Susana Trilling, cookbook author and PBS chef, gives
classes in the spice-rich cuisine of Oaxaca at Seasons
of My Heart cooking school at Rancho Aurora.
Under the sky blue dome that crowns her spacious “temple of cooking,” Susana Trilling is explaining the mysteries of mole. Dressed in an embroidered huipil, her dark hair braided with maroon ribbons, she holds up several types of wrinkly dried chiles: “Oaxaca is the land of seven moles. Everyone makes it differently, but the ingredient that all moles have in common are chiles. The mole [which means “mixture”] is cooked in one pot, the meat in another. You never want to taste one ingredient over another.”
Seven other students and I are lounging at a long, handhewn table, sipping chilled Coronas, eating buttery, black skinned aguacates criollos we picked up in the market earlier in the day. I take notes, but steal an occasional glance at the Sierra Madres from the window of the school at Rancho Aurora where we have gathered for a five-day cooking class. If culinary heaven exists, at least for this moment I’ve found it here.
The traditional cuisine of Oaxaca has roots that go deep into Mexico’s colonial and pre-Hispanic past. There is no livelier guide to its twists and turns than cookbook author and PBS television host, Susana Trilling. She has spent the last 19 years in the region’s kitchens, coaxing authentic recipes for moles and other gastronomic delights from a wide circle of stellar home cooks. A former caterer and restaurant chef, she now runs Seasons of My Heart, a cooking school at an organic farm just outside town.
Born in Philadelphia, Trilling first tasted homemade flour tortillas, tamales and frijoles at a small Tex-Mex café her grandmother ran at the Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio. After cooking at restaurants from Alaska to Australia, she became chef at Bon Temps Rouler in New York. Then she came to Mexico and fell in love with the ancient culture of Oaxaca—a passion which she shared in her first cookbook and PBS series, Seasons of My Heart. A second book on the foods of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is in the works.
Trilling’s generosity and good cheer have won devoted admirers all over Oaxaca. Wandering with her through the city’s bustling Mercado de Abastos, we were besieged by vendors crying, “Susana! Susana!” as they embraced and exchanged family gossip. Her friendships led us to the mountains where we spent an afternoon with a mystical wild mushroom hunter and to the home of the four cheery Hernandez sisters where we made sopa de guias de calabaza (summer squash vine and flower soup) and black beans with niditos (literally “bird beaks,” actually tiny handmade dumplings) over an open fire. She once tossed out our schedule and whisked us off to a raucous fiesta celebrating the baptism of a friend’s grandson, making us feel less like students than old friends at a free-wheeling house party.
Recently, we talked with Susana by email about the cooking of Oaxaca and the way cinnamon is used in its signature dishes.
How would you describe the cooking of Oaxaca?
The Oaxacan kitchen is a magical place where foods from Mexico and other parts of the world have converged to produce a unique style of cooking. It is a mixture of pre-Hispanic foods prepared and eaten by indigenous groups—such as armadillo and turkey, or atole, a gruel made of ground corn—and the Mestizo cuisine that emerged a few generations after the Spanish Conquest. Mestizo cuisine has ingredients like almonds, allspice, cinnamon, raisins, prunes, sesame seeds, all foods that were transported to Mexico from the Old World, India and other parts of Asia.
After the Spanish Conquest, there was also a big Moorish influence, which is apparent in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as well as Oaxaca city foods. When Maximilian became Emperor, his cooks brought French culinary traditions—cream sauces, etc.—that influenced the cuisine of Mexico as well as Oaxaca.
Could you give an example of a dish that reflects these currents?
Estofado de pollo, Spanish chicken stew with capers and green olives, is a signature dish of the region. It’s prepared many different ways. Sometimes it’s red, sometimes it’s green, depending on the type of chiles used, how ripe the tomatoes are and the proportion of tomatillos used. But in general, the sauce is made of Old World ingredients such as almonds, capers and olives, Asian spices such as cinnamon, cloves and black peppercorns, and indigenous chiles, tomatoes and tomatillos. Traditionally all the ingredients are ground on a metate, a three-legged grinding stone used since pre-Hispanic times.
