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Jeffrey M. Pilcher , Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (New York and Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2012), pp. xv+292, $27.95, hb
Robert Weis , Bakers & Basques: A Social History of Bread in Mexico (Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press , 2012), pp. xii+217, $29.95, pb.
Reviews
What is authentic Mexican food? That's the question - or rather, the attempt to define the question - that Jeffrey Pilcher takes up in Planet Taco, his impressively well-informed and sprightly third book on Mexican food. Should one seek the answer by reaching back thousands of years to the domestication of maize and the ability of the ancient people of Mesoamerica to create a culinary regime able to sustain millions? Wasn't the elaborate banquet that Moctezuma served to the astonished Spanish invaders that autumn day in 1519 - a marvellous display of a varied and healthy indigenous cuisine, many elements of which are still consumed today - as 'authentically Mexican' as one can get?
Perhaps we should turn to another meal, staged a mere 20 years later by the conquerors themselves, when they sat down in the very heart of Tenochtitlan to gorge on roast kid and ham, stuffed chicken, boiled mutton, turnips, cabbages and chickpeas accompanied by casks of red and white Spanish wine. However, this meal also included, as Bernal Diaz noticed, local ingredients such as the exotic guajolote, frothy cups of chocolate and local fruit - harbingers of the mixed 'creole' food regimes to come.
Jeffrey Pilcher takes us through the many permutations of subsequent Mexican cuisine with a sure hand. His chapter on the Pastry War and Parisian mole demonstrates the almost comical fascination for French culture and food among the Mexican elite in the later nineteenth century, when, for example, 588 distinguished guests celebrated President Diaz's birthday by dining on 'fish à la princesse, trouffled vol-a-vent [and] beef à la valencienne', along with 'over a thousand cases of wine including the great vintages of Pouilly and Mouton Rothschild and 450 cases of champagne', a kind of culinary offshoot of France's globalising mission civilatrice that was irresistible to Mexican and South American elites.
On Mexico's far northern frontier and...