la ruta de la milpa

We catch an uber out of the city. It climbs to the outskirts where the self-built houses start to become part of the hills, unevenly peeping out of nooks and crannies to watch over the sprawl of CDMX. We arrive in a town square at 9am, greeted by a band of dogs. The air feels crisp and cold, a refreshing break from the muggy ambiente of the city and there is a mercado where we have a brief and semi-successful search for cafe/sustenance before meeting our guide Jorge. We scramble into the back of his pick-up and he drives us out of town and through the fresh wind to the nopales fields where we begin our tour. Jorge begins by telling us the meaning of milpa, a Mesoamerican crop-growing system producing maize, beans and squash, aka the basis of the Mesoamerican diet. I'm not sure I can really emphasize enough the cultural significance of it in Mexico - but maize is almost a religious symbol here. Before teaching us about the nopal (an edible cousin of the cacti),  he debriefs us on how to avoid splinters when picking it. We then pick nopales and I immediately get a splinter in my thumb. His wife and father-in-law set up a table and hot plate where tomatoes, chillies and onions are charred before being smashed into salsa in a giant pestle and mortar. The nopales we pick face a similar fate to their veg siblings, thrown onto the steaming hot plate with fresh tortillas. Whilst sipping sweet café de olla we construct a breakfast of tortilla, nopales, cheese and salsa, our mouths burning with the heat of the chili. It is delicious, rich and deep, and perhaps one of the nicest things I have eaten in Mexico. I realize that charring food = more flavour.

After our mouths have recovered, we pile back into the truck for the next stop on our tour. On the way we are harassed by some barky dogs on a roof, and I realise that we all have 35mm film cameras which makes me feel slightly ashamed and really pretentious. The next stop is in a lady's courtyard where she shows us different types of maize and how to remove the kernels with a stump made of maize (how resourceful!). There is a competition to see who can remove kernels the fastest and the lady obviously wins. We are shown the entire process, from kernel to tortilla, and handed weighty balls of masa to knead and attempt to form tortillas with. For me this proves a struggle. As someone who loves cooking, and almost all foods, I stride confidently into the tortilla-making process only to completely embarrass myself by creating something which barely resembles a tortilla and disintegrates as soon as it hits the hotplate. This doesn't affect the flavour though, and our host creates sopes out of the sad-looking tortillas - pinching the semi-cooked dough to make it thicker and then topping it with salsa, onion and coriander. The heat from the salsa is soothed by a traditional drink made of maize and perhaps cacao? I can neither remember the name nor the content, whatever it was it was tasty.

Next a plate of maize leaves and a mixture of masa and frijoles is placed on the table as our next food construction challenge begins; tamales. Tamales consist of masa wrapped in maize leaves and traditionally filled with a variety of goods including mole, salsa verde, beans or even sweet fillings. I once confidently named what I thought were all the tamales fillings to my flatmate, only to then google 'tamales' and realize that there are over 400 variations. 

We place the bean filling inside the leaf, wrap it over and then tuck the end of the leaf into the pocket, creating a warm and squishy ball of goodness. This is probably the easiest and most fun food construction of the day. In a moment of magic, a huge basket of steaming tamales are whisked out by Jorge as we are egged on to tuck in to yet another delicacy. We carefully unwrap them and pile on the remaining salsa, breaking the masa off bit by bit and licking our fingers clean. They are delicious.

As the day goes on I take less and less photos, as I become more and more full of food. Our next stop involved sitting on plastic chairs in a field and receiving a presentation from a beekeeper and his daughter, and a man who made dulce de leche from goat's milk! I won't lie, I was semi-asleep by this point and don't really remember much from this section of the day, other than that I really wanted a nap. Which says a lot because I hate napping. As our hosts spoke we were handed what seemed like endless wooden spatulas topped with different flavours of dulce de leche (ranging from vanilla to mezcal to tequila), all of which were accompanied by a disconcerting aftertaste of goats' cheese. 

Our final fiesta was at the Fería de Mole, a huge fair/festival dedicated solely to mole (not the animal) which lies at the heart of Mexico's cuisine (and Mexican stomachs). Although there are variations, the basis of mole is chili, chocolate, tomatoes and spices, ground into a sauce and traditionally eaten with chicken and rice, or as a tamales filling. At the fería we were once more subject to more endless wooden spatulas - this time atop with various types of mole. Our heaving stomachs were then sat down at one of the feria's restaurants and fed a three course meal! Somehow we survived through each delicious course - first a vegetable broth, then mole with rice and chicken, a light serving of obleas (a sugar paper/wafer in a crescent shape - basically some sweet cardboard - my least favourite delicacy of Mexico), all washed down with a glass of pulque - essentially alcoholic maguey sap - or 'fruity phlegm' as I have dubbed it.

The feeling I had at the end of the day was akin to that of post-christmas dinner - full, sleepy, and gluttonous, but satisfied. We returned back to the city - six of us squashed into a tiny taxi - with full stomachs and a desire to never see a wooden spatula ever again.