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FORK PLAY February 19, 2008
Tasting the Yucatan. Zarela Does Mexico.
Dear Friends and Family,
Before we left for Merida, capital of the Yucatan, Zarela Martinez invited The Road Food Warrior and me to join her at Zarela's to taste one of her special regional dinners. "A preview of the Yucatan," she said. My late friend Harley Baldwin had fallen in love with Zarela and her mother doing langoustines with garlic and chiles at what was surely one of the greatest gatherings of kitchen talent ever: dozens of chefs, professional and amateur, more than 40 recruited, I believe -- not for charity, but for fun and to honor Craig Claiborne and his memoir, A Feast for Laughter, on his 62th birthday at his Easthampton home. Not many cooks or cookbook writers would say no to Craig, but would anyone? If you were an uninvited foodie, that left you definitely below the salt. Then there were the 400 celebrated guests, media powers and bold-faced names from Claiborne's dinner circle.
I was thrilled to be asked..and insisted on making a dish. Paul Prudhomme had driven a mobile home from Louisiana to cook his jambalaya and one hundred pounds of blackened redfish, Zarela recalls. Lionel Poilane sent bread from Paris. It would be Paul Bocuse, Marcella Hazen, Jacques Pepin, Roger Vergé from the Moulin de Mougins, Pierre Franey and me, doing my insanely rich and buttery mushroom strudel.
Next thing I know, Baldwin had encouraged Zarela to move to New York with her seven year-old twins, Aron and Rodrigo - and helped her find an apartment on what was then a not yet gentrified 83rd street off Columbus.
So Zarela and I have a history and, as we have discovered,  several shared passions. Mexico counts her as a proud booster of its cuisIne and culture, just as Tony May, Lidia and Joe Bastianach and Mario Batali have been for Italy, igniting our taste for authentic products, feeding our sophistication.
As for that dinner we shared, one of her weekly "Gastronomic Tours of Mexico", I loved the lime soup with strips of tortilla, fiery with habanero chiles and tangy with sour orange and lime, and loved it again here in Merida, from a handful of Yucatan offerings on a menu of French, Spanish and Mittel European specialties by an Austrian chef at Villa Maria, a few blocks from the restored colonial house we have rented near the old center of town. Zarela did fish tacos, again with the Yucatan's essential sour orange and habaneros, and poblano chiles stuffed with annatto-orange recado-flavored chicken steamed in a banana leaf.
I am not a fan of shredded chicken. Indeed I rarely love pulled pork as much as unpulled pork (except perhaps the especially juicy pulled pork one evening at Daisy Mae's BBQ served minus its usual slug of vinegar out of respect for the magnum of great Bordeaux our pal Bob had brought along to share.
As for the banana leaf: I always appreciate a well-wrapped package, but it's the gift that counts (or the thought) and dried-out breast of chicken is no gift. So far we've had sensational ceviches and shrimp cocktails and a few scary black stews and pork fried to resemble shoe leather. To read more go to BITE.
By far the best Yucatan food we've tasted was at a lunch in the home of Elba Garcia, a daughter of one of Mexico's great art families, artists and art supporters - she is director of the Fundacion Cultural Macay, Merida's contemporary art museum. Waiters kept replacing shots of tequIla and tomato juice as fast as glasses emptied and weight watchers nibbled carrots and jicama sprinkled with chile power and lime juice. I was dizzy contemplating the plan of Elba's brother Carlos Garcia-Ponce, who has lined up a rotating board of some of the world's great museum curators to select artists whose maserworks will be featured in a garden of the Great Sculptors of the 21st Century to be built nearby.
Finally, not even the calorie- counters could resist the elegance of the tightly curled and deep fried tacos, called codzitos, with a spill of tomato sauce, and a classic Yucatan snack, panuchos: a small puffy tortilla filled with black bean paste and topped with shredded chicken, pickled red onion and salsa. I'm afraid I am hopelessly spoiled now for any other panuchos we may encounter.
A simple salad of cucumber and avocado doused with lime cut the richness of a dish that was more stuffing than chicken, and a sauce that had every born and imported Yucatanaphile at the table raving. Dessert was a choice of papaya preserved in lime (the chemical, not the citrus), traditionally offered with Gouda (from Merida's days of trade with the Dutch) and a photo-perfect Carlotta Russe tied with a red ribbon. Of course. I had to have both.
***
Photos of Carneval, shrimp cocktail and me in a hammock at Las Palapas by Steven Richter cannot be used without permission.
Copyright pending Gael Greene 2008
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