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I was not the only one to bust out some Mexican-American fusion experiments on Thanksgiving this year. Miracle McNeill came to dinner with a tupperware container full of congealed mac and cheese and promises of a treat (he also brought his newly up-the-duff wife along). I ceded the kitchen to him on the condition that he let me pilfer his recipe. Here it is….
Ingredients
* Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner
* Whatever else you need to make Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner (milk and butter?)
* A pile of tortillas
* Valentina very-hot sauce
Preparation
1. Miracle McNeill emphasises that the key to Maco success is to over-cook the Mac and Cheese. So pre-heat a pan of water, and when it begins to boil add the macaroni noodles. Leave them in for too long.
2. Remove from heat, stir in the butter, then the Cheese powder, then the milk. Mix it all together until it is a delicious and overly-yellow gelatinous goo. Note: the mac should retain its shape, it should just be overcooked and sticky.
3. Grease a hot plate and lay out some tortillas. Spoon mac and cheese mix onto the tortillas and add a little Valentina. Fold them over and fry both sides until they are splendidly dorado (golden). Repeat repeat repeat until you have a mound of Macos.
4. Is that really it? Miracle McNeill didn’t just receive that name for nothing.
Warning: Macos are surprisingly filling and unsurprisingly addictive.
My enthusiasm for the approaching Thanksgiving was met time and again with cruel reminders that Thanksgiving is not an Australian tradition. None the less, this was only going to be my second real Thanksgiving, and I was damn excited by the prospect of eating a lot of weird food. Despite what some did/will say, traditional American food is weird. Sweet potatoes topped by marshmallows? Baked potatoes topped with corn flakes? They may be delicious, but there is something counter-intuitive about all of these. The crossing of well-establish boundaries, the pairing of breakfast foods with dinner foods, dinners with desserts.
I was determined not just to eat a lot of weird American food, but to pay testament to the weirdness of said food by weirding it a little more. I wanted to do some Mexican-American fushionising. So I volunteered to make the traditional Thanksgiving Green Bean Casserole. But I resolved to do it Australian-Mexican-American style. Which basically just means that I took the green beans out and put rajas in. They’re still green; really I just changed one word of the name.
Ingredients
* 12 chiles poblanos, to make into rajas
* two cans (or one very big can) of cream of mushroom soup
* milk – quite a bit
*onions – quite a few
*flour – not much
*salt, pepper, ground garlic, etc.
Part One – Making Rajas
1. Turn the gas burners on (or in my case, find out that you’re out of gas, order more, wait for two hours for it to be delivered, wonder how you could have used so much gas so fast, and then turn on the gas burners), and char the chiles poblanos directly over the heat, until the skin is blistering to brown and black. The less healthy, smooth dark green skin left the better (not sure what this does to the nutritional content of the chiles, but since when has Thanksgiving – or Mexican cuisine in general – been about that?).
2. As soon as you remove the chiles from the flame, put them in a plastic bag and tie it tight, so that the chiles sweat. Let them do so for about 15 minutes.
3. Remove the chiles from the bag, pull/scrap their skin off (should come away easily), and remove the cores and all the seeds. Cut the chiles into short strips, and you have a heap of rajas ready for casseroling (if you’re not casseroling them, stir fry them lightly with onion).
Part Two – Casseroling
1. Pre-heat oven to 175 degrees Celsius (or if you have a Mexican oven, set it to ‘quite big flame’).
2. Mix the mushroom soup, rajas, maybe some onion, and about one soup tin worth of milk. Add sat, pepper and etc to taste.
3. Pour the mix into a baking tin/tray (don’t line it with baking paper like I did unless you want to be picking shreds of paper out of your teeth all night), and bake it for 30 minutes, or until its bubbling and getting firm.
Part Three – French-frying Onions.
1. Perfect example of the weirdness of American food. What do you need to add to a perfectly good casserole? A whole lot of crunchy fried onion rings, obviously. So cut some onions into thin rings.
