Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  “There are a lot of cultures involved in Cajun food,“ Link said. “No one can really lay claim to it. Why does it have to be one thing? Why can’t it be different? Why can’t it be in an entirely different context?”

  On opening night, Cochon Lafayette was already addressing these and other questions. The restaurant’s parking lot was full.

  FORAGING AND FISHING THROUGH THE BIG BEND

  By Gary Paul Nabhan

  From Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands

  Long before it became a foodie mantra, “eating local” was a guiding principle of Gary Paul Nabhan’s pioneering work as a farmer, food writer, and conservation biologist. In Desert Terroir, he gives us a deeply personal look at how his life in the American Southwest forged that connection to the land.

  There was a particular moment in my life when I knew I must live where I could fully taste the place in which I lived every week for the rest of my life, if not every day. I call it my Seek-No-Further moment, named for an heirloom apple that sometimes grows in old streamside orchards of the Desert Southwest. This revelatory moment did not occur exactly where I live today, but along the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, where barren rocks and towering yuccas dwarf any gardens, fields, orchards, or pastures.

  It was along the Big Bend that I learned the pleasure of making a meal of foodstuffs gleaned only from the surrounding landscape. I gained the urge to make such a meal by meeting some poor Mexican families who had to eat off the land in order to survive. My time among them humbled me, for it suggested that I should never again ignore or waste the harvestable foods within reach of where I stood. To do otherwise would certainly dishonor the borderline families that so generously shared with me the little foods that they had, but it would also dishonor the plant and animal foods that emerged from some of the driest reaches of this earth.

  My revelatory moment of homing took place some twenty-one years before I write this, but it has taken me all this time to fully acknowledge how that epiphany has guided my life since then. Before Big Bend, I had moved along listlessly, without much of a place or taste of my own. I meandered through life like a disengaged visitor, strolling through the garden of earthly delights merely reading the signs in front of each plant rather than reaching out to pluck the ripest among them.

  And then, as I broke out of the chaos of cactus and brambles on that day of epiphany, I could at last see, as well as savor, the fruits of the tree of life growing right before me.

  Ironically, my Garden of Eden was devoid of apples (no Seek-No-Furthers nor any other heirloom varieties). Instead it tasted of cornmeal-crusted catfish, wild oregano, chile pequin, and a few poisonous nightshade berries tossed into some goat’s milk to make it curdle. If you can wait a little longer for me to cast the rest of this story, I think you’ll understand how a catfish, some goat cheese, chiles, and oregano came to lead me home.

  Oddly, I can’t remember much about my life at that time. I had been living rather unhappily in the sprawling metropolis called Phoenix, working at a botanical garden filled with desert plants that seemed to be assaulted on all sides by asphalt, concrete, plywood, wallboard, and two-by-fours. Fortunately, someone suggested to me that I should study the edible flora of the Big Bend, and that I might be able to get a deal serving as a guest guide with a rafting outfit that regularly ran through the canyons there. I had never spent much time in the wilds of Texas nor in the monte of Coahuila, but portions of those areas had recently been conserved as biosphere reserves. I knew little about biosphere reserves except that they allowed the local, more sustainable uses of edible and medicinal plants to continue within their boundaries. I needed to get out of the city, and Big Bend was the ticket.

  The Big Bend, as you may know, is a raggedy dogleg of the Rio Grande. That river—hardly more than sixty yards across and four feet deep through much of the Big Bend—briefly cuts through a series of canyons with walls four hundred feet tall. The population density of that region of the U.S./Mexico border rivals that of the bleakest reaches of North Dakota. There are more cacti than people along the Big Bend, and more emptiness than busy-ness.

  Perceived by most folks as an empty, desolate, and desultory place, Big Bend has also been neglected by wild food enthusiasts, but is held in great esteem by desert rats. I myself had not thought much about nor thought much of the Tex-Mex borderlands until I was granted the chance to float and eat my way through Big Bend on a raft trip with Far-Flung Adventures in the autumn of 1988. When the proprietors of Far-Flung sent me a postcard of their six-month-old baby smiling, sitting naked in a pile of jalapeno peppers, I became intrigued.

