Border Food
Author:
Peggy Knickerbocker
photograph by Laurie Smith
I arrived in the hot, dry, bustling West Texas border town of El
Paso one day last summer at sundown, just as the sky was going
pink. Huge, billowy Southwestern clouds haloed the skyline. The
Chihuahuan Desert, which surrounds the city, looked flat and
dusty—but the peaks of the mile-high Franklin Mountains, the
southernmost extension of the Rockies, push into the very heart of
the city, and I couldn’t help thinking that they resembled a line
of huge, jagged tortilla chips stuck upright in a bowl of chili.
Laptop Battery The culinary metaphor probably occurred to me because I’d come
to visit El Paso and its neighbor just across the border, Ciudad
Juárez, to learn about a reportedly delicious subvariety of Mexican
cooking that might best be termed simply “border food”. Now, El
Paso is in Texas, and Juárez is in the state of Chihuahua,
Mexico—but the cuisine I’m talking about is not, emphatically, what
is usually meant by Tex-Mex. It isn’t oversized combo platters
blanketed with melted orange cheese, or crisp-fried tacos filled
with greasy ground beef. It’s marinated cactus salad wrapped in a
just-made tortilla, or enchiladas, stacked instead of rolled, and
smothered in delicate red chile sauce, or flavorful fresh chiles
stuffed with cheese and lightly fried, and served with nothing on
the side except more of the same. It is plain cooking, served up
unadorned, with a distinct regional character—pure, complex, and
unambiguous. Early spanish explorers found their way through a pass
in the mountains near here in 1598, and dubbed the spot El Paso del
Norte—the pass of the north. That name was also originally given to
what is now Juárez, when it was founded in 1659. Today’s El Paso
started life as a Spanish military garrison in 1780. After El Paso
del Norte changed its name in 1888 in honor of the Mexican
president, Benito Juárez, the American town borrowed the name El
Paso for itself. In a way, then, the two cities are really
twins—mirror images of each other across the Rio Grande. But the
border between the two is real, and Juárez, with its population of
about 1.5 million (El Paso has about 675,000) and its NAFTA-driven
manufacturing complexes, is not exactly a magnet for Texas
tourism.
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Thinkpad There is also a lot more Mexican food in El Paso than there is
American food in Juárez. It’s Mexican food with a distinct
identity, however—influenced by the cooking of Chihuahua, but with
a number of little twists. In a way, it’s not unlike the Italian
cooking of San Francisco’s North Beach, in the sense that it’s a
classic immigrant cuisine, adapting traditional familial dishes to
local ingredients and, eventually, local tastes.
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Microsoft Oil is used more than lard, for instance, and beef more than
pork. Jack cheese appears in place of softer Mexican queso. And
there is an occasional borrowing from New Mexican cuisine, like the
use of posole (hominy). Above all, this food is surprisingly
delicate—full of flavor and texture and occasionally spicy but
stylistically subtle. Local cooks don’t strive for “rustic”; they
take great pride in the preparation of their dishes.
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Laptop Computers This became apparent at my first meal in El Paso, at a warm
little neighborhood restaurant called Casa Jurado, where proprietor
Henry Jurado serves up ice-cold Mexican beers with lime to a loyal
clientele of locals awaiting their moles, salpicóns (cold
shredded-beef salads flavored with lime and chiles), or flautas
(crispy flutes of fried tortillas wrapped around a spiced-meat
filling). Henry recommended that I try his enchiladas norteñas, a
towering, slightly tilted stack of corn tortillas interspersed with
layers of melted cheese and cloaked in a complex red chile sauce
with an elusive but genuine heat. When I begged for the recipe,
Henry’s wife, Luz, offered to give me a cooking lesson the
following day.
