Got some new cookbooks.

[Nativearizonan]

Here in Arizona the homegrown Mexican food is called Sonoran style, and I recognize it as really large, very thin flour tortillas for burros and lots of longhorn colby cheese for cheese crisps , as well as the usual stuff you would expect . Then there is the New Mexican style, which developed in the Rio Grande Valley with lots of Hatch Valley green chiles chopped up in everything. The rellenos in AZ and NM are made from the same long green chilles, whereas most other regional mexican food, including, I think, Tex-Mex, uses poblano peppers for rellenos. There is a great Mexico City style mexican food place in downtown Tucson, with very little cheese, no refried beans, and lots of small hand made corn tortillas, but it is an imported style. When I was growing up, the easy way to rate a mexican food restaurant was by the size of their cheese crisp, which was always ordered as an appetizer.

 

[coloradoclyde]

How did we go from Shaker and Appalachian cookbooks to Mexican food?
I guess the topic went south..... :haha:

 

[Brokennock]

Do you want the ISBN number?

Sure. That would be great. Thanks.

 

[satx78247]

RotflmRao.

yours, satx

 

[coloradoclyde]

Do you want the ISBN number?

Sure. That would be great. Thanks.

ISBN: 0-517-263882

 

[tenngun]

The best I ever ate was a little hole in the wall in San Diago in the navy. The place looked like the lowest dive, and the family that owned it would be hard pressed to sit in a duce and a half, though there were only half a dozen. Looks aint every thing, God went there to eat on his days off.

Was that over near Coronado in say Barrio Logan, or over in NationaI moved from San Diego, we found a guy from Mexico, in a tiny little building, that only made burritos, just outside of DC when I was growing up....could've taught a thing or two to Chipotle.

If folks go to Hathi Trust and search under the word "cookery"...., they will find old cook books, OR try English cookery books to the year 1850...it's a book that lists previously published cook books by Year and Title, and then search for the title; some can be found within The Hathi Trust...., so alas are lost.

LD

I don't recall the name of the place. I got out of the navy in '79 so the last time I was in San Deigo was in 78, and now I'm getting the ol'timers and don't recall as well. It was on El Cajon just a little west of La Mesa.
I never ate in a restaurant in Mexico, but have ate from a lot of street venders, never had trouble. Alas I was young and foolish when last in Mexico, running with navy buddies we were looking for beer and parties

 

[Brokennock]

Thanks C.C.

 

[coloradoclyde]

I found it online for less than $4.00 :shocked2:

 

[zimmerstutzen]

Regional cooking? Here in PA a dish can vary just by going 20 mile one direction or the other. We sometimes talk about a dish variation by the county, such as whether a shoo fly pie is Berks County or Lancaster County. Traditional Germanic colonial foods such as scrapple vary greatly just from eastern pa to central pa.

 

[tenngun]

A yup. Where I grew up enchiladas were corn tortillias stacked and baked with filling in between. Sort of a Mexican flavored lasanga or moussaka. They could be cheese or meat, but were not rolled. It wasn't until I joined the navy and ventured to California that I ever had rolled enchiladas.
My mother who was cooking challenged, made moussaka as a dish growing up, with potatoes :nono: Later I got her cook book, published in the 1930s, and she had followed the recipe from it. A friend in the navy introduced me to goulash...no tomatos no macaroni but heaven in a bowl.

 

[Nativearizonan]

A yup. Where I grew up enchiladas were corn tortillias stacked and baked with filling in between. Sort of a Mexican flavored lasanga or moussaka. They could be cheese or meat, but were not rolled. It wasn't until I joined the navy and ventured to California that I ever had rolled enchiladas.
My mother who was cooking challenged, made moussaka as a dish growing up, with potatoes :nono: Later I got her cook book, published in the 1930s, and she had followed the recipe from it. A friend in the navy introduced me to goulash...no tomatos no macaroni but heaven in a bowl.

One of my favorite dishes in AZ was a green chili burro, enchilada style, with sour cream. I ordered one of those about 45 years ago in the small NM town of Magdalena, and they didn't understand the order. I told them it was like a burro filled with green chili served like an enchilada with sauce and then sour cream on it. They asked if I wanted meat with it, and I said, yeah, you know, like a green chili burro. So they said, well, okay, and took the order to the kitchen.

