A Culinary Adventure Through Veracruz
When the first peals of thunder reverberate through the cloud forests of Mexico's eastern Sierra Madre highlands in May, thick clusters of white, star-shaped blooms known as flor de trueno — literally "thunder flowers" — open, signaling the start of the rainy season in Veracruz. This Gulf Coast state, a sickle of hills and beaches, is a region of year-round magnificent abundance, filled with coffee, vanilla, and honey. During the summer rains, however, frequent showers bring wild mushrooms to the surface of the forest floor and encourage hundreds of flower types into bloom.
"There are 52 edible blooms in Veracruz alone. We eat flowers rather than decorate with them "On the sunny April day we met at her house in Xalapa, Veracruz's state capital, Raquel Torres Cerdán, a 72-year-old anthropologist, cookbook author, and former restaurant, stated. She's been using her kitchen for the last six years to host courses on the cuisine of her native state, a topic she's studied for more than 40 years.
Torres began visiting the hills near Xalapa with her family when she was a child, and as an dordle anthropology student and employee of the federal government's Rural Development Program in her twenties, she expanded her visits to more remote regions of Veracruz. Despite the fact that she began working in her father's restaurant at the age of 13, the variety of items she met on subsequent travels surprised her. They represented not just Veracruz's diverse array of fruits and vegetables, fish, and wild animals, but also the civilizations and rituals that have thrived there for three millennia, dating back to the Olmecs, Mesoamerica's first significant civilization.
However, outside of household kitchens, Torres argues, finding manifestations of that variety has always been challenging. She scoured cookbooks from as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries after opening her second restaurant in Xalapa's historic center in the early 1980s, but found no recipes that required, for example, those thunder flowers, an ingredient used regularly by many of Veracruz's 14 Indigenous communities.
"I assumed these novels were created for those who could read...which is to say, for the wealthy," she said as we sat in her little ocher kitchen. "That's when I realized I needed to do something new."
Torres had created a half-dozen dishes, all of which were typical of the Xalapa area. She packed gleaming pear-green jalapeos with a pale-yellow mash of sweet plantains, then dipped them in a goat-milk cheese and cream sauce. Young black beans simmered gently with masa dumplings, sticky and pliable like gnocchi, in a narrow-necked clay pot. A pitcher of nectar made from wild capuln, an astringent stone fruit that looks like a cross between açai and black currant, sat on the sideboard, lurid as a bruise and generously spiked with caa, a high-proof liquor distilled from sugarcane, sat on the sideboard, lurid as a bruise and generously spiked with caa, a high-proof liquor distilled from sugarcane. Torres presented a simple zapote negro dish for dessert, the fruit slathered in honey and citrus, its flesh dark as molasses and as unctuous as an overripe avocado.
When the first peals of thunder reverberate through the cloud forests of Mexico's eastern Sierra Madre highlands in May, thick clusters of white, star-shaped blooms known as flor de trueno — literally "thunder flowers" — open, signaling the start of the rainy season in Veracruz. This Gulf Coast state, a sickle of hills and beaches, is a region of year-round magnificent abundance, filled with coffee, vanilla, and honey. During the summer rains, however, frequent showers bring wild mushrooms to the surface of the forest floor and encourage hundreds of flower types into bloom.
"There are 52 edible blooms in Veracruz alone. We eat flowers rather than decorate with them "On the sunny April day we met at her house in Xalapa, Veracruz's state capital, Raquel Torres Cerdán, a 72-year-old anthropologist, cookbook author, and former restaurant, stated. She's been using her kitchen for the last six years to host courses on the cuisine of her native state, a topic she's studied for more than 40 years.
Torres began visiting the hills near Xalapa with her family when she was a child, and as an dordle anthropology student and employee of the federal government's Rural Development Program in her twenties, she expanded her visits to more remote regions of Veracruz. Despite the fact that she began working in her father's restaurant at the age of 13, the variety of items she met on subsequent travels surprised her. They represented not just Veracruz's diverse array of fruits and vegetables, fish, and wild animals, but also the civilizations and rituals that have thrived there for three millennia, dating back to the Olmecs, Mesoamerica's first significant civilization.
However, outside of household kitchens, Torres argues, finding manifestations of that variety has always been challenging. She scoured cookbooks from as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries after opening her second restaurant in Xalapa's historic center in the early 1980s, but found no recipes that required, for example, those thunder flowers, an ingredient used regularly by many of Veracruz's 14 Indigenous communities.
"I assumed these novels were created for those who could read...which is to say, for the wealthy," she said as we sat in her little ocher kitchen. "That's when I realized I needed to do something new."
Torres had created a half-dozen dishes, all of which were typical of the Xalapa area. She packed gleaming pear-green jalapeos with a pale-yellow mash of sweet plantains, then dipped them in a goat-milk cheese and cream sauce. Young black beans simmered gently with masa dumplings, sticky and pliable like gnocchi, in a narrow-necked clay pot. A pitcher of nectar made from wild capuln, an astringent stone fruit that looks like a cross between açai and black currant, sat on the sideboard, lurid as a bruise and generously spiked with caa, a high-proof liquor distilled from sugarcane, sat on the sideboard, lurid as a bruise and generously spiked with caa, a high-proof liquor distilled from sugarcane. Torres presented a simple zapote negro dish for dessert, the fruit slathered in honey and citrus, its flesh dark as molasses and as unctuous as an overripe avocado.