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Laptop Computer Luz, one of 13 children, learned to cook from her mother and
grandmother in Mexico. She welcomed me at the appointed time to the
bougainvillea-covered Jurados’ adobe, perched in the cactus-studded
foothills overlooking downtown El Paso. A shy, attractive woman,
she seemed most comfortable when sharing cooking lore. Picking up a
brittle dried red colorín chile, she cautioned “If heat is not what
you want in a sauce, remove the seeds and the vein.” As she stacked
and filled the enchiladas, she continued, “Did you know that a corn
tortilla has an inside and an outside?” She demonstrated by holding
out a corn tortilla and showing me that its inner side has a little
membrane of dough that can be lifted up, while the outer is tough
and smooth, able to withstand rolling and direct heat. When she had
finished assembling the enchiladas, she pointed to them proudly.
“No yellow cheese,” she said.
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Desktop Computer This proved to be a common refrain in El Paso. I heard it again
the next morning from Kenneth Haddad, proprietor of the H & H
Car Wash and Coffee Shop, who added, “We don’t use a lot of sour
cream or shredded lettuce, either.” Haddad’s father left Syria to
join El Paso’s large Syrian community in the 1920s, opening a car
wash (with a soda fountain attached) in 1958. Later, he rented the
soda fountain to two Mexican women, who started serving Juárez
specialties. Now Kenneth runs the coffee shop, which is popular
with everyone from power breakfasters with cellular phones to chic
women in tennis dresses to dripping-wet car washers in rubber
boots.
Notebooks At the H & H, I sampled a creation I couldn’t have imagined
in my wildest Tex-Mex dreams—a chile relleno burrito. This was
exactly what it sounds like: a flour tortilla wrapped around a
slender, elegant fried green chile stuffed with oozing white
cheese. It was presented plain and lonely, all by itself on a white
plate—a poignant desert landscape—and it was absolutely delicious.
Standing beneath a sign reading Smoking Is Allowed, Haddad stopped
dragging on a cigarette just long enough to ask his cooks to make
me some carne picada when I finished my burrito. Again, the plate
was absolutely austere in presentation—one loosely wrapped tortilla
with glistening red chile–spiked meat spilling out, topped by
another of the same. “I want people to see what they are eating,”
Haddad told me. “I want the flavors to star.” And, that’s exactly
what they did.
Lenovo When she heard that I was going to El Paso, my friend Zarela
Martínez, who owns Zarela’s, a noted Mexican restaurant in
Manhattan, insisted that I call her mother, Aída Gabilondo, a
longtime resident of the border region. I did, and was rewarded
with an invitation to join her and Zarela’s sister Clarissa Delgado
for an afternoon of cooking in the borrowed kitchen of an old
restaurant now being renovated just over the Texas and Mexican
borders, in New Mexico. Aída (named by her opera-loving father) is
a short, twinkly woman, a well-known cook, and the author of
Mexican Family Cooking (Fawcett, 1986). “Cooking for me is
a blessing and true entertainment,” she said when we met. “It’s the
opposite of work.”
Hard Drive Soon I was enjoying what I have come to think of as the
definitive border food experience—watching Gabilondo peel a long
green anaheim chile for chiles rellenos while disparaging Tex-Mex
food. “We abhor the idea of combination platters,” she told me.
“The idea of piling three or four things on one plate came about
because people were in a hurry and didn’t have the help required to
wash dishes for separate courses. We think every taste deserves a
chance, every dish should stand alone.” I saw what she meant as I
tasted the chiles rellenos, and was transported by its slippery,
barely crisp bite and haunting blend of flavors.
Travelstar Back in El Paso that evening, I wasn’t exactly hungry, but I
wanted to visit another local landmark, the L & J Cafe. Here,
80 percent of the customers drink beer with ice—a tradition that
began when one regular was told by his doctors to either quit
drinking or switch to watered-down beer; he opted for the latter,
and his pals decided to keep him company—and everybody eats savory
little snacks. I watched a procession of crisp mini-flautas,
cheese-oozing quesadillas, and blazing red enchiladas go by, and
managed to resist them all—but I couldn’t say no to the chile con
queso, a bowl of soft, stringy liquid cheese festooned with loud,
hot chiles all but crying to be scooped up with freshly fried
tortilla chips. It was the perfect light supper, border-style. I
got up early the next morning to meet W. Park Kerr, who had offered
to be my guide on the other side of the border. Kerr and his
mother, Norma Kerr, started The El Paso Chile Company in 1980 with
a $500 investment in ristras—garlands of dried red chiles. Now they
run a busy store and a lively mail-order business and sell
everything from Hell Fire & Damnation hot sauce to Sweet Texas
Fire jalapeño honey mustard in fancy food stores and grocery chains
across the country—with reported sales of nearly $5 million in
1994. Kerr is the principal ambassador of border food in the United
States—and, as he would probably be the first to admit, the
cuisine’s principal commercializer as well.
