(A different version of this article appears in the Fall issue of Sabroso magazine)
Near the corner of Bullard and Sixth Street, in the heart of Silver City, New Mexico there is a restaurant named Nancy’s Silver Cafe. It is a small restaurant—five or six booths and few scattered tables, all crowded with locals. A graphic of a busty Mexican woman scrubbing the floor hangs on the wall above the soda fountain. Here, waitresses take orders in a mixture of English and Spanish, and carry plates of enchiladas and beans, bowls of menudo and baskets of golden sopapillas balanced up and down their arms. This is an authentic New Mexican experience. An old woman is flapping tortilla dough from hand to hand, then slapping it on the griddle, while minding the green chile sauce (made with diced tomatoes) on the stove. For more than 30 years, generations of the same family have been doing this every day. Outside, a lowrider passes by.
All across the great state of New Mexico, one will find tiny Mexican cafes like this. Up and down the main street’s in places like Carlsbad, Silver City, Espanola, Taos, and not to mention the bigger cities of Las Cruces, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, these Mexican food restaurants make their humble homes. They are named after people—Amelia’s, Pete’s, Roberto’s or Lucy’s, or they are named in Spanish—La Fonda, El Paragua, El Paisano, El Parasol and El Sombrero and they are not fancy. Here, one will not find tablecloths; there are no sommeliers, no maitre d’s and you don’t need a coat to sit down. Simple tables bear salt and pepper, packets of sugar and one well-used jar of honey. The waitress will tell you, truthfully, what she likes on the menu, and laugher and Spanish will spill from the kitchen.
“Anybody who doesn't think that the best hamburger place in the world is in his home town is a sissy,” writes Calvin Trillin and the same notion holds true in New Mexico. Here, it isn’t burgers the people defend; it is their enchiladas, their chile rellenos, and the wonderful, lovely green and red chile sauces that they pour over them. Ask a New Mexican if the food is better in the northern or southern part of the state and you are apt to start a fight. Northerners and Southerners alike defend the integrity of their cuisine. Nortenos and Sudenos alike believe the two are different, and each is adamant that theirs is better.
Yet, it remains to be seen if the two cuisines differ enough to warrant such heated debate. To settle this, I went on a weeklong eating spree. Up and down I-25 I sought out plates of enchiladas, golden sopapillas and whatever else locals claimed they made better than their counterparts in the other half of the state, which was just about everything. This took me to places like El Paragua in Espanola, The Shed and Castro’s in Santa Fe, Nellies and El Taco Mexicano No. 2 in Las Cruces, La Posta in Mesilla and Chopes in La Mesa. Anyplace that had an index of Mexican food terms on the back of their menu was docked points. I wanted what the locals ate. I wanted to learn from the people that knew their food.
To aid me in this pursuit, I brought along Anela Borrego, a fellow editor and proud “Nortena,” (as I am from the south) and together we set out, looking for enchiladas. We argued, violently and times, and we ate. Calabacitas. Red and green enchiladas. Rellenos. Frijols and rice. Chicos and sopapillas. We ate, and ate and ate. Green chile stew, tacos and tacos more tacos still. Finally, with a trail of combination plates and tamale wrappers in our wake, we collapsed, fat and out of insults.
This was going to be harder than we anticipated.
To some, the distinction between New Mexican food and Mexican cuisine is. New Mexico has the highest percentage of people of Hispanic ancestry of any state in the US, some recent immigrants and others descendants of Spanish colonists, and the food here is a direct representation of this influence. However, the cuisine (though similar in some fashions), is not from Mexico. Nor were the Spanish settlers that made their way up from Mexico in the 1500s the sole influence on the food (just as the Spanish were not the sole influence on the cuisines that grew out in the different regions of Mexico). Dating back to the time of the Anasazi, the oldest culinary heritage in the nation, New Mexican food is a melding of Native American, Mexican and European (and Anglo, one might add) cultures over a span of hundreds of years.
When the Spanish traveled up through El Paso and made their way into what is now New Mexico, they found societies of Native Americans that were making good use of what food they could pull from the arid land. Hunted foods—primarily deer, rabbit, quail, bison and pronghorn—supplemented gathered foods of acorns, pinon nuts, berries, herbs, mushrooms and cactus. Roughly 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, well before the Spanish conquest, four important foods were domesticated—beans, corn, squash and chile—thus forming a noble quartet serves as the foundation of this cuisine (think about it—even today an enchilada contains beans, chile and corn tortillas and would be a lot better if people remembered to put squash inside it). Nicole Ammerman, manager of the Santa Fe School of Cooking, refers to this as one of the defining characteristics of New Mexican food. “If you look at New Mexico,” she says, “we are a state that produces very limited amounts of agricultural goods, in terms of variety, not amount.” “When I look at historical cookbooks,” she continues, “[I] see cooks working with only a handful of ingredients and making different variations with them.”