What they brought out was an open flat flour tortilla, with a bunch of fresh diced and cooked green chili on top of some fried ground beef, with a fried egg on top of that and a side dish with some sour cream.

That was when I learned mexican food could be quite different in NM.

 

[Nativearizonan]

I know a guy who ordered a bowl of chili in a small town in NM, and they brought out a bowl of diced green chili. No meat, just diced green chili.

 

[satx78247]

While I like "New Mexico style" food, it is NOT "Mexican", any more than it's "Chinese food" NOR is it even vaguely "Tex-Mex".

Truthfully, "NM-style" is Amer-Indian & NOT "Mexican" at all.

I "look forward to" the arrival of REAL Hatch pepper arriving each year at Central Market here in The Alamo City. = You know that the GOOD pepper have arrived if you drive buy the market & can smell them roasting with the windows rolled up.

yours, satx

 

[satx78247]

Here in South Texas, what you had is usually called: STACKED ECHILADAS.
(Incidentally, they are often fixed that way in Nuevo Leon & Sonora, Mexico.)

Usually in Sonora the layers (starting at the plate):
tortilla
charro or refried beans (black or pinto)
tortilla
cooked/shredded beef
tortilla
green chopped onions, strips of hot peppers & shredded cheese
tortilla
PLACE THE ABOVE "STACK" IN A 450 DEGREE OVEN FOR 10 MINUTES
Then add some sort of salad on top & PERHAPS shredded cheese on the top, for garnish.

Note: It's been my experience that IF you find stacked enchiladas on the menu, you have found a café that serves at least some traditional MEXICAN cuisine.

yours, satx

 

[Nativearizonan]

The best flour tortillas I ever ate were cooked by an Apache Indian lady. They were about 18" and made so thin they were translucent. They could be folded up like a napkin and unfolded without breaking at the crease. They were served folded and used like bread that way.

One old cowboy told me the best tortillas were slapped out on a bare thigh. I don't know if that is how she did it, but she had the anatomy necessary to make those large tortillas.

 

[satx78247]

That makes perfect sense as the flour tortilla is a "reservation invention". The government used to drive through the reservations in "Indian Country" & throw 50-100# sacks of flour off the wagons/trucks & expecting NA women to make loaves of bread from them.

Inasmuch as "loaf bread" was unfamiliar to most such NA women, they made something that seemed "right" in their culture & the flour tortilla was "born".

yours, satx

 

[tenngun]

That sounds like what I had heard called pika bread. Cooked on a flat rock in mutton fat. Often made with blue corn. So tasty hot off the grill, or stone as it were.
Mexican food is Indian food isn't it???

 

[Nativearizonan]

That sounds like what I had heard called pika bread. Cooked on a flat rock in mutton fat. Often made with blue corn. So tasty hot off the grill, or stone as it were.
Mexican food is Indian food isn't it???

Not Piki bread. This Apache lady made flour tortillas, with lard, or animal fat of some kind. Piki is a Hopi bread that is made from finely ground flour corn cooked, like you say, on a hot rock and then rolled up and tied like a scroll; no fat, just corn flour and water. They would grease the rock with smashed pumpkin seeds, though. Then a bunch of these scrolls are tied together and hung on the wall for storage. They are very flaky. The flour tortillas were pretty tough, for how thin they were, not flaky like the piki.

Mexican food is definitely Indian food. Mexicas is what the native people called themselves, who we now call Aztecs; but a lot of what we think of as mexican food was the food of the Native American populations of the northern reaches of Mexico, including the American Southwest. Early Spanish accounts talk about being served tortillas, beans, and chiles by the natives when they first reached the area. The Aztecs had a more varied diet, due to their location and the availability of so many different foods.

 

[tenngun]

All the pika I ever had was in mutton fat, the girls had a smear of it by hand on the rock, the batter was just corn meal and water. It was Navajos I had it with. Ordered it once at the 'Navahopi kitchen' in Tuba city, just got a fried corn totillia :td:

 

[coloradoclyde]

You guys are making me hungry......I love a good flour tortilla or any flat bread...

I picked up some more cookbooks today....not as good as the others but still have some very old recipes in them....some I never even heard of....