Coyota in the Kitchen: A Memoir of New and Old Mexico

By Anita Rodríguez

This book of stories and recipes introduces two eccentric families that would never have eaten together, let alone exchanged recipes, but for the improbable marriage of the author’s parents: a nuevomexicano from Taos and a painter who came from Texas to New Mexico to study art. Recalling the good and the terrible cooks in her family, Anita Rodríguez also shares the complications of navigating a safe path among contradictory cultural perspectives. She takes us from the mountain villages of New Mexico in the 1940s to sipping mint juleps on the porch of a mansion in the South, and also on a prolonged pilgrimage to Mexico and back again to New Mexico. Accompanied by Rodríguez’s vibrant paintings—including scenes of people eating on fiesta nights and plastering an adobe church—Coyota in the Kitchen shows how food reflects the complicated family histories that shape our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: May 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780826356734

Anita Rodríguez

Anita Rodríguez is an award-winning painter who is also widely known as an enjarradora, or plasterer and finisher of adobe buildings. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Book preview

Introduction

I have an excuse for the presumption of fusing painting, storytelling, and cooking—three art forms—into one book. Coming from an oral tradition makes you a pack rat for stories. Being a painter makes you a pack rat for images. I am stuffed full of paintings, and new stories keep being born. They are like a crowd of people all trying to squeeze through the door of a theater that is about to collapse from old age. In all the confusion they got mixed up, and I ended up painting stories and writing images in the shape of a cookbook.

It began with paintings and drawings of people eating or preparing chicos, of utensils and food, of tamale making. My intention was to write a cookbook someday to go with the paintings. When I finally reviewed my tattered, bespattered pile of recipes, I began remembering the cooks in my family. The great cooks, the terrible cooks. How their food revealed who they were, how their recipes told the story of two lineages and the historical conflicts and confluences that fused and divided us. I realized my family recipes speak of three cultures, extreme class differences, two countries. I thought about what we ate, the history of the ingredients, what we did to get the food, what happened while we were eating it. I thought about the women who keep families together with their feasts and how, when they die, family members scatter and forget one another. I wished the Spanish colonial dining room table I inherited could talk and replay the part of extended family feasts that I loved the most—the stories.

I was born on the cusp of cultural and historical change, just before the mesmerizing, magical voices of storytellers were drowned out by the cacophony of TV or even reliable radios (the power kept going out). Storytellers have been the carriers of all wisdom since the first campfires and the first cooked food. Human consciousness evolved in that primordial space over millions of years. The irresistible power of the storytelling voice, in all the languages of the world, is embedded deep in the human psyche, bones, and belly. Shaped by history, the voices in this book are bilingual, so there is a glossary of Spanish words at the end of the book.

The stories are little windows into the history of this Indian land that became New Spain, Mexico, and then part of the United States—of parallel, interpenetrating worlds in one geographical location. The thread that holds them together is food. They are about all families, everywhere, and what human beings do to get through things like conquest, racism, and cultural and class conflict—while managing to eat and laugh.

As I continued writing I noticed how the silences and omissions of my characters pointed to the presence of invisible energy. I saw how their secrets and their community’s secrets shaped their lives like puppet masters, hidden in the wings of denial, ignorance, shame. I thought about the secrets of those cooks, of the stories they took to the grave, what we were not taught in school, the questions we were punished for asking, the languages we were forbidden to speak, and the history erased by the grown-ups.

I confess I am suspicious of secrets on principle, a personal bias I could not prevent from creeping into the book. Skeletons in family, governmental, and collective closets lose their power when you open the door and turn on the light. There is a devil costume from Guerrero, Mexico, hanging on the wall of my bedroom. If people ask me why I have a life-sized devil in my bedroom, I say, Everybody has a devil. I like mine where I can watch him. What would literature and painting be like without shadow? Maybe all writers are investigative journalists at heart, compelled to dig up the bones. And all cooks know bones make the best soup.

A word about the illustrations naturally follows: readers will notice that many of the characters are skeletons (as in my paintings in general). This book presumes to cross not only boundaries between literature, cooking, and painting, but the boundary between life and death. However, I have several excuses here too. No one of Mexican descent need apologize for being comfortable with the image of death. It has been present in Mesoamerican art, architecture, literature, popular art, and ceremonial cycles since before Columbus touched these shores—and still is. Besides, death is so deeply a part of the human story that omitting it diminishes life, takes away its wholeness. If that’s not enough, you can blame my love of painting skeletons on a near-death experience, after which I became an artist, hiding in plain view the knowledge that life is eternal. My skeletons are alive in a world of brilliant colors, eating, driving their lowriders, plastering their churches, being funny, making music and love—and they are not afraid of death. You don’t know what gender they are, if they are rich or poor—only that they are human.

The recipes are part of the stories, embedded in the text, so you know what people were eating when the action happened. They also form a survival manual. These recipes got me through life.

Enjoy this book as if you were my guest, surrounded by my paintings, fed with lovingly cooked food, and regaled with stories.

