Oaxacan hot chocolate

I remember watching Sarah Weese cut cheddar cheese to make grilled cheese sandwiches on a snow day.  Sarah Weese and I always used to hang out on snow days, even though we didn’t normally hang out together.  Our houses were close enough for one of us to make the snow-suited trek (I had pink puffy down overalls I wore on such occasions) and so, when our parents had gone to work, we’d call each other:

“Wanna come over?”

“Be there in ten minutes!”

Sarah Weese would come over and we’d play, the way I can’t imagine playing now, the hours of the day slipping by without concern for time or tomorrow.  We’d make snow angels and snowmen, drink hot chocolate, play Trivial Pursuit, and prepare deluxe grilled cheese sandwiches all by ourselves.  She always cut the cheese in meticulously even slices.  I was in awe.  My slices were huge and chunky and clumsily proportioned, a fat wedge on one end and a lean wisp on the other.  Finally I just asked her to cut my cheese for me.  It was simply too fascinating to watch her do it.  She must have practiced for hours at home, I concluded, or her mother must have taught her –“Listen, Sarah, you start with the knife a half-centimeter in and you press down at a 40 degree angle with the same pressure all the way through so that the slice comes out with surgical precision, OK?”  Then, when the time came to show off on those snow days she looked smooth and cool and awesome, making grilled cheese sandwiches without awkward lumps in the middle or neglected cheeseless corners.

In the years that followed, I forgot about Sarah Weese and our grilled cheese sandwiches.  I graduated, went to college, fell desperately in love with school, took many shots of cheap vodka and did 27-second keg stands, climbed out of basement windows fleeing police, destroyed men in raquetball and discovered ultimate frisbee, slept a sum total of 10 hours a week, passionately regaled my poor parents with the theories of Murray Bookchin, and generally lived my life to the last drop.

I didn’t think of Sarah Weese again until one morning in Mexico not so long ago.  I was at the market, waiting for chicken.  Jorge was going to make his now-famous Oaxacan chicken soup, a potent cure-all brew of chicken, chayotes, carrots, small potatoes, chick peas, huiche squashes, rosemary, thyme, Mexican oregano, and heart-shaped yierbasanta, topped off with freshly chopped white onion, jalapeño and lime.  I’d just ordered the chicken.

“Should I cut off the skin?” the woman asked.  She had a ponytail of tight brown-gray curls and a thick red apron.  I nodded yes.  With her knife she made a series of swift incisions in decisive places and the skin peeled off and was thrown into a bucket.  She did the same for chicken legs, breasts, and thighs; a few swift curves and swoops of the knife and a clean sheet of skin was lifted away and tossed aside.  The way she took that skin off, not a single unnecessary movement, not a nick on the glossy flesh beneath, reminded me suddenly of Sarah Weese.

I started paying attention.  On Independencia, walking home from the grocery store, I ordered a mango.  Always wary of the prospect of vomiting for four days straight following an unfortunate street food encounter, I requested that the teenage boy in charge of the mango cart peel a fresh one.  He picked up a mango and with a small knife began removing the skin.  It came off quickly, only the thinnest layer of flesh clinging to the discarded peels.  He had it peeled in ten seconds, and what was left was bulging, succulent fruit with a dozen smooth, geometric sides of exactly the same length and width, a mango sculpture.  He then started in on the flower, scoring horizontally into the flesh in a way that felt like the chorus of an orchestra, each slice following the same rhythm and beat.  I could practically tap my foot to it.  A flower emerged from the mango, a petal of flesh opening with each movement of the knife. A cut and the opening of mango flesh, a cut and the opening of mango flesh, a cut and the opening of mango flesh, round and round the core.

“Chile?” he asked.

“Si, mucho.”

He picked up the yellow bottle of chile powder and doused it in little puffs into the folds of the flowers.  I passed him ten pesos and he handed me the flower, a work of precise, delicate design where once there was the bulbous raw material of mango.

