen book Don't Count the tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking will publish in June the Texas Techn University Press Press.It is the food that families like yours have been preparing long before the Rio Bravo served to delimit a border, when Texas was part of Mexico and even much earlier.
But do not misunderstand it: Tex-Mex cuisine must also be respected and celebrated, he said.Only Tex-Mex basics such as molten cheese and combos of fajitas mountains with chicken and shrimp are not a homeless memory for those whose Texan roots date twelve thousand years ago.
"That is not our food," said Medrano, who has spent a good part of the decade working on the definition of his kitchen and on the way he has inspired a growing number of Mexicans from Texas."We don't eat like that".
This type of kitchen can be found in the sites that Medrano frequents, in ancient dining room.2 that remains in the same block.Also in Maria's Restaurant in the center of McAllen and in Brownsville's friend.
It is made of dishes such as chicken with corn and zucchini, the augation soup with tomato and the gulf shrimp stewed in a mixture of red dried chiles.It is the simple meat of the minced or the meat stew with potatoes called stewed meat, both discreetly seasoned with a fat pepper, garlic and cumin paste.
Juan Hernández, by Mrs. María Mexican Café, has always described this meal as "Mom Style Kitchen".In her case, the mother is Anna Hernández, her wife, who grew up one block from the restaurant and is also one of the owners.Juan Hernández would never say that the food she prepares is Tex-Mex but, rather, the inspiration of Tex-Mex.
That exchange began in the early 1990s, when the mexico -American food began to adapt in the "Anglos for Anglos" restaurants, said Medrano.In the seventies, gastronomic writers began to refer to that hybrid cuisine as "Tex-Mex": Refrite beans as smooth as the mass of a pancake;Chili made based on spices powder and broth, instead of meat with entire dry chili;fajitas made of any cut instead of the beef skirt that gave the plate its name and, above all, extra cheese.
The idea of differentiating Mexican food from Texas from the Tex-Mex occurred to Medrano after enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio in 2010.Until then he had made a career as a producer and television screenwriter and also in the award of funds for educational and artistic projects without profit.Medrano, who also founded the San Antonio Annual Film Festival in 1977, says that he took classes for fun but that thanks to them he had a revelation: after decades in the shadow, his kitchen not only needed a defender but a name.
Medrano did not want to use the word "Texan" because it is sometimes used to underline the Spanish colonial inheritance instead of the native legacy, and because writing Texas with "J" instead of with "x" is a European practice.
After learning about the different regional kitchens of Mexico, a more appropriate term occurred because he realized that he had basically grown up with a different kitchen."There is Mexican from Oaxaca, Mexican of Jalisco ... why not Texas Mexican?" Medrano wondered.
His first investigation into the history of this culinary became his first recipe book, Truly Texas Mexican: Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes, published in 2014.
Since then Medrano has traveled the region cooking, giving talks in schools and museums, and collecting the knowledge of chefs, anthropologists and amateur chefs, many of which appear in Don't count the tortillas ... this summer, by the way, will prepareGuisada meat tacos in a celebration for July 4 in Moscow, at the residence of the American ambassador to Russia.
Medrano is also the executive producer, screenwriter and driver of a bilingual documentary that is about to be released, The Roots of Texas Mexican Food, whose launch is scheduled for this fall (it has been offered to television suppliers in the United States and Latin America).The film focuses on archaeological and historical sites of Texas and on women who have been the main architects of the culinary in the region.
For restaurateurs such as Sylvia Casares, a well -known Houston chef who runs Sylvia's enchilada Kitchen, Medrano's work has been revealing."Twenty years ago I was looking for how to describe my food," said Casares, who is from Brownsville, Texas.
Casares met Medrano after he recommended a Houston reporter for her restaurant as a place where the kitchen's gustatory monuments could be found, especially her enchiladas.The Casares team prepares hundreds of them in the Mexican style of Texas, softening each tortilla in oil and bathing it in a Chilean sauce before winding it with its filling.
