Dave DeWitt - The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook: The Soul of Mexican Home Cooking

2022 by Dave DeWitt and Jos C. Marmolejo

All rights reserved. Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8263-6351-0 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6352-7 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948221

Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional homelands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New MexicoPueblo, Navajo, and Apachesince time immemorial have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.

Cover illustration by Mindy Basinger Hill

Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

Composed in Adobe Caslon Pro

DAVE dedicates this book to the memories of Marlin Bensinger and Jeffrey Gerlach.

JOS dedicates this book to his childrenSofia, Natalia, Julieta, and Andreswho have enjoyed his cooking as well as his food anecdotes.

Chile, they say, is the king, the soul of the Mexicansa nutrient, a medicine, a comfort. For many Mexicans, if it were not for the existence of chile, their national identity would begin to disappear.

ARTURO LOMEL / El Chile y Otros Picantes (1986)

Special gratitude to Chuck Evans for the use of his extensive food library in Spanish and to Jeanette DeAnda for helping Dave learn the Spanish culinary language. Special thanks to Steve Hull and the rest of the University of New Mexico Press team for a great publishing effort. We would also like to thank the following people for their help on this project: Lula Bertrn, Cindy Castillo, Jesus Martn Cortez, Josefina Duran, Marta Figel, Lorenzo Fritz, Kathy Gallantine, Nancy and Jeff Gerlach, John Gray, Antonio Heras, Patrick Holian, Diana Kennedy, Jay Lewis, Leo Nuez, Jim Peyton, Mark Preston, Maria Marcela Ramonet, Maria Lila Robles-Uscher, Robert Spiegel, Susana Trilling, and Robb Walsh.

It has often been written that the only national cuisine of Mexico is the cuisine of chile peppers, and this book examines the ways chile peppers are used in Mexican cooking. First and foremost, in Mexican cuisine, more than in the cooking of any other country, chiles are utilized as a food as much as a spice. In massive quantities they are pureed into sauces, stuffed whole, chopped, roasted, powdered, pickled, and used as rajas, or strips.

Our collection of Mexican recipes celebrates the chiles role as a primary vegetable in the national cuisine even though botanically they are berries and horticulturally they are fruits.

Important features of this book include:

• A wide selection of recipes in which chiles are the principal ingredient, including chiles rellenos, salsas, and pickled chiles.
• The most complete glossary of Mexican chile terminology ever published, along with a detailed glossary of other Mexican food terms and techniques.
• Regional hot and spicy recipes covering most of the thirty-two states of Mexico.
• Personal stories from the authors exploration of Mexican cooking.

Readers and cooks should remember that this is a book focusing on chile-oriented Mexican dishes and is not intended to provide complete coverage of Mexican cuisine, which, in our opinion, is impossible to accomplish in a single volume.

Jos lives in Mexico City and has spent decades learning how his country cooks with chile peppers. Dave lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has visited Mexico more than fifty times, and is one of the foremost chile experts in the world, having authored or coauthored twenty-three books on chiles and spicy world cuisines. Hopefully, our love and appreciation of Mexico and its varied cooking styles comes across in this volume.

Fortunately, chiles and other Mexican ingredients are increasingly easy to find in the United States and Canada. Not only are they appearing in supermarkets and Latin markets, but they are also available from numerous online sources, including our favorite source, MexGrocer.com.

We continue to use the same heat scale that we devised for Chile Pepper magazine and many cookbooks: mild, medium, hot, and extremely hot. Each rating takes into consideration the types of chiles in the dish, the number of chiles used in the recipe, and the degree of dilution with the other ingredients. The relative heat of each recipe can be easily adjusted.

We hope you enjoy our hot and spicy trek south of the border.

A Brief History of Chile Peppers in Mexico

In southern Mexico and the Yucatn Peninsula, chile peppers have been part of the human diet since about 7500 BC, and thus their usage predates the two great American civilizations, the Maya and the Aztec. From their original usage as a spice collected in the wild, chiles gained importance after their domestication, and they were a significant food when the Olmec culture was developing, around 1000 BC.

About 500 BC the Monte Albn culture, in the valley of Oaxaca, began exporting a new type of pottery vessel to nearby regions. These vessels resembled the handheld molcajete mortars of today and were called suchilquitongo bowls. Because molcajetes are used to crush chile pods and make salsas today, the suchilquitongo bowls are probably the first evidence we have for the creation of crushed chile and chile powders. Scientists speculate that chile powder was developed soon after the suchilquitongo bowls were invented, and both the tool and the product were then exported.

Using the same technology that proved the use of cacao at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, researchers have analyzed the contents of the residue of pots from ancient Mexico and have discovered traces of chiles without cacao. This indicates that either chile sauces were being made, or that they were used to spice up other beverages, about a thousand years earlier than the Joya de Cern archaeological site in El Salvador.

Terry Powis, associate professor of anthropology and his colleagues at Kennesaw State University in Georgia have chemically analyzed the residue in thirteen pottery vessels, including spouted jars, pots, and vases dating from 1,700 to 2,400 years ago that were found at an archaeological site in the state of Chiapas, which was at that time inhabited by the MixeZoquean people.

The best and most direct evidence for chile pepper use in Mesoamerica prior to our study is from Cern, writes Powis in his article, Prehispanic Use of Chili Peppers in Chiapas, Mexico. So our work pushes back this date from circa AD 540 to circa 400 BC. To be honest, our study is the only one of its kind to show direct evidence of chile pepper use. In all of the other examples listed in the paper there is only indirect evidenceof chiles and pots found together. We actually linked the two together for the first time, and that is an important development. Therefore, we actually have the earliest known consumption of the peppers. Powis added, During the mass spec analysis we were completely surprised by the fact that no cacao was present in any of the pots tested. In fact chile was present. The exact species of chile present was not identified, but Powis hopes to accomplish that in the future. The most logical species is the