I ask my friend José Luis to tell me his favorite meal from childhood, and it is simply this: a flour tortilla, steaming and brown-speckled from his grandmother’s cast-iron skillet, with melted butter, minced fresh garlic, and a wide strip of green chile, just roasted, laid down its middle. “Maybe you would salt it, but you didn’t really need to,” he explains, tearing a wedge from the last soft tortilla on the table. With two fingers and a thumb, he delicately bends the wedge, slides it across the plate still glistening with red chile, golden egg yolk, and flecks of tender pork, pops the scoop of goodness into his mouth, and grins at me.
We are sitting at The Range Cafe, in Bernalillo, New Mexico, about ten miles out of Albuquerque, and we’re about to embark on a mission to see the northern reaches of the state. Along the way, we’ll use a multitude of tortillas to sample a cuisine that has remained distinctive for hundreds of years. It is peasant food, built on a few ingredients that are deceptive in their simplicity. The foundation—pinto beans and cornmeal, seasoned with a bit of meat—is the same as that of my native Appalachia. When I first sat before a steaming combination plate (this was 1973, at Beva’s Diner, behind the Greyhound station in Santa Fe), I recognized my victuals immediately. It is the chiles that make all the difference, though, and that initial experience with the incendiary green sauce that covered everything made me cry real tears. The women who worked the kitchen watched me skeptically, arms folded across ample bosoms, mouths set, until the oldest among them realized I meant to finish what I’d started. She brought a small glass of milk to soothe the fire. She spoke to me in Spanish, and while the words were unfamiliar, I soon understood their prophecy: “The first burn will sear right into your dreams. You will never be able to live without our New Mexico chiles again.”
The red and green chiles that grow along the northern Rio Grande and its tributaries reflect terroir. It is not a stretch to say that there’s a measure of magic in their complex flavor, which is at once hot, fresh, vegetal, and earthy. They seem to taste of the landscape itself—which is stark, breathtaking, and completely unforgiving—so that anything brought forth from them has an extra measure of savor for the effort. The tears that salted that first plate of green I devoured might have been not only mine but those of the disparate peoples who struggled for centuries with one another, with the fierce climate, and with the hard but beautiful earth, to bring foods both delicious and sustaining to the table.
Fortified with huevos rancheros, José Luis and I plot a course north on U.S. 550/N.M. 4. Our first stop, Coronado State Monument, isn’t far away, but with one of the loveliest views in New Mexico—that of the Sandia mountain range—it sets the tone for our journey. Topped by blue-black peaks, its rosy lower slopes flecked with dark green pines, it does look like the flesh and seeds of the ripe watermelon for which it’s named. In the near distance, the bosque of the Rio Grande shimmers with the deep green leaves of lush cottonwood trees.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his expedition camped here (or near here) during the winters of 1540 and 1541. Perhaps even more significantly, it’s the site of Kuaua, a vast pueblo that flourished from the 1300s to the early 1600s. Its inhabitants were sustained by the American trinity of beans, corn, and squash, as well as by indigenous greens and small game. The Spanish brought sheep, pigs, goats, and domesticated fowl; grapes and plums; white flour and meager seasonings; and iron pots for simmering. And it’s likely that the 1598 colonizing expedition of Spaniards and Mexican Indians led by Juan de Oñate also brought the first seeds of Mexican chiles, which would adapt and thrive in this wild place.
The foodways of the natives and the newcomers of the 16th and 17th centuries moved back and forth across the cultures with an ease belying the violence of those times. Eventually, fry bread made from European wheat became the basis for the signature Indian taco, and Spanish cooks were complimented on the fineness of their blue-corn tortillas. Outside food trends had little impact until the arrival of the railroad in the late 1800s, and then it was more the addition of a few novelty items than a seismic shift in cuisine. By the middle of the 20th century, California avocados had become so easily available that guacamole appeared on restaurant menus and in home kitchens. In the 1970s, the counterculture’s demands for meatless dishes hardly caused a stir at tables that had been accommodating the Lenten fasts of Catholicism for almost four centuries.
We traverse a terrain as open as the ocean, under a sky that is the same strange and brilliant blue-green as the turquoise stones found here. Austere tan buttes give way to warm red tabletops, then to small, squared-off gray escarpments as N.M. 4 takes us twisting up into mesa country, past the village of Jemez Springs and the Valle Grande—the caldera (crater) of a long-dormant volcano. To the south is Bandelier Monument, site of an ancient cliff dwelling and worthy of a full day’s visit, but we keep heading north, through Los Alamos to Espanola, once dubbed the low-rider capital of the world. The main drag is now given over to big-box stores and fast-food chains, but the old Hispanic town can still be found on side streets. Locals line up at El Parasol, a tiny taco shack, or El Paragua, the cool, comfortable sit-down establishment next door. (The taco shack, under the name El Paragua, was started by two little boys in the late ‘50s as a New Mexico version of a lemonade stand, the brothers serving their mother’s tacos to an eager public.) Today we opt for the easy democracy of a shared outdoor table at El Parasol. The freshly made tacos of spiced beef or chicken and potatoes with a side of tart chile caribe attract everyone from farmers in straw cowboy hats to white-turbaned Sikhs from a nearby religious community.
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