2. Soak the rings in milk for a few minutes.
3. Mix flour, salt, pepper, ground garlic etc on a plate. Drag the milk-soaked onion rings through the flour mix.
4. Fry the battered onions in a panful of dirty oil, then set them to drain.
5. When the casserole has firmed nicely, dump the onion rings over the casserole, and bake again for a few more minutes.
Hypothetical Part Four – Enchiladaing your casserole (warning: this is untried!)
1. Don’t dump the onion rings over the casserole and re-bake it. Instead just remove the casserole from the oven.
2. Lightly fry a bunch of tortillas – but keep them soft!
3. Spoon (or knife and fork) portions of the casserole into the tortillas, rolling them up. When you have a long row of tortillas heap the remaining casserole mix over the tortillas. Top with the onion rings and cheese (optional).
4. Bake the casserole enchiladas for a few minutes.
5. You’ve just created a brand new food bastard. Is it good? I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t be.
November 20 marks the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. What? Wasn’t that September 16 and all the Miguel Hidalgo business? No way Jose; Mexico has had both a war of independence and a revolution (and various conquests, a few invasions and now a war on drugs). Officially the Mexican Revolution began in 1910 and ended in 1920, although there have been and continue to be revolutionary relapses spawned by the first bloody revolution.
Throughout the revolution a series of rulers succeeded one another in Mexico, always requiring at least a little military force to make it into, and to stay in power. Most of these figures, as with my of the prominent figures of the revolution, would be eventually assassinated by the factions of their rivals.
Two of the most beloved folk-heroes of the revolution are Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the Centaur of the North and the Tiger (or the Attila, depending on who you talk to) of the South. Neither of them ever became top dog, but both of them were decisive generals who helped topple the other top dogs of the revolutionary period.
While Villa launched his raids and courted Hollywood, Zapata had the more definite agenda to his struggle. Villa was a career bandit who took up the banner of the revolution. Zapata was a dandy and talented horseman who took up arms slowly when it became clear there would be no other way to continue the struggle for land rights for the impoverished serfs of his region.
Eduardo Galeano (author of Open Veins of Latin America) unsurprisingly calls Zapata “purest of the revolutionaries, most loyal to the cause of the poor, most determined to right the wrongs of society”. Certainly Zapata was the most radical of the revolutionaries, and this made him utterly uncompromising. Three consecutive rulers of Mexico were comrades-in-arms to Zapata, until they came into power and did not do enough to address land reform. Ultimately there could be no place in the newly emerging Mexico for Zapata; the new order was one of compromises, of moderation, perhaps of vacillation. It was the last ally-turned-ruler, Venustiano Carranza, whose underlings deceived, ambushed and assassinated Zapata in 1919.
Zapata’s Plan de Ayala was a rambling manifesto, full of spelling errors. It helped characterise Zapata as an illiterate brigand whose movement had been co-opted by radical city intellectuals. The plan was also the most revolutionary document in Mexico at the time; it was printed in newspapers to discredit Zapata, but instead drew thousands upon thousands of disillusioned peasants to his cause. It also demanded that Zapata’s military adversaries be considered traitors and not prisoners of war, and summarily executed en masse. As was written in the Plan, Zapata was “resolved to struggle against everything and everybody”.
Zapata died at the same age as Che Guevara, and like Guevara it required his death to bring him into the mainstream. Both men found they couldn’t live with the systems they had in part established, that the results of their revolutions weren’t sufficient, and that there would be always and forever a need for more guns (even though neither men had started out with a gun in his hands). In death though Che found a place on t-shirts everywhere, the poster boy of the left. Zapata found a place on the now out of circulation 10 peso note, and became one of the heroes of the Revolution, poster boy for a system he had rejected and died still fighting. Although times have changed in Mexico the fundamental inequality has not; the poor are still as voiceless, as trampled as ever.
Zapata has become a hero, though, and not just a hero to jungle revolutionaries or downtrodden peasants. Contemporary Mexico was born out of Carranza’s government, out of his constitution; Zapata is celebrated today by the offspring of those who arranged his murder. Perhaps he had to die for Mexico to find a way forward, perhaps there is no place for an uncompromising, die-on-our-feet-instead-of-living-on-our-knees mentality. Galeano paints a picture of the state Zapata was creating in the wake of his military victories; it is a socialistic utopia. It sounds very much like what Mexico needed and needs. But it doesn’t sound much like something that could ever be allowed to exist; such a society couldn’t be made by a dissenting faction; only the consent of everyone could build such a society and see it thrive. That or a lot of guns.