And what about the cheese sheet on top?"There is a little for the presentation there," said Casares.
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Casares says that Medrano's work helps to correct the lack of vocabulary and historical ignorance, even for some mexicoastosunidenses."The problem with most people is that they do not understand the original food of Texas," he said.
Like many owners of Mexican-American restaurants, she includes both Tex-Mex dishes and Texas Mexicans in her menu.(Some dishes are spliced or halfway between one guy and another).Most of their clients assume that those who seem more Mexican are imported dishes.
But these are not creations from the south of the border, said Medrano: "The Mexican of Texas did not cross the border, the border crossed it".
Until the 1948 war ended between Mexico and the United States, most of the southern Texas was part of Mexico and for centuries it had been part of the New Spain Viceroyalty.Therefore, according to Medrano, the heart of Mexican culture in Texas is an area that includes southern Texas - the Valle del Río Grande, Corpus Christi and the metropolitan areas of San Antonio and Houston - but also the north of the statesMexicans from Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.
They may be on the other side of the Bravo River, but share the same land, which includes mosque and walnut trees, cassava and nopales and basic thickets such as pumpkins, beans, potatoes, chiles, corn and seafood of the Gulf of Mexico.It is a subtropical zone where thousands of head of cattle were raised after the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century.
In his research, Medrano was excited to find academics who had used the Mexican term of Texas occasionally or who had interviewed others who used it.One of them was Mario Montaño, an anthropologist from College College in Colorado Springs, who specializes in the border food.(His thesis was on the head barbecue: a beef head that cooks slowly in a well with hot stones and that Medrano's family recently prepared for the recordings of his documentary).
Montaño grew near the river in Eagle Pass, Texas, when water "was not a cultural separation," he said.
Montaño describes the culinary of the area as a mixture of influences of trade, colonization and migration of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as the southern Mexicans who emigrated to the north.
Even so, Texas Mexican food is rooted in the kitchen of indigenous nomadic groups that walked on both sides of the river centuries before the Spaniards arrived.Many of those peoples - now collectively known as the nation Tap Pilam Coahuilteca - moved to the Catholic missions founded in San Antonio in the 18th century.
That was where Texas Mexican food began to take shape, said Ramón Vásquez, a member of the nation Tap Pilam Coahuilteca and who also offers tours of the Missions National Historical Park of San Antonio from the point of view of native cuisine.
"What was here is the origin" of what the Texans eat today, Vásquez said, and pointed out that their ancestors were the ones who first cooked with hot stones in well, often cuts of meat that nobody wanted, like the heads ofThe beef that the Spaniards disregarded.
The park has just allocated more than 20 hectares to agriculture and Vásquez hopes to help cultivate native species, many of which appear in the new book of Medrano, which also includes a recipe from Vásquez's mother to prepare bison with blackberries andnuts along with family recipes by Texano César Martínez and chef Rico Torres - born in the passage - of the Mixtli modern Mexican cuisine restaurant in San Antonio.
All this rich and living history is the reason why San Antonio received an unusual designation from UNESCO as a city of gastronomy in 2017.The city turned to Medrano to help formulate the application.
This recognition is an unexpected turn.The missions, after all, are only a few kilometers from the square where at the beginning of the 20th century the Mexican women of Texas were forbidden to sell meat with Chile in outdoor stalls, just at the same time that the dish was becomingIn Chili.
It is the same place where Otis Farnsworth, a native of Chicago, opened his very popular original Mexican Restaurant, one of the first places where what was later known as Tex-Mex.
Today, Farnsworth Restaurant could be accused of cultural appropriation, or what Medrano calls "cultural predation".Medrano bothers the lack of respect for his culture and the many ways in which the Mexican people have been aggrieved throughout history.
But above all it motivates the love for his culinary, that he delights him every time he sees how an omelette is inflated in the comal, or aspires to the condition of cumin mixing with the fat pepper.
"We need to share the beauty of food," said Medrano, "and if we do, the world will be more beautiful.".
* Copyright: 2019 The New York Times News Service
