Re: [CH] michelada
Mary Going (mary@firegirl.com)
Mon, 20 Aug 2001 09:01:52 -0400
Peter & Chileheads,
I don't know how many of you saw the article in the New York Times, but
I'll post it below. The NYT reporter emailed me asking if I had heard of
it. I wrote him back saying that I hadn't, but I would try to find out.
Someone did write back to me with a recipe from webtender, which I sent
onto him, but he printed the article saying I didn't know. Oh, well. Better
to be mentioned in the NYT than not, eh?
Here's the article:
Pour Beer, Add Volcano And Drink
By TIM WEINER
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 14
Life is full of deep mysteries. Who are we? Where do we
come from? Where are we going? And why do
millions of Mexicans drink micheladas?
Those kinds of questions lead into a labyrinth, and the
michelada maze is a crazy one.
When I first came here a year ago, I noticed that people
were ordering beer accompanied by a highball
glass. The glass was rimmed with salt, filled with ice. At
its base lay a weird primordial ooze. Combined
with a lager like Sol or Pacifico, the mix took on a
honeyed hue. With a dark beer, like Negra Modelo, it
was the color of burnished mahogany. They called it a
michelada (pronounced me-chel-LA-da),
translated, more or less, as ''my cold brewski.''
Curiosity trumped reason. Reader, I ordered one.
I sipped, and was transported. The fine dark cerveza
shimmered with hints of pepper and lime and
spices. It tasted, strangely enough, a little like the
best steak I had ever eaten. Clearly, it's not for
everyone -- it's not even for every bar. El Nivel, one of
Mexico City's oldest cantinas, won't mix a
michelada. It simply lines up the makings along the bar
with a whiff of do-it-yourself disdain.
And just what is in a michelada? In Mexico City, it
consists of fresh lime juice, a trinity of Tabasco,
Worcestershire and soy sauces, a pinch of black pepper and
maybe (or maybe not) a dash of Maggi, the
seasoning usually used for soups and stews. This mix makes
up two or three fingers' worth of a tall glass.
That glass needs ice in it. It needs beer. And it needs
drinking. At least, I certainly think it does. It might
sound like a hangover recipe, but to me it tastes like
malted manna.
I set out to answer the big questions. When and where was
the michelada born? And, for that matter,
why? Experts were consulted: Diana Kennedy, the Mexican
cooking authority. Ted Haigh, also known
as Dr. Cocktail. Mary Going, a hot-sauce aficionada who
uses the nom de Web FireGirl. And even a
noted food-and-drink authority at an English-language
broadsheet published in New York.
Nada. Complete blanks. Puzzled silence. Red-herring
references to ''red beer,'' the lager-and-tomato
juice concoction served on the Great Plains from northern
Texas to southern Saskatchewan. No
answers, but no surprise: no one knows where the martini
was born, for that matter.
Deeper investigation was demanded.
First the lime, the salt and the beer. Together those
three form a wispy version of the michelada,
sometimes called a chelada in these parts, and often
served in Mexican beach resorts. It's refreshing and
piquant, to be sure. Mexican limes are what people in the
United States call Key limes -- sharper, more
limey than the standard supermarket citrus. But the plain
old chelada is in principle not so different from
something you might find in Europe -- a shandy in England,
a panache in France, a Radler in Germany --
basically, lager and lemonade. Weak beer indeed.
''When I went to college in Guadalajara in the late 60's,
everybody drank Tecate beer with lime and salt,''
said Zarela Martinez, who serves micheladas at her
Manhattan restaurants, Zarela and Danzón. Inquiries
at the Tecate brewery proved to be old beer: stale, flat
and unprofitable. Jorge Juraidini Rumilla, director
of institutional relations at Cervecería Cuauhtemoc
Moctezuma, which makes Tecate, could only trace
the michelada back to a 15-year-old sales gimmick, when
Tecate was sold with a slice of lime and salt.
He had no theory for the present state of the michelada's
spiciness, saying the drink ''just got more and
more sophisticated.''
Ms. Martinez's thoughts ran deeper: ''I think the origins
go way, way back. Since pre-Hispanic times,
Mexicans have a tradition of drinking foamy, frothy
beverages. You can see them in the Mayan Codex.''