  There was a lot more than jalapenos, however, among the groceries when I and the other rafters arrived at the “put-in” site known as Solis, where we loaded the rafts with waterproof river bags, grills, canteens, and coolers with a half ton of canned food and beer. I began to wonder whether the familiar foods we’d brought along might serve as a disincentive for discerning the unique flavors of the Big Bend, but I readily accepted a cold one when someone popped open a beer and offered it to me.

  Mexico’s Sierra San Vicente was in sight as the trip began, and as we glanced downstream, we saw the glistening river disappear into a three-mile “tunnel” called San Vicente Canyon. Its limestone walls rose above us in subtle shades of grays, buffs, and creams; where the sun shined upon them, they were so barren and bright that we could have gone stone-blind by simply staring at them for more than a minute’s time.

  “This ain’t Eden,” I grumbled to myself, wondering how in the hell I was going to lead an “edible plant walk” later in the day when everything in sight looked as though it might bite at me before I could take a bite out of it.

  If there was anything edible along that first stretch of San Vicente, it remained hidden from me. However, Marcos Paredes, our head guide, reminded me that we were visiting during the season of hunger weather, when food was hard to come by. That’s why Mexican cowboys brought the cowhides they cured and candelilla wax they refined across the river to get cash so that they could buy canned groceries and beer. Yes, there were some desert foods out there, but they would be slow to reveal themselves. Instead, we turned our immediate attention to all the other plants that poked their thorns and spines and stickers out from the otherwise naked canyon walls.

  After our first riverside lunch of cold cuts, chips, and beer in the shade of an old mesquite tree, we put the rafts in and began to float the Rio Grande in earnest. Like the Rio Colorado, the River Nile, and most other desert rivers I have floated, the Rio Grande has its banks choked by a dense thicket of shrubby tamarisks and a canebrake of bamboo-like grass that the Mexicans call carrizo. As the sinuous river curved and looped back on itself like a coiled snake, grassy curls of carrizo offered a minimalist’s hint of greenery in swirls and corkscrews and commas on the water’s edge. Beyond this narrow little lip of lushness, the limestone slopes of San Vicente Canyon appeared barren, that is, unless you got down on your hands and knees beneath the creosote bushes and took a good hard look at the ground. There, hunkered down amid the dull-colored stones, were beautiful “rainbows,” highly prized by cactus collectors, along with a dozen other species of cryptic cacti unique to the Chihuahuan Desert. In some places, as many as thirty-five kinds of spiny gray cacti were hiding out on each acre, some of them bearing delicious strawberry-like fruit. To recognize the cacti and to eat their succulent fruit, I first had to learn how “to get over the color green” (as Wallace Stegner once urged us to do) so as to take note of their world.

  Down on the river, the most obvious objects other than our rafts were two-liter Coke bottles bobbing up and down, especially in the eddies just downstream from where the river bent.

  “Holy mole!” one of my raft companions exclaimed, pointing and frowning. “The Mexican folks around here must toss all their Coke bottles into the river with no respect for the river itself.”

  “Well, I’m not saying they’re pretty, b
ut at least they’re functional,” explained Sammy, a boatman from the Far-Flung crew. Sammy was skinny, leathery, gray-haired, and goofy, and wore as few clothes as possible, rain or shine. He rowed as he spoke:

  “A lot of those bottles . . . I guess they’ve been scavenged from our camps or rescued from the river. The Mexican folks retrofit ’em, turn ’em into floats for jug-lines to catch catfish.”

  “What do you mean . . . they’re not all free-floating trash?”

  Sammy shook his head. “No, not at all. Especially during the drought, people need to eat from the river cuz, well, they can’t eat a helluva lot from the land. So they gather up four or five of those two-liter Coke bottles, put a little gravel in them, sometimes paint ‘em white, caulk them closed, screw the caps back on, and they’ve got some pretty cheap floats for their jug-lines. Then they tie some braided twine tight around the bottlenecks. They might extend the line, oh, maybe some twenty feet or so, and start adding hooks, leaders, or sinkers, or anchor them with bricks. Or tie them to a lead line tied to a tree off the bank. Now, when a catfish hits, the bottle dips, the gravel rolls to one side, and weight shifts to the end with the cap. They come by and see the jug has shifted position, check it, and find a big of catfish on the hook.”