I am sure that, if asked to produce a mango flower on the spot, it would take me ten minutes of hard labor and the result would be a decimated mango, with random bulges and emaciated curves.  My hands would be coated in sticky mango juice and I’d resort to sucking the flesh from the backsides of the peels.  And I don’t think, despite my being on the extreme end of the lack-of-attention-to-detail messiness spectrum, that I’m alone on this.  There is an art to mango carving, a casual but learned art, which this boy had down to a tee.

Again, I started paying attention.

There was the woman in La Nevería, Esther, the cocinera who ran the restaurant there and whipped up dinners that had us all swooning, nearly out of our minds with relief and pleasure after seven hours of hiking.  She was short, stout, and sure, with a pretty face: soft creamy brown with smoky eyes the color of dark coffee.  She wore a thin flowered apron and leaned with her elbows on the counter, asking us what we wanted and then, with a quick nod, making it: watercress-egg pancakes, roasted tasajo on the comal, huevos a la mexicana with extra jalapeno.

The next morning she frothed Oaxacan chocolate, her hands sliding back and forth in a vigorous steady rhythm with the  wooden tool for stirring chocolate between them, until the hard grainy blocks gave way to creamy foam.

Many other instances of this casual mastery, this practiced dominance of an everyday art that to the onlooker seems implausible and extraneous, popped up around life in Oaxaca.

There’s the way whole families eat tlayudas without getting a drop of salsa or frijol on their hands.  I gape at them, dirtied like a kid emerging from a particularly devastating finger-painting session, a heap of napkins at my side. Jorge clucks his tongue in shame.  Una servieta he hisses insistently.  No debes de usar mas que una servieta.

There are the women who juggle the freshly pressed tortillas between their hands and grab them between pinched fingertips to flip them on the hot comal, who know just when and how to press them gently so they’ll get that browned grilled flavor.  They fill the center of empanadas with pockets of mole amarillo, never too much so that it soaks the tortilla or seeps out the edges, but not so little that there are deserted patches of tortilla sin salsa.

There are the old indigenous women carrying turkeys by their feet or necks through the market, striding along firmly with their braids and baskets and vibrant scarves rocking gently back and forth, the animals letting out an occasional squawk or gobble but otherwise utterly humbled.

There are the men who slaughter goats in the Mixteca with one quick slash of the throat, and the women who open caguamas of beer with one quick yank of the carving knife.

There’s the ancient señora at the market, with a voice like a tired wobbling flute – “que quieres, señorita?” – who peels green tunas (cactus fruits) in minutes, her strong hands with raised ridges of veins and tapestries of wrinkles flaying the fruit’s thick spiny skin and leaving a gleaming oval ball, naked and slimy.  The green tunas taste like a glass of water from a sweet mountain stream that’s been perfumed by flowers, but getting to them is damn near impossible.  I prick myself and wind up shouting.  She does it hardly paying attention, dropping each newly exposed tuna in the bag.

In the beginning, on the snow days when Sarah Weese sliced cheese with dazzling expertise, I was moved by how perfect her form was and how with calm and ease she could produce something immaculate while I, no matter how many times I struggled, came out with crude although undoubtedly unique results.

But now that initial emotion has grown into something different.  It has become not only a fascination with detail and form, but also an appreciation for practices that have died out in the United States but live on here.

I don’t want to glorify Mexico as some sort of pre-industrial paradise, no, not at all, but I think in many of the subtle common practices I notice here there are vital and reassuring connections which the United States has lost.  The small, seemingly insignificant mastery that goes into peeling a mango, frothing chocolate, flipping a hot tortilla, carrying a gobbling turkey, the precise and distinct skill it takes to slaughter a goat or a chicken – these are displays of grace.  They link human beings with their food, their history, the Earth.   They contain the memory that we don’t need so much stuff, so much grandiosity, that sometimes the sizzle and pop of the cap flying off the beer jug and the unveiling of a mango flower are enough, if you pay attention.