So people in Mexico were drinking home-brew in their
pyramids back when Europeans were living in
mud huts and scrounging for roots and berries. German
brewers began to make lager sometime around
1420, but the Aztecs, Incas and Maya were brewing beer, or
something like it, for many centuries before
the conquistadors took Mexico City in 1521.
Giving the Germans their due, they brought beer as we know
it to Mexico, establishing the first breweries
here nearly 150 years ago.
As for the rest of the recipe, soy sauce came to Mexico no
later than the early 17th century, on Spanish
ships built by the Chinese. Worcestershire sauce was born
in 1835, when a certain Lord Sandys from the
county of Worcestershire, England, asked two chemists,
John Lea and William Perrins, to replicate a
condiment he had tasted in India. A shipment reached New
Orleans no later than 1848. Twenty years
later, in 1868, a genius named Edmund McIlhenny invented
Tabasco sauce in New Iberia, La. The
peppers come from the state of Tabasco, which lies almost
due south of New Orleans across the Gulf of
Mexico.
And here the sauce thickens.
A. J. Liebling once observed that the Louisiana coast was
really the western littoral of the Mediterranean,
a place where deep currents of great food flowed together
in a savory gumbo. All the active ingredients
of the michelada -- the beer, the lime, the salt, the
peppers, the fundamental sauces -- were for sale on
the Gulf of Mexico by the 1870's. Ships then shuttled from
New Orleans to Mexican ports like Tampico
and Veracruz.
Was the michelada a 19th-century creation of thirsty
sailors? Parched oil-field roughnecks? A lost relic,
recently unearthed by chance, like the frescoes uncovered
by the construction of the Roman subway?
At the oldest cantinas in the heart of Mexico City -- El
Nivel, El Gallo de Oro and La Opera, gilded
jewels of the 1870's -- a tenuous theory emerged among the
oldest and wisest of the bartenders, who
chronicle the passage of powermongers and philosophers
like sportswriters covering palookas.
''Lime and salt -- that's primordial,'' said Vicente Cruz,
26 years behind the bar at the Gallo de Oro. ''The
rest of the ingredients have emerged within the past 10
years, and from where, and why, God knows.''
But at El Nivel, they thought they knew.
In Veracruz, the port city that has been shipping and
receiving goods across the gulf for ages, the oilmen
drink a cocktail called a Petrolero -- which is, more or
less, a michelada with tequila instead of beer.
''So that's that,'' said Manuel Zapata, a barman at El
Nivel for 21 years. ''It showed up only in the last
few years, but it's a migrant from Veracruz.''
Interesting, if true. The questions of who and why remain.
Charles Davis, president of Habagallo Foods, in McAllen,
Tex. (www.habagallo.com), aims to become
Mr. Michelada. He says he is the only man in the United
States marketing michelada mix:
Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, tomato juice, celery
salt, pepper and a dash of habanero pepper, $3.99
for a 32-ounce jug. But he says the michelada is only
beginning to cross the border. ''If I go further north
than San Antonio, people don't know what I'm talking
about,'' he said. ''They serve micheladas in
Houston, but not in Dallas.''
At the Border Grill in Santa Monica, Calif., ''the only
people who order the drink are people who are
either from Mexico City or who have recently visited
there,'' said Carollyn Bartosh, the restaurant's
marketing director. ''Our kitchen staff is more familiar
with the drink than the bartenders or servers.''
This will change, and soon. Why? One of the most
interesting things happening in the United States today
is the imperceptible but inexorable erosion of its
southern border. The michelada's origins may be
murky, but mark this: The American tongue has an appetite
for Mexican tastes. This taste is good, this
taste is strong, and this taste is heading north.
MICHELADA
Time: 5 minutes
1/2 lime, preferably a Key lime
Coarse salt
2 dashes Worcestershire sauce
1 dash soy sauce
1 dash Tabasco sauce
1 pinch black pepper
1 dash Maggi seasoning, optional
12 ounces beer, preferably a dark Mexican beer like Negra
Modelo.
1. Squeeze the juice from the lime and reserve. Salt the
rim of a highball glass by rubbing it with the lime
and dipping it in coarse salt. Fill with ice.
2. Add lime juice, Worcestershire, soy sauce, Tabasco,
pepper and Maggi, if desired. Pour in beer, stir
and serve, adding more beer as you sip.
Yield: 1 cocktail.
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