So finally Zapata is a hero to all, but only in death. In life there was no place for him and his ideas. The only safe way to deal with him was to betray and kill him, so he could be safely printed onto the lowest denomination of paper money; a fitting location for one who sought to raise the lowest common denominator in his country.
I had a Pancho Villa t-shirt once and I loved it intensely. It went where I went, and occupied the designated ‘white t-shirt’ place in my pack, even after it was turning yellow and pilling uncomfortably and shrinking further and further up my midriff. Before it was retired the tee travelled with me through Europe, North America and Asia.
I bought the tee in Zacatecas, where a thundering equestrian statue of Pancho Villa overlooks the city. It (the tee) read ZACATECAS / Pancho Villa / Centauro del Norte / Mexico. Zacatecas was the site of one of Villa’s most significant victories.
Wherever I went with my Pancho Villa tee, I could be relatively sure of finding at least one Mexican who wanted to congratulate me (ok maybe not in Korea, but certainly in Europe and the US). When I started living in Spain I made sure to wear the tee in the presence of potential Mexican friends. If I couldn’t speak Spanish I could at least speak cool. Pancho Villa is definitely cool.
I’ve written before about the conundrum of wearing Che Guevara tees. These days it’s cooler to decry Che shirts as a betrayal of his revolutionary dreams than it is to wear a Che shirt. The other incendiary revolutionaries of the twentieth century haven’t quite progressed that far in popular theory yet.
Villa was, in any case, a very different kind of revolutionary. He took no stance as broad and untenable as the downfall of capitalism. He fought more or less consistently against a string of military rulers during the Revolution (some of whom had been former comrades-in-arms), but made no grand manifestos declaring his motives. Land reform was if not one of Villa’s goals, then certainly one of his methods, as he appropriated hacienda lands and pressured the wealthy into funding his campaigns with generous loans.
Villa was no communist; if anything he was closer to a rogue entrepreneur. Aside from expropriating the wealth of the upper classes, he raised money with train robberies, by printing his own money, and by signing film deals with Hollywood, which brought camera crews into his camp. He would have sold t-shirts to fund the cause if they were in vogue back then.
The Mexican Revolution was the era that forged Mexico’s international image. It was from this time that the image of the gunslinger wearing a wide sombrero and wrapped in bandoliers originates. Pancho Villa was the archetypal gunslinger of the time; there are many photos of him on horseback, haughtily posed and with ample moustache, armed and defiant. He was a capable general known for recklessness, for leaving a trail of destruction and controversy that other politicians and general were forced to clean up. He would have made a terrible president, but he made a great desert caudillo, storming fortresses, torching cities and evading capture.
The revolutionary era in Mexico took a long time to end, but as it began to dwindle away Villa and other revolutionary generals found themselves outlawed and cut off from their funds and supplies. There was really no place for Villa in the new Mexico. As successive governments slowly returned stability to the country the old firebrand generals needed to disappear so that new structures of power could emerge. Villa retired to a hacienda in the north, and as with all the figures of the revolution, was assassinated by the underlings of one of his rivals (even though his power was already broken). A late spasm of violence in the tail of the revolution.
I bought my Pancho Villa t-shirt because it looked cool. It didn’t make as strong a statement or counter-statement as a Che tee. I suppose I could say that the shirt represented the fight against oppression, but really it just represented the fact that Pancho was supremely cool, a figure that managed to make a dirty business look glamorous. Villa is known as a hero of the revolution today, I think, more because of his charisma and his eminently t-shit-worthy image than because of his politics or his methods or his results.
While Guevara and probably others sit awkwardly on their t-shirts, their revolutions betrayed to consumerism, Villa sat comfortably on my shirt and sits comfortably on others (though not all that many). The t-shirt is perhaps his proper realm; a fitting place to remember a Hollywood rogue, a revolutionary who ran out of revolution, a sly entrepreneur and a Mexican icon.
