Dionisio “Baco” Rangel became famous when he was just a kid, when competing on the radio program Junior Professors he unhesitatingly gave out his recipe for Puebla-style marrow tarts.
A discovery: gastronomic knowledge can be a source not only of fortune but of magnificent banquets, transforming the need to survive into the luxury of living. This fact defined Dionisio’s career, but it gave him no higher goal.
His ascent from mere appetite to culinary art and from there to a well-paid profession was attributable to his love of Mexican cuisine and disdain for cuisines of lower status, like that of the United States of America. Before he was twenty, Dionisio had taken as an article of faith that there were only five great cuisines in the world: Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, and Mexican. Other nationalities had dishes of the first quality — Brazilian feijoada, Peruvian chicken soup with chiles, Argentine beef were excellent, as were North African couscous and Japanese teriyaki — but only Mexican cuisine was a universe unto itself. From Sinaloa’s chilorio, with its little cubes of pork well seasoned with oregano, sesame, garlic, and fat chiles, to Oaxaca’s chicken with mountain herbs and avocado leaves, the uchepo tamales of Michoacán, Colima’s sea bass with prawns and parsley, San Luis Potosi’s meatloaf stuffed with cheese, and that supreme delicacy which is Oaxaca’s yellow mole — two so-called wide chiles, two guajillo chiles, one red tomato, 250 grams of green jitomatillos, two tablespoons of coriander, two leaves of hierbasanta, two peppercorns — Mexican cuisine was for Dionisio a constellation apart that moved in the celestial vaults of the palate with its own trajectories, its own planets, satellites, comets, meteors. Like space itself, it was infinite.
Called upon, also in short order, to write for Mexican and foreign newspapers, to give courses and lectures, to appear on television and to publish cookbooks, Dionisio “Baco” Rangel, at the age of fifty-one, was a culinary authority, celebrated and well-paid, nowhere more so than in the country he most disdained for the poverty of its cuisine. Having appeared all over the United States of America (especially after the success of Like Water for Chocolate), Dionisio decided this was the cross he would have to bear in life: to preach fine cooking in a country incapable of understanding or practicing it. Excellent restaurants could of course be found in the big cities — New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans (whose tradition would have been inexplicable without the lengthy French presence there). But Dionisio challenged the lowliest cooks in Puebla or Oaxaca to approach without a sense of horror the gastronomic deserts of Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Indiana, or the Dakotas where they would seek in vain for espazote, ajillo chile, huitlacoche, or agua de jamaica …
For the record, Dionisio said he wasn’t anti-Yankee in this matter or in any other, even though every child born in Mexico knew that in the nineteenth century the gringos had stripped us of half our territory — California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The generosity of Mexico, Dionisio would habitually say, shows in its not holding a grudge for that terrible despoiling, although the memory lingered on, while the gringos didn’t even remember that war, much less know its unfairness. Dionisio spoke of “the United States of Amnesia.”
From time to time he thought humorously about the historical irony that caused Mexico to lose all that territory in 1848 through abandonment, indifference, and a sparse population. Now (the elegant, well-dressed, distinguished silver-haired critic smiled roguishly), we were on the way to recovering it, thanks to what could be termed Mexico’s chromosomal imperialism. Millions of Mexicans worked in the United States, and thirty million people in the United States spoke Spanish. But at the same time, how many Mexicans spoke decent English? Dionisio knew of only two, Jorge Castañeda and Carlos Fuentes, for which reason both seemed suspicious to him. For the same reason, the exclamation of the Spanish bullfighter Cagancho seemed admirable to him: “Speak English? God help me!” Since the gringos had screwed Mexico in 1848 with their “manifest destiny” so now Mexico would give them a dose of their own medicine, reconquering them with the most Mexican of weapons, linguistic, racial, and culinary.
And Rangel himself, how did he communicate with his English-speaking university audiences? In an accent he learned from the actor Gilberto Roland, born Luis Alonso in Coahuila, and with a profusion of literal translations that delighted his listeners:
“Let’s see if like you snore you sleep.”
“Beggars can’t carry big sticks.”
“You don’t have a mom or a dad or even a little dog to bark at you.”
All this just so you’ll understand with what conflicted feelings Dionisio “Baco” Rangel carried out, twice a year, the tours that took him from one U.S. university to another, where the horror of sitting down to dinner at five in the afternoon was nothing compared with the terror he felt when he realized what, at an hour when Mexicans were barely finishing their midday meal, was being served at the academic tables. Generally, the banquet would begin with a salad of fainting lettuce crowned with raspberry jam; that touch, he’d been told several times in Missouri, Ohio, and Massachusetts, was very sophisticated, very gourmet. The well-known rubber chicken followed, uncuttable and unchewable, served with tough string beans and mashed potatoes redolent of the envelope they had just recently abandoned. Dessert was a fake strawberry shortcake, more a strawberry bath sponge. Finally, watered-down coffee through which you could see the bottom of the cup and admire the geological circles deposited there by ten thousand servings of poison. The best thing, Dionisio told himself, was a furtive sip of the iced tea served at all hours and on any occasion; it was insipid, but at least the lemon slices were tasty. Rangel sucked them avidly so he wouldn’t come down with a cold.
Was it because they were cheap? Was it because they lacked imagination? Dionisio Rangel decided to become a Sherlock Holmes and investigate what passed for “cuisine” in the United States by secretly carrying out an informal survey of hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons. What did he discover was served in all those places? Salad with raspberry jam, rubbery chicken, spongy cake, and translucent coffee. It was, he concluded, a matter of generalized institutional food, exceptions to which would probably be surprising, if not memorable. Professors, criminals, the insane, and the sick set the tone for U.S. menus — or was it perhaps that the universities, madhouses, jails, and hospitals were all supplied by the same caterer?
Dionisio smiled as he shaved after his morning bath — his best ideas always came to him then. Rubbing Barbasol onto his cheeks, he imagined a historical explanation. National cuisines are great only when they arise from the people. In Mexico, Italy, France, or Spain, you need have no fear when you walk into the first roadside restaurant, the humblest bistro, the busiest tavola calda, because you’re certain of finding something good to eat there. It’s not the rich, Rangel would say to anyone who cared to listen, who dictate culinary taste from above; it’s the people, the worker, the peasant, the artisan, the truck driver who, from below, invent and consecrate the dishes that make up the great cuisines. And they do it out of intimate respect for what they put in their mouths.
Patience, time, Dionisio would explain in his classes, standing in front of an uncomprehending herd of young people with chewing gum in their mouths and baseball caps on their heads. You need time and patience to prepare a lapin faisandé in France, need to let the rabbit spoil to the point when it attains its tastiest, most savory tartness (ugh!); you need love and patience to prepare a buitlacoche soufflé in Mexico, using the black, cancerous corn fungus that in other, less sophisticated latitudes is fed to the hogs (yuck!).