  “Muy suave. Pretty slick. Wish we could do it,” I said.

  “Well, hell, just keep your eye out for one of them jugs that has got loose.” Sammy put one oar in his lap and pointed over toward an eddy, where the drift lines tend to get waylaid. “We like to pull in the drifters, anyway. Maybe it’ll already have a fish on it, maybe it won’t, but you can float it behind the raft for a while. As long as you don’t let it drift loose again, and check it every half hour or so, I doubt anyone will bother you.”

  Late that afternoon, after we had set up camp in San Vicente Canyon, not far above the town of Ojo Caliente, I found a ghost line drifting along with a jug behind it. I pulled it in, refurbished it a little, and set it out. Within fifteen minutes of placing it in the water, I saw my Coke bottle float by, bobbing. I grabbed some gloves out of my pack, and a bucket from the cooking area, and went over to pull up my first fish of the trip.

  It was most likely a Chihuahua catfish, close kin to the widespread channel cat, but a species more common on the middle and lower Rio Grande. Its tail has a shallower fork than those of both channel and headwater catfish, and the Chihuahua seldom reaches a full foot in length. Differences aside, they are all good eating, as we learned later that evening after gutting and grilling four or five more that we had caught (by rod as well as by jug).

  While the Far-Flung crew reheated a pre-prepared pan of enchiladas, poured out a can of beans into a skillet to refry, and mashed some avocados into guacamole with the bottom of a beer bottle, a couple of us sat in the sand next to the grill and pan-fried our catfish. We passed around nuggets of catfish as finger food just after dark, and most everyone agreed that fresh catfish was much tastier than canned beans. The catfish was soon forgotten, however, as more beer appeared out of the coolers—Dos Equis, Tres Esquis—all the X’s you could count or drink. A little beat-up guitar was passed around the group, and we tried our best to remember the words of songs by Gary P. Nunn, Doug Sahm, Steve Fromholz, Butch Hancock, and other Texas songwriters.

  With the jagged lines of the canyon rim above us, I put my sleeping bag on a tarp ten feet from the river and looked up at the sky to watch for the moonrise from my sleeping bag. As usual, I faded off to sleep before the moon arrived.

  In the twilight time the Mexicans call la madrugada, I awakened to roosters crowing not all that far away. The stars were still visible in the slot of sky framed by the canyon, but I could see from a rose-colored patch of the Sierra del Carmen in the distance that the day was coming on. I pulled on my jeans, slipped into my huaraches, put on my straw cowboy hat, grabbed my plant collection bag, and began to walk toward the sound of the roosters, where I presumed I would find the little spring-side settlement of Ojo Caliente.

  The hot springs had been tapped to irrigate a few small fields, and they were in the last throes of being harvested. There were melons and squashes, corn and beans, broom sorghum, sugar cane sorghum, and pasture grass. It was hard to tell who had harvested more of the crops, the Mexicanos or the grasshoppers. Grasshoppers were everywhere, hopping around as if they had bit parts in a motion picture about biblical plagues. I wondered if these grillos were ever grilled and eaten when other foods were scarce. (Later in life, I carried grillos asados from Mexico along with me as a trail food whenever I ran rivers.)

  Just as the dawn’s light spilled into the canyon, I met a young Coahuiltecan woman who was going to fetch some drinking water from the springs. She carried two beat-up plastic water jugs. She had three small children in tow, and another one or two on the way, judging from her bulging shape. She was willing to talk for a while in exchange for me carrying the water back to her house. Her name was Maria de Lourdes.

  When we were going back to her place, she stopped to rest in the shade of a big mesquite, so I opened the bag of plants I had been collecting and dumped them in the sand before her and the children.

  “Would you mind telling me if any of these are eaten here?” I queried her.

  “Pues,” Maria said haltingly, as she sorted through the plants freshly picked from the river’s edge. “Well, you should really talk to an older, more knowledgeable woman like the yerbera downstream in Boquillas del Carmen.”

  “The yerbera?” I asked.

  “You know, well, she’s the curandera. Her name is Isabela. Everyone knows her in Boquillas. Even the gringos come to see her.”