The story goes that while working for an English newspaper, Bruce Chatwin interviewed the designer Eileen Gray. They discovered a mutual fascination with Patagonia, and the 93 year old Gray told Chatwin to go there for her. Two years later he arrived in South America, quitting his newspaper job with a telegram; “Have gone to Patagonia”.
Chatwin makes no mention of this story in In Patagonia, the book spawned by the trip. Instead he chooses for his mythic start a piece of Brontosaurus skin (which actually came from a Mylodon, some sort of prehistoric giant sloth) in a cabinet in his grandmother’s dining room. The skin was from Patagonia, and among other things he was going to Patagonia to claim his own scrap of Brontosaurus.
These multiple origin myths are pretty characteristic of Chatwin’s storytelling. He doesn’t try to resolve his narrative into a series of certain events; he’s not too concerned with definite facts (which is probably why he has been accused of distorting and fabricating details of the book). Instead he explores possibilities, gathering local myth and opinion and adding his own theories. He traces, for example, the path of Butch Cassidy through Patagonia, visiting the cabin he lived in, talking with people with hazy memories of the outlaw. Eventually the path starts bifurcating; perhaps Cassidy died in Bolivia (the official line), perhaps he survived, perhaps he returned to the US, perhaps the whole fatal shoot-out was fabricated. The possibilities multiply and Chatwin explores them all, leaving them side by side, a whole Patagonian mythology.
There is an immense amount of research and reading behind the novel. Chatwin very rarely speaks of himself (somewhat ironic given the personal mythology he built for himself), but it’s clear that he is a tireless explorer and investigator. Aside from knowing of virtually every book, poem and journal ever to mention Patagonia, he chases down a wealth of extra colour and detail for every one of his stories and characters. Even the most minor figures, mere asides within the stories, are fastidiously researched: “The rest of Harry’s career was predictable. He went to the war, joined a fast set, married three times and ended up in England, the secretary of a golf club”.
Chatwin apparently adored Jorge Luis Borges (more mythology), and although Borges gets no mention in In Patagonia, his influence is thick within Chatwin’s style, particularly within some of the stories. Like Borges, Chatwin explores an idea and then begins to twist it, taking it to extremes, probing the possibilities. Writing of a a secret cabal of male witches in Chile, he finishes with “No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the Challanco is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the ‘Central Committee’ is a synonym for Beast”. Borges would have been proud of such a paragraph.
In between the witches and the mylodons, Chatwin manages to weave interpretation of Shakespeare (“into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World”), a Patagonian genealogy for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, political intrigue, isolated Welsh communities, plenty of murders, noble savages, an El Dorado myth, Charles Darwin, water tigers, a Patagonian unicorn, Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan; the whole Patagonian pantheon.
In another of his books (Utz), Chatwin writes about collecting and obsession. Certainly with In Patagonia he is collecting the stories of Patagonia, going to great lengths to uncover them, studying and pursuing them obsessively. This is not your standard travel writing, Chatwin is telling other stories instead of his own. Perhaps he is stealing them too, or at least re-appropriating them. Still, his fascination with Patagonia makes for brilliant reading. Chatwin lived a vibrant life, full of adventure and controversy, but he knew enough to know that he didn’t have to create his own stories in order to write a great book. There are enough myths and stories preserved like that scrap of brontosaurus, that just need to be unearthed in order to enchant again and again.
Chatwin eventually tracks down his Mylodon cave, finds a site still littered with perfectly preserved evidence of the ancient beast. The cave is, like all of Chatwin’s subjects, and perhaps like all of Patagonia, a strange place where reality and myth overlap. Chatwin pilfers a few impossible Mylodon or Brontosaurus hairs and it is hard to know whether this is myth or history or possibility or fancy, but that is the whole point. Whatever the Mylodon was, it exists today as many possibilities, as a series of forking paths. Wandering these paths doesn’t bring much resolution, but that doesn’t really matter. It is in the possibilities that the fascination lies.
