Críticas Magazine

Melissa Guerra spoke at our library a couple nights ago, and nearly a hundred people came to listen- a pretty big crowd for us, but then Ms. Guerra is a mighty big deal. She tells the story of Tex-Mex cuisine as few others can. It’s her story. Guerra is a border-crossing culinary ethnographer, a cultural historian who explores the dishes that her family, and others like it, have developed for more than 200 years in ruggedly flavorful Mexican and South Texas kitchens.

Last year her second book was a nominee for the most prestigious honor in food writing, the James Beard Foundation Book Award. Not many Rio Grande Valley ranchers ever make it to New York City to attend a ceremony for a literary prize, but Guerra is one who did. Dishes From the Wild Horse Desert: Norteño Cooking of South Texas is a spectacular cookbook- with recipes for tamales, grapefruit blossom cake, fried rabbit, cactus fruit margaritas, and frijoles con manitas de puerco- but it’s a lot more besides. Guerra spins well-researched tales of her foods’ origins and how they got their names; she explains how harsh terrain and sturdy people of many cultures shaped a regional cuisine that set the table for the tasty meals of today.

History drips from its gorgeously designed pages. Guerra describes how to break in a molcajete (the basalt grinding bowl in the picture) and carefully tells you how to harvest prickly pear cactus pads and remove the thorns without hurting yourself.

You might know Melissa Guerra as a TV chef: her program The Texas Provincial Kitchen aired on PBS for four years. Her talk at the library struck a pancultural chord from the beginning as she reminded us that the Rio Grande river was not always a dividing line. Quite the opposite: the important water source was a gathering place for people of assorted sizes, colors, languages, and appetites. She listed some of the dozens of indigenous groups found along this stretch of the river, pointing out that several tribes such as the Garzas, who ate birds, and the Comecrudos, who ate stuff raw, were named after their foods. (She joked that the Mescaleros were named instead for what they liked to drink).

Guerra’s down-to-earth demeanor made this library program a pleasure for everyone. We feared there’d be no parking on the crowded campus so a couple librarians moved heaven and earth to get a VIP space coned off for the speaker. I invited her to call ahead so we could guide her in. Instead we were caught by surprise when four Guerras appeared at the circulation desk, after parking who-knows-where and cheerfully lugging their supplies through a cold drizzle.

Two of her young sons, Lorenzo and Diego, came to the library with their mom and dad to hear and to help out with her presentation. It was easy to imagine them all together around the dinner table up at the ranch. Guerra closed by urging us to think about our own dinner tables, our private culinary traditions, to consider the histories behind the foods we choose to eat and the ways we eat them. That food-and-the-folk-process outlook pervades Dishes From the Wild Horse Desert:

So, although this is a cookbook, this is also the story of a land and a people that I love dearly. Hopefully, it will inspire you to look at your own land, your own family, your own story, and your own recipes.

And if you want your own molcajete, look no further than Melissa Guerra’s online store. I walk over to her offline one all the time with our kid so he can ogle her old movie posters of Santo and Blue Demon.