¡Provecho!

CHAPTER ONE

Mother’s Kitchen

and Papa’s Stories

Grandma Hipólita Ramírez Trujillo, my dirt-poor paternal grandmother, was missing her right forefinger. My aristocratic southern-born mother, Grace Graham Prince, had a crippled right arm. My father chose a wife who could not have come from a more different world than his mother’s. But personal destiny’s power is stronger than culture or class, and although my parents’ marriage crossed both those boundaries, they, as usual, formed a family driven by invisible forces and forged my fate.

Hipólita’s son, my father, became a druggist instead of the doctor he wanted to be, because during World War II druggists were in such demand that the government somehow—I never knew exactly how—made it possible for a barely English-speaking boy from Taos to attend pharmacy school in Denver. He was so poor he had to mail his laundry back to Hipólita, who washed it in a tub with lye soap she made from ashes and pig fat and mailed it back.

He married a woman who had never washed her own underwear or fried an egg. Mother had to learn to cook in the trenches on a thing she had never seen before called a wood stove. By the time I arrived my father had risen to middle class, and my mother cooked for the family on a gas stove.

Just as alchemy mirrors the alchemist, cooking is a reflection of the cook. Occasionally, Mother’s food was good, but mostly it was just so-so. Once in a while, it was a disaster. Occasionally a new recipe would arise out of a calamity—like the time she drank too much and accidentally spilled coffee into the sweet potatoes. Since then, my sweet potatoes have had an exotic, hard-to-identify flavor.

Sweet Potatoes with Coffee

I don’t remember seeing her spill the coffee, so the exact amount of coffee in this recipe is an approximation arrived at after experimentation. All I remember is watching her woozily pick out the grounds and simper modestly when the guests complimented her cooking.

Piloncillo, sold in Mexican and special supermarkets, is a cone-shaped chunk of brown sugar. You shave off the desired amount with a serrated knife or cheese grater. This recipe serves 6 generously.

INGREDIENTS

6 large sweet potatoes

½ cup brown sugar or grated piloncillo

3 tablespoons plus 1 stick sweet butter

1 quart orange juice

½ teaspoon instant coffee powder or 2 tablespoons strong brewed coffee

2 teaspoons cinnamon

2 teaspoons nutmeg

¼ tablespoon vanilla

about 10 marshmallows

Boil sweet potatoes until skins loosen. Drain and cool, peel and slice. Layer evenly in a casserole dish you have buttered generously with 3 tablespoons of butter, sprinkling each layer with sugar (or piloncillo). Put remaining butter, orange juice, coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla in a large saucepan. Bring to a soft boil, reduce heat, and simmer for five minutes. Pour liquid over potatoes, then cover and bake for 50–60 minutes at 350 degrees. Uncover, top with marshmallows, and bake at 400 degrees until marshmallows are browned, about 10 minutes.

On my stove top, I still have Mother’s ceramic spoon rest with its embossed red chile peppers to remind me of the morning when we were happy. It was a Sunday, and Mother was still sober. She let me stand on a chair to clean the beans and put them in the pressure cooker. Delighted, I pretended to be the grown-up cook I would become—a woman with a kitchen of her own who did not have vodka bottles hidden in the flour bin.

I wanted to be the kind of cook Mama Rosa was. All Mother’s recipes for Mexican food came from tía Rosa, including the frijoles con chile colorado that I was learning to make that Sunday morning.

Beans with Red Chile, or

Frijoles con Chile Colorado

The invention of the Crock-Pot delivered me from the explosive perils of pressure cookers, and all by itself the Crock-Pot will safely cook beans in about 4+ hours, but it’s true that the longer beans cook, the better they get. Remember to spread dry beans on the counter and remove any stones, then rinse them thoroughly in a colander. You can also substitute chicos for half the beans. To make them from the ground up, go to page 25. Otherwise, they can be found in stores. Serves 6.

INGREDIENTS

½ cup pinto beans, screened for stones and rinsed

4 cups chicken or vegetable stock

1 cup lean pork or boned chicken breast, cubed

3 cloves garlic, peeled

salt to taste

¼ tablespoon dried oregano

red chile powder to taste (about 1 tablespoon)

¼ cup cold water

2 tablespoons flour

Put everything but the last two ingredients into a big soup pot or slow cooker and cook until the pork or chicken falls apart. About an hour before serving, dissolve flour in cold water by shaking them together in a jar, then stir this mixture into the frijoles, mixing thoroughly.

After letting me put the beans, cubed pork, garlic, oregano, and chile powder in the pressure cooker, Mother forgot to lower the flame before we embarked on our usual Sunday ritual of cruising the mountain villages around Taos.

I didn’t know enough to turn the flame down on the stove, but I knew why she went into the bedroom one last time and why she climbed so unsteadily into our 1941 Studebaker.

As soon as we got underway, we heard her familiar complaint: Tony, you drive this car like a horse-drawn wagon!

