On September 9, 2007, Jalisco’s “culinary queen” Maru Toledo, launched her eleventh cookbook in a ceremony held in the picturesque Hacienda del Carmen, located nine kilometers southwest of the pyramids of Teuchitlán.
María Eugenia Toledo Vargas goes by her nickname Maru and is well known in Jalisco as the founder of the Research Center for the Rescue of the Oral and Gastronomic Tradition of the Valles Region. Maru’s new book is titled “La Comida en Casas de Techos Altos” (Food in Houses with High Ceilings) and is dedicated to “the rescue of oral tradition in Xalixco,” which alerts the reader to the fact that this is much more than a cookbook. In fact, the new publication comes with a CD that reproduces a hymn at least 300 years old, which was sung by patrones and campesinos alike during the first sowing of seeds in the fields.

The compact disk also contains interviews with old-timers, as does the book. A most interesting interview is hidden away between the recipe for Panile de Semilla (Pumpkin Seed Powder) and Agua de Durazno (Peach Juice Drink) and doesn’t even appear on the contents page. In this interview, eighty-year-old Don Isidro talks about meeting Emiliano Zapata and describes the nearly impossible life of the campesinos before the Revolution. As a seventeen year old, he was required to rise at two or three in the morning and walk twelve kilometers to bring in and feed the oxen with which he had to plow the fields at first light. “And if one of us didn’t appear at sunrise, he got no food for all the rest of the week…and what was he going to eat? What was he going to eat? We hated the hacendados (hacienda owners) with a great hate… and then one day the government (under Zapata) arrived and opened the stores, which were brimming with corn. ‘Come on, ladies, take what you need,’ shouted the Federales…and they forced the hacendados to give us ejidos, plows, yokes, carts, everything we needed, and after that, life was beautiful because now all the people could work for themselves.”

Of course, this unusual cookbook also has plenty of recipes, each of which, as you might expect, is accompanied by charming memoirs of bygone days. For example, to make oatmeal cookies you need:

260 grams of butter
175 grams of sugar
3 eggs
250 grams of flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
200 grams of oatmeal
 

In the course of explaining what to do with these ingredients, we meet Tía Rosaura, the aunt who gave Maru the recipe and Rosaura’s lovely cat which must have learned all the cooking secrets of the house while spying on the kitchen from up in the attic. We also learn all about her aunt’s bedroom where a long-dead pretender, still in love with her, would come to sit on her bed at night to caress her tenderly. Next to the bed was a “ridiculous white bathtub with twisted legs,” and above it, a curious shower. Pulling on one of two chains would bring down a spray of hot or cold water which Maru “always dreamed of using” but never got a chance to try.
And the cookies? “The first thing we did was to beat the butter with the sugar until it became creamy. Then we added the eggs one by one, always continuing to beat the mixture. After that, we added the flour strained with the baking powder. Finally, we added the oatmeal. We put blobs of dough on the greased trays and pushed them into the oven.”

Besides recipes and folklore, La Comida en Casas de Techos Altos also contains the first chapter of a novel which, as you might suspect, has much to do with an old hacienda, a book of recipes and Aunt Eugenia, after whom, it appears, a commercial brand of butter (recommended by Maru) was named. It should also be mentioned that this cookbook comes with an enormous collection of photos and drawings showing colonial kitchens, cooking implements and techniques (like the “nixtamalization” process) and even a picture of Aunt Rosaura’s cat.

At the book launching, several original melodies were played on the panpipes by Maru’s colleague, Godofredo Oseguera, co-director of the research center. If you are interested in taking a cooking class taught by Maru and Godofredo themselves, you may want to contact their school in Teuchitlán, the Jardín Mestizo, which has been specializing in prehispanic gastronomy for over nine years. Just call Maru’s cell phone number: 044 333 839 9941 or send us an email which we will forward to her.

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