  “Well, I’ll try to find her when I get to Boquillas, but perhaps there are plants here too that you yourself use as food . . .”

  “Well, yes, there are some, but most of these plants you have picked this morning are medicines, not foods. I can tell you a little about them, but Isabela knows them better.”

  Maria de Lourdes paused for a second to rummage through the pile, and her children crowded in around her.

  “Look, you have the gobernadora [creosote bush]. Very good for stomachache and for kidneys. You have calabacilla loca [buffalo gourd]. That’s not good to eat. It’s good for bleaching out our bowls and towels and pots and pans. And there, you have the hierba de la golondrina. We give it to the babies to stop their diarrhea.”

  “Sounds like you have got a lot of plant medicines around here that can help you deal with stomach problems,” I noted.

  “What would you expect?” Maria said flatly, running her fingers back through her braided hair. Her mouth closed tightly before she began again. “Asi es la vida. That’s how it is where you have bad well water. Here, you got river water contaminated with mierda from the cows. The meat and the vegetables spoil quickly in the heat if you don’t have any refrigeration. On top of that, the drought all the time, too. It can keep you hungry, too.”

  “Well, what do you try to grow over here?” I asked.

  “The nopal and the tuna—what you call the prickly pear cactus—that’s the most reliable thing we got. Even in drought, we can rely on it. Not so the beans and the corn and the squash and the melons over there in the field. Even if we irrigate them, maybe we get something two, maybe three out of five years. If the heat doesn’t get them then it’s the grasshoppers. Or else the cattle break in. I’ll show you what we grow, what we keep inside the fence around our house. . . . I can always grow some onions there. Sometimes the plants of chiles, tomatillos, and cilantro survive. You know, I just throw the dishwater on them. That’s all they get.”

  Maria de Lourdes got up to go, motioning the kids and me to follow. I grabbed the water jugs she had filled at the springs.

  “What else can you eat when the corn and beans fail?”

  “You know, you have some of them here in your pile [of plants], but it takes work to pick enough of them to eat. Like this one here, the garambullo [hackberry]. Or that other red berry, agrito [wolfberry]. Sometimes, we’ll even make a drin
k from the mesquite bean pods. Not too often anymore. Like anybody else, we’ll eat the wild greens if they come up in the fields. Qaelites. Verdolagas. But some years, they don’t even sprout—too dry here.”

  When we approached her little adobe house—one of only five left in the village—I was ready to drop the jugs of water from my shoulders. I looked at her, so young, pregnant for the fourth time, and wondered how she did it each day. Of course I had guessed that it wasn’t easy to fill the larder from this stretch of desert, but I had never realized that a shallow well, some edible wild greens, and berries might be the only buffers against thirst and starvation.

  “So how do you make it? Do the men here gain much cash from the livestock? I mean, do you gain any income from your own work—cooking, crafts, sewing?”

  “With the children this age? I can’t do much more than keep them fed and clean. The men proudly say they are just poor vaqueros. You know, they don’t really keep enough vacas to gain much cash. If a cow gets hurt, we have to butcher it right away, no matter what the size. Butcher and jerk and dry the meat for later. My husband, he cuts candelilla for wax, cuts lechuguilla for fiber, cuts the sotoi for the bootleggers, picks oregano or chile pequins. It’s whatever people will buy. Anything so we can keep the kids fed.”

  “You have wild oregano and wild chiles here?”

  She pointed to the backyard as I set the water jugs down for her. “We have a plant or two in our huerta behind the kitchen. But you’ll see them down by the river, up on canyon walls, if you know how to look.”

  If you know how to look . . . as I had to learn to look for the ground-hugging cacti and their fruit on the canyon slopes. If you’re hungry enough, you have to learn how and where to look for them. You would have to learn how to pick them with as much speed as you could possibly muster. You would have to learn how to dry them so that they wouldn’t spoil before the buyer arrives. You would have to learn how to do all of this as efficiently as possible because your family needs food and the drink and the medicines, as well as the cash for the things you can’t grow or forage. This desert is not for wimps. It exacts its price. I looked at Maria’s hands: a few scars, a few burn marks, chipped fingernails . . .