So how then can a cuisine that evolved from the very same agricultural constraints differ from itself?
One commonly held assumption is that the food in the north is more heavily influenced by Native American traditions, whereas in the south, the food is more “Mexican.” Ammerman supports this statement, saying that in the North, corn is a bigger part of the diet, and dishes like chicos (sweet corn dried in an horno oven), calabacitas (squash prepared with chile) and sopapillas (which is similar to fry bread) are common.
In the South, however, foods that are more directly linked to Mexico (with who we share a lengthy border) are more present. Tacos, tostadas, and fideos are only some of the foods that more directly take after their cousins to the south, not to mention the very Mexican tacos or asada, al pastor, and various other meats served with lime, onion and salsa.
Maurice Zeck, a professor in New Mexico State University’s school of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management, however, holds that while there was probably a significant difference between the food of the two regions 300 years ago, “now there is not a dime’s worth of difference.” How much difference can there be, he asks, between good enchilada in Silver City and good enchiladas in Taos? To Zeck, this is simply a marketing tool (all restaurants have to be unique to sell their food). Zeck points to two major influences on New Mexican food. The first is not a product of the north or the south, but of Chihuahua, Mexico. “Go into any kitchen in the state,” he says, “and you will find a bunch of people from Chihuahua in there, cooking.” He credits this to the fact that a larger segment of the population is going to school now instead of working in the long, hot hours (which usually don’t pay well, either) in a restaurant. This left the door open to immigrants, who came in as dishwashers and moved up the line until the majority of the cooking was (and is) being done by people born in Mexico. They bring with them, Zeck says, their mother’s kitchen craft, and their mothers are in the interior of Mexico, not New Mexico.
Secondly, when chefs trained in culinary schools, (like Mark Miller of the Coyote Cafe), began to open restaurants in Santa Fe, Taos, and, well, everywhere else, they brought with them new ways of cooking. It wasn’t long before someone noticed that they could subvert the traditional way of making red chile (steeping them in hot water, blending, etc) by making a roux and adding chile powder to it. While much faster (and more French), this accompanied the invasion of non-Natives from California and other places with softer palates into New Mexico, which changed the type of food that was served, and how it was plated. This new audience didn’t want Nancy’s Silver Café, they wanted the Coyote Café, and that is what they got. The economic market, Zecks points out, calls the shots.
It could also be, as one loyal Southerner told me, “I just haven’t found any places up there that I like.” New Mexico, as the fifth largest state in the Union, is about as big as New England. While the food, and the people, in New York are different from the folks up in Maine, it is no surprise that many New Mexicans don’t know the north or south very well. With Santa Fe being close to five hours from Silver City, it is no wonder that for many New Mexicans the north or south of their own state is foreign territory.
In our experience, the food in northern New Mexico was different from that in the south. But the difference wasn’t so much between north and south, because the food was different from town to town, kitchen to kitchen. Each restaurant had its own ways of doing things—some better than others—and while this answer is a cop out, it is the truth. There is no way to say that the tacos at El Taco Mexicano #2 are better than the enchiladas at The Shed because, well, both are good. Different, but good. This distinction is not determined by their geographical location in relation to the rest of the state—in every kitchen across the state people are making foods differently, north or south.
New Mexican food, like all great cuisines, comes from necessity. It comes from the creativity of people living without, taking what they do have and making something good to eat with it. It comes from several distinct cultures, merging in a much more peaceful, creative and satisfying manner than the humans behind them managed. In the end, New Mexican food comes from our kitchens and the kitchens of those that were here before us. It belongs some Senora whose food we have been emulating for 40 years. It is those old women, the mothers of our great-great-great past, which lay at the heart of New Mexican cuisine, and here in every kitchen across the state, both at home and in the restaurants, those flavors are lovingly carried on, eaten, and respected.
Good Green Chile
Everyone in New Mexico prepares their green chile sauce differently. While some just add chile to cream of mushroom soup, I don’t. I want my chile big and bad. I collaborated with local Las Crucen chef Aaron Seavers on this recipe (as in I told him my idea, and he did all the hard work) and it is one of the better I’ve tried.
She isn’t shy, this sauce. She wears no mask and she isn’t afraid of me, and she isn’t afraid of you.
12 green chiles, roasted and peeled. Note: Use New Mexican, the hotter the better.
5 jalapeno peppers, roasted and peeled
1 red bell pepper, roasted (optional)
2 tomatoes, roasted (optional)
5 cloves garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped
3 to 4 tbsp oil
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup water
Pinch of cumin
Salt and pepper to taste
1. In a stock pot over medium heat, cook garlic and onion in oil until onion is translucent.
2. Add chile (and red bell pepper and tomato, if using) . Add chicken stock, water, cumin, salt and pepper and let simmer for about 1 hour or until reduced by half.
3. Stir. Use over enchiladas stuffed with pinto beans, queso fresco and black olives (my grandma always did this).
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