It’s true that Papa was a terrible driver. He would veer onto the shoulder, missing cows by inches, and wander over to the wrong side of the road while pointing out a quirky house, a particularly colorful campo santo, or one of the roadside descansos, bedecked with plastic flowers, that mark the place where someone died in a car wreck. Because of his drugstore on the plaza, Papa knew someone in every village, and we would stop to visit while Mother, sighing with impatience, ostentatiously drummed the fingers of her good hand on the car seat.

Papa told stories on those Sunday drives—stories that ignited my imagination and nourished my slowly emerging sense of who I was and where I came from. Brimming with anticipation, I would wait for him to shift into to his storytelling voice. That’s when the enchantment would begin.

Tu abuelo, Juan Antonio Ramírez, had vacas. He won ’em in a card game. Every year part of the herd had to be taken over the mountains to the matanza to be butchered. Those mountains way over there. Pointing, Papa veered sharply to the right, fusing the image in my mind’s eye with the terror of barely missing a horse.

In those days there was no roads . . .

Were no roads, Tony, my mother interjected.

There was no roads across the Picuris Mountains to the matanza, where we had our busher chop . . .

"Butcher shop, Tony. And it’s ‘shop’—not ‘chop.’"

. . . busher chop. It was my job to take the cows to the matanza. I was only fourteen and even more skinny than now. All they gave me for the journey was an old .22 rifle todo fregao, some tortillas to eat, and a blanket for bedtime. It got dark, and I was scared. I could hear something big following me in the butches . . .

"Bushes, Tony, bush-es, for land’s sake!"

". . . in the butches. It was a bear, looking for something to eat so she could fatten up for the winter. It was fall then and cold already.

Now be sure an’ remember thees in case you ever run into a bear. A .22 bullet only makes the bear mad, like a wasp wanting to eesting. You can’t kill a bear with a .22. And a mad bear was what made your bisabuelo El Viejo Atole so mean. Remember that story, m’hija?

I nodded.

So I was praying that I wouldn’t have to choot that bear.

Shoot. Mother sighed.

It was gonna eat me, skinny as I was, in one bite. So I built a fire right away, fast as I could, and sat chivering in the pitiful little circle of light, all alone en la sierra, listening to that bear eat one of our cows in the dark. I could hear it shewing while the other poor cows, all scared to death, kept on mooing. Huddled over the campfire, I think I prayed the rosary at least one hundred times.

Chewing—not shewing, my mother interrupted. Then she turned to look at me.

And—can you imagine? He got punished for that! Your grandfather Juan whipped him with a belt buckle! She snorted, appalled as always by the violence of your father’s people.

Unperturbed, my father continued, "People were mean in those days, m’hijita. The sons, they took them to the woodyard and weeped them with belts. And the daughters, they were punished by being chut up all night, you know, in those old-fashioned underground soterranos where they kept the potatoes. No food, no water, no light, ¿sabes?

"Shildren obeyed their parents in those days. Life was too hard. It was just too hard. Every leedle job was a matter of life and death for toda la familia. If just one person deen do their job, it would break a leenk in the shain of survival, and the whole thing would go a la fregada.

Back then there was walls around the town of Taos, and even the village of Ranchos de Taos. Outside the walls and the pueblos, there was nothing but darkness, fear, Apaches, and Comanches. The Comanches were bad in those days, bery bad. Everybody had to work hard and wash out—shildren and old people too. Nobody ees estrong enough to work like that anymore . . .

Tell another one, Papa! Tell the one about the old man’s wagon, I pleaded.

Mother protested, Tony, do you really think your delinquent childhood sets a good example?

Ignoring her, he sighed, Ahhh, that poor viejito! Your uncle José was behind that one.

Tell it, please Papa!

Well, one Halloween your uncle José and me . . .

"‘José and I,’ Tony, ‘José and I’! Don’t you want her to learn to speak correctly? Do you want her to sound ignorant?"

This was the point when Papa’s storytelling voice would swell into more fluent Spanglish, flashing with multiple meanings, ironies, and playful rebellion. The Studebaker would begin to swerve and weave because Papa’s hands and his storytelling voice were connected. He drew pictures in the air while he talked. He just couldn’t help it.

"Ee-ee-ee! Your uncle José and me, we essay to eash other, ‘Oiga, vamos a play a treeck on that viejito.’

He used to leeve on Plaza de la Loma—over where your uncle Teófilo leeves now, tú sabes, at the bottom of the hill. He had a wagon, that old man, and he used to heesh up hees old broken-down yegua, poor old mare . . .

‘Hitch,’ Tony!

He used to heesh up hees broken-down mare and drive that todo fregao wagon to shursh every Sunday. Tooodos los domingos. Güeno. One night after todo el pueblo was esleeping . . .

‘Sleeping’—there is no such word as ‘esleeping,’ Tony!

Papa continued, "The whole placita was esleeping, no? La plebe en aquel entonces, they wen’ to bed early because they had to esave the queroseno, no? There wasen no ’lectricity back then.

"Güeno.