Gateway Crossing the border, driving over the bridge that spans the Rio
Grande in Kerr’s Isuzu Trooper, we quickly arrived at our
destination, Juárez’s open-air Mercado Cuauhtémoc. It was bursting
with vitality. At every food stall, there were people chopping,
peeling, slicing, frying, laughing, talking, haggling. There were
literally hundreds of vendors, spread over blocks and blocks,
selling everything from mangoes to medicinal roots, chiles to
T-shirts, pet food to dried snake powder. There were whole cow
carcasses, and freshly slaughtered pigs. Buckets of birdseed were
lined up next to galvanized containers of dried beans and rice. One
stand sold nothing but cheeses made by a local Mennonite
community.
Laptop Parts Kerr steered me through the throngs to meet the women at one of
his favorite food stands—the muses, he said, from whom he culls
inspiration for his products. As we approached, they were shaping a
brick-red mound of ancho and pasilla chile paste ground with hulled
cantaloupe seeds—their version of a pipián, usually made with
pumpkin seeds instead. The women greeted us with big smiles.
“Look,” Kerr said. “There’s the ‘human Cuisinart’.” He pointed to a
young man at their side who was whacking away at a stack of trimmed
cactus paddles like Zorro on fast-forward, stopping periodically to
hand the results to the women, who cut the pieces further into a
julienne, then boiled, drained, and finally marinated them in lime
juice with chiles, cilantro, garlic, onions, oil, and salt to make
nopalito salad. Scoops of this are spooned into tortillas for sale
as snacks. They look so foreign, but taste somehow familiar, almost
like green beans—and are delicious.
Software Next, Kerr led me to a tiny, nameless food stall under a flight
of stairs in an ancient, ramshackle building. It is run by a couple
of efficient young cooks who offered us another version of chile
relleno burritos—this time made with fat, spicy-sweet red poblano
peppers. These, said Kerr, are the best chiles rellenos he’s ever
had. They tasted pretty spectacular to me, too, I must admit.
Hard Drives Before we returned to El Paso, as if to prove to me that there’s
more to Juárez’s cooking than market specialties, Kerr swung the
Trooper slightly out of the way to an oversize, fiesta-bright
restaurant called Casa del Sol, where the waiters wear black tie
and the menu includes things like fresh grilled black Boquilla bass
and tenderloin steak topped with lemon butter and herbs. We didn’t
have time for a meal, but Kerr insisted that we at least sample the
restaurant’s version of another border-food classic—an escabeche of
crunchy jicama, cauliflower, zucchini, and other vegetables,
pickled in a spicy marinade. It left a fresh, glowing taste of
Juárez in my mouth as we passed back over the border.
Electronics That night, Kerr and his wife, Martina Lorey, an El Paso
architect, invited me to dinner at their stylishly quirky 1920s
pink-washed adobe house. I ate till I could barely move—grilled
quesadillas filled with asadero cheese (sort of a Southwestern
mozzarella) and served with smoky salsa made from grilled green
chiles, onions, tomatoes, and corn; a salad of grilled prawns and
scallops marinated in lime and tequila; a main course of salpicón;
and for dessert, partially peeled Mexican mangoes impaled on
beautiful Victorian silver forks. It was all very good, and very
elegant—another side of border food. But I found myself wondering
if maybe the H & H would be open in the morning so I could stop
by on my way to the airport for, well, you know.... PEGGY
KNICKERBOCKER’s last article for SAVEUR was “Farming
for the Love of Food”, about the farmer-cooks of California’s West
Marin and vicinity.
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