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From today’s NYT…

Market Driven, Oaxaca-Style

By PETER CATAPANO

A vendor at Mercado de la Merced in Oaxaca, Mexico, where produce grown on small local farms is sold throughout the city.

¿Qué?

We were walking around Oaxaca’s Mercado de la Merced, a covered market where Cabrera, a well-known chef and owner of the popular La Olla Restaurant, does some of her food gathering for a class she teaches at La Casa de los Sabores, a cooking school she runs to which chefs on pilgrimages and food-curious tourists have been flocking for several years. Students who sign up and pay for the class (about $70) gather up the goods with her at one of the town’s markets in the morning, then bring them back to a big, bright, picture-perfect kitchen, where they proceed to cook and consume the meal, a five-course Oaxacan lunch based on Pilar’s recipes, including a taste of mezcal and dessert. (Coloradito, a red mole, was the main event at the class I attended.) They also get to pepper her with questions about the food, recipes and region.

Pilar knows her stuff: she was born and raised here and has a background in food science, as well as decades of cooking experience. La Olla serves a modern menu based on traditional Oaxacan recipes in a modest, clean setting that attracts both tourists and well-heeled locals. Apart from the restaurant and cooking school, she has gained some fame as a sort of ambassador for Oaxacan cuisine, traveling abroad to teach her classes, even making an appearance on “Iron Chef.”

In both the restaurant and the class, Pilar hammers home the main theme of Oaxacan food: an uncompromising devotion to fresh, unprocessed local ingredients (the squash blossoms she chose for the meal that day were still open when the vendor handed them to her). And she can switch from speaking Spanish to English with ease, making it easy for monolingual pilgrims like me to get what’s going on.  [Read full article]

h/t:  gg