Susana Trilling's Chile Lovers' Tour is among the culinary
vacations featured in the May 2008 Gourmet. Here, a pail
of rare chilhuacle chiles harvested in the fall. Photo credit:
www.seasonsofmyheart.com
Somehow we wound up at a raucous baptism, drinking shots of mescal and dancing to pulsating music.
A few years ago, I took a summer cooking class in Oaxaca with Susana Trilling. One day there was a surprise invitation to a fiesta. After driving aimlessly around a colonia on the outskirts of town, we heard music and let our ears take us to the party. Susana’s friends welcomed us warmly into their backyard and sat us at a round wooden table. We got to kiss the young man whose baptism we were celebrating—a sturdy, two-year-old riding on his grandmother’s hip.
It’s all a little hazy, but later I remember dancing under a ceiling of blue and white balloons with wildly flickering strobe lights. Children in party clothes were racing about, mothers crooned to their babies. I ate chicken in a subtly spiced black mole sauce and a moist white cake with a creamy filling. The baby’s father poured shots of his special mescal para mujeres—fermented juice of the maguey plant "just for women." Infused with coconut, it was potent and delicious. Then a woman plunked down her own home-brewed mescal. This one was scented with oranges and came in a plastic gasoline jug. A curandera promised a handsome young bartender in our group that she would teach him all her mystical lore—oh, and she had a lovely niece…
I describe this in some detail because it illustrates what I believe to be a cardinal rule of travel: There are moments when you have to ditch the plan and veer off track. Give in to spontaneity. You never know, you may wind up at a party with 100 new friends.
The May 2008 issue of Gourmet is devoted to cooking vacations, from the posh to the purely adventurous. In “The Hot Zone,” (pp. 164-171), Kemp Minife describes his own moment of serendipity on another of Susana’s culinary excursions: the fall chilhuacle chiile harvest in the Canada region outside Oaxaca. “Marta brought us steaming bowls of broth piled high with chunks of meat, squash, beans and chilies….[We} pulled off the chile stems and tore open the skins, letting the tender flesh slip gently into the soup. Except for the pork and beef, I could have been in a 14th century time warp, slurping on that pre-Columbian combination of squash. beans and chiles…” Never mind about the abortive parrot viewing expedition—without it, Minife would never have had the thrill of stumbling back down the trail in total darkness while a hungry puma circled the van. Story value back in New York: priceless.
Other vacations include the intriguing Route of Flavor jaunt to Ushgouli in the Republic of Georgia (“First You Milk the Cow,” p. 56-58.) where cheese-making sessions alternate with visits to 12th century monasteries. I’ve just returned from India, but I’d fly back tomorrow if I could take the curry class at Phiilipcutty’s Farm in the languid backwaters of Kerala (“Curry, No Hurry,” p. 38.) On the same trip, Jane Daniels Lear ran into a Cochin pepper merchant who whispered about a recently discovered “rare wild pepper plant with pungent fruit and lemon-scented leaves.” Two more reasons to return…
To read more about Susana Trilling and her cooking school, Seasons of My Heart, go to Conversations with Cooks and Writers. Check Travel Diary for posts on our vanilla trip to Vera Cruz.