Cooking Camp Day 2
After the teens left on Day 1, Jessica and I discussed the plan for Day 2. On the one hand, I was told the dishwasher would be fixed sometime on Tuesday. On the other hand, I didn’t want to depend on it being fixed by 10 AM. So we moved Day 3’s menu to Day 2.
If you’re trying to keep track: Day 1 was supposed to be Asian Inspired but instead was Italian Inspired. Day 2 was supposed to be Italian Inspired but instead was Mexican Inspired.
Jessica has led tortilla making workshops, and before camp started, she agreed to show the teens how to make them. I was actually grateful that she could take the lead for a bit on Tuesday/Day 2, as that was my worst day mentally and physically. That was the day where I was like, “Maybe camp will have to be canceled for some reason!” It was so bad, I even told Jessica I wasn’t doing well.
Before camp, I had to run to the store to get more cheese. When I walked into the Culinary Center, Jessica was already setting up her tortilla making supplies: three wooden presses and an electric griddle, plus bowls for the masa. Also, a man was on his back on the floor, working on the dishwasher.
A few times I heard him say, “Huh, that’s weird.”
He did finish before 10, though, and the dishwasher was fixed (slow leak from an internal pipe) and the puddle was gone. What a relief! I went to collect the teens, hoping the day would go a little more smoothly.
Jessica’s beautiful tortilla presses. She said she collects them!
The very first thing we did was make two pizzas and put them in the toaster oven. Then, the main event: tortillas!
Jessica is Mexican-American, so she talked about both the history of tortillas in general, as well as in her family. She showed off the special tools she’d brought in, including a special embroidered cloth to keep them warm. We also set rice to soak so we could make horchata, and we talked about its history, too.
Horchata, 1978
Horchata is a rice drink closely associated with Mexico. It has a long history, actually dating back to Roman Egypt. It was made with barley then. It traveled to Spain, and was very popular in Seville. The Spanish brought the drink to the New World, where the base switched from barley to melon seeds and finally to rice.
However, what intrigued me the most was the difficulty in finding a recipe. I could find some approximations of the ancient drink and I toyed with the idea of barley horchata. Maybe if we had time later in the week. (Haha we did not.) I found a lot of websites with “Authentic/Traditional Mexican Horchata!” but “Authentic/Traditional” doesn’t mean “what they drank in 1705” or whatever.
I turned to multiple cookbooks from the 1940s and 1950s, a time when Mexican food really started taking off in mainstream America. (Burritos were created in the ‘30s and nachos in the ‘40s; both were on my menu, but we didn’t get to make them.) Thanks to Archive.org, I read books that were only Mexican recipes as well as books like Trader Vic’s cookbooks that had Americanized versions of dishes from around the world. Despite its name, Trader Vic’s Pacific Island Cookbook has a section on Mexican and also Tex-Mex food. All of the drinks are cocktails. If the Mexican cookbooks mentioned horchata, it was the type made from melon seeds.
I finally found a Mexican cookbook from 1978 with a recipe for rice horchata. All of this leads me to wonder if “horchata is a popular Mexican drink!” is a newer phenomenon. Not that people weren’t drinking it, but that it didn’t become a national symbol until the last fifty years.
This recipe, from Adventures in Mexican Cooking by Angelo Villa and Vicki Barrios Schley, asks you to soak the rice for three hours. I was going to let it soak for an hour or so. Instead we didn’t get to it until, oh, two days later.
Really neat book, by the way, lots of cool pictures and information about Mexico.
Tortillas
Jessica used a 1:1 water:flour method. She used Maseca, that you can get at any grocery store, and also an heirloom yellow corn flour from Masienda , left over from a previous workshop (or maybe even last summer, when we’d made tortillas). As the teens kneaded the dough, we talked about its similarity and differences to the pizza dough from the day before. Once it was ready, she shaped a ball and put it in the press. We all gasped when she revealed the perfect flat, round tortilla.
Jessica cooked their tortillas as the teens worked in shifts to make them. They happily sliced queso fresco to eat with them. The pizzas finished not long after.
I had purchased 20 ears of corn, with the intention of making it in the microwave (again, each day was supposed to have a microwave component). But due to the amount of time and still limited cooking resources, we pivoted again, and made elotes. We’d made elotes last year, and had microwaved some leftover corn, which is when I learned the teens were enchanted by that machine. So it was a bummer to have to pivot again. But the teens enjoyed shucking the corn, removing the kernels, and cooking it. We had to improvise our sauce: Japanese mayonnaise, lemon juice, and random spices from the pantry. But the teens enjoyed it.
After camp, we put the remaining corn and pizza dough in the fridge, as well as the stockpot full of water and rice. We agreed that finally, on Day 3, we’d tackle the orange chicken.
There are worse things than eating pizza and making elotes.
Burritos and Nachos
The 1930s recipes for burritos that I found via FoodTimeline were the first ones that made me go, “Yes! We are making this! The rest of camp will revolve around this!” So I was pretty devastated to realize it just wasn’t going to work.
Obviously burritos and nachos had been around in some form forever, much like pizza, it’s a bread with a filling. But the dishes as we, twenty-first Americans, would think of them started evolving in the previous mid-century.
Burritos were made from a thicker tortilla with a depression in the middle. Chicherrones were put in the depression, then the whole thing broiled. I purchased cracklings and even chicherrones masa, which the teens did wind up eating later in the week. Modern burritos came about in the 1970s.
Nachos were invented by a chef named Ignacio, tasked with making a snack for some diners with only a few items on hand. He fried some small tortillas, cut them into pieces, then topped them with cheddar cheese (!) and sliced jalapenos.
Side note, the Trader Vic’s cookbook mentioned above, originally published 1968, has the same recipe for nachos. The recipe for guacamole calls for French dressing. That book is a trip in every sense of the word.
