There is a common misconception that Mexican food is all about cardboard-textured boat-shaped receptacles stuffed with cubed chicken and iceberg lettuce and synthetic sauces from a jar, washed down with sledgehammer margaritas made from cheap tequila. A cuisine in which chicken comes drenched in some chocolate-based sauce called mole. Worse still, there’s the tendency to confuse Mexican cooking with Tex-Mex; but chilli con carne is not a Mexican dish.
Real Mexican food – an extravagantly wonderful, explosively tasty blend of pre-Hispanic, Spanish, Arab and European influences, ingredients and techniques – is the least known and most deeply misunderstood of all the world’s cuisines. It needs champions.
Enter Patricia Quintana, chef, author of 20 books on Mexican cooking – many of them in English, and a magic-realist novel just published – teacher and unofficial ambassador for fine Mexican food both inside and outside her native country.
Born in Mexico City but with extended family in Veracruz and Oaxaca, Quintana was fascinated by food and cooking from an early age. Spending summers on her father’s cattle ranch, she would skip from house to house to watch the local women cook, sampling spoonfuls of rich sauces or fragrant black beans from bubbling pots, pinching and patting out fresh tortillas, teasing out strands of meat to fill tacos, and all the while building up a taste bank of wonderful sabores. “Thanks to all the indigenous women in my family, especially my granny from Oaxaca, my taste buds were developing from my earliest childhood,” she says.
In the 1970s, before Mexican food was considered worthy of serious study, the newly married Quintana travelled to France to work with the top chefs of the day (Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, Gaston Lenôtre). Among these, she says, it was Guérard who influenced her the most. This was the time when the gospel of nouvelle cuisine was just beginning to be preached, with its new light sauces and its fresh emphasis on exquisite presentation.
Reflecting on the gloriously untamed flavours and textures of the food she had grown up with, she considered whether some of these nouvelle cuisine tendencies and techniques might be adapted to Mexican food without compromising its authenticity. Mexican cuisine could hold its head high in terms of its rich history, its ethnic and regional variety, its culinary techniques. But as far as presentation was concerned, she had to admit it fell short.
On return home, Quintana began an extensive exploration into Mexican food from the roots up, travelling through this vast country – four times the size of France or Spain – from the Pacific to the Gulf Coast, and from the cattle-raising, wheat- growing lands of the north to the sultry tropical south. Over the past 30 years she has taught, lectured and demonstrated her own refined interpretation of genuine Mexican cooking at her cooking school in Mexico City,as well as travelling frequently to the US as guest teacher or speaker. Recently she addressed the Culinary Institute of America (the other CIA) and the Harvard School of Public Health on the nutritional value of the Mexican diet. While freely acknowledging her debt to Guérard and the nouvelle cuisine movement, Quintana prefers to talk of “la cocina contemporánea Mexicana”, rather than “la nueva cocina Mexicana”. “Basically it’s not new,” she insists. “The cornerstones are all there – our extraordinary range of ingredients, for example, their historical and ethnic roots, the unique processes by which we arrive at our sauces. What’s new is the lighter touch and above all the way we present our food – it’s more visual, more beautiful.” As an old Mexican proverb says, “de la vista nace el amor” (love starts with the eyes) – and that includes love of food.
The coherence of Quintana’s approach to contemporary Mexican cuisine is nowhere more apparent than in her restaurant, Izote, in Polanco, a smart residential neighbourhood of Mexico City.
