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.
Ten miles north lies the proverbial fork in the road: U.S. 84 would lead us into Georgia O’Keefe landscapes, but we turn instead onto U.S. 285, which takes us to Ojo Caliente, the geothermal mineral springs that have been sacred to the Tewa people for hundreds of years. The adobe territorial-style hotel, built in 1916, retains the mood of that sparser period, but newer, luxury rooms are being built, and the springs’ renovated facilities include private bathing pools with round kiva fireplaces. Energized by a soak and the house special “milagro relaxation wrap,” we continue up the road to the junction with U.S. 64, at Tres Piedras. Soon, we’re crossing the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, the second-highest cantilevered bridge in the United States, soaring 650 feet above the river. Hawks circle close overhead and rafts move in slow motion below, between striated red cliffs. It’s a sight of heart-pounding beauty, and when we eventually reach our rooms at the Dobson House, an off-the-grid bed-and-breakfast just north of Taos, we’re content for the moment to sit in our airy suite with floor-to-ceiling windows and consider all the miles and eras we have spanned in one day’s drive.
We decide to spend the next day exploring Taos, where the surrounding mountains loom blue-gray and misty, very different from the bold, red-tinged shapes farther south. The town (population 6,000) has long attracted quirky, artsy types, and despite booming development in recent years, it still has plenty of charm seasoned with a healthy sense of wry. It’s here that we find the quintessential New Mexico slogan on hats and T-shirts: “Carpe Mañana.” And it’s here as well that we discover the territory’s finest tortilla soup—thick with chicken and chorizo—at De La Tierra restaurant.
From Taos, we pick up the High Road, N.M. 76, making our way along the mountain to Truchas, elevation 8,400 feet. Driving through the town, which is strung along a narrow ridge road, I have a familiar feeling. The area shares the same lonesome angularity of the Cumberland and Blue Ridge mountains of my birthplace. It’s harsher and more extreme, however, with a chill of eerie spirituality that’s underscored by glimpses of calvarios—large, weathered wooden crosses erected along roads and trails by the Penitentes, who have practiced a mystical form of Catholicism in this region since the 1800s.
A mood of strange grace pervades the drive into Chimayo, where the much-celebrated Santuario sits in a humble corner of the town. Abandoned crutches, letters of thanks, votive candles, and photos fill this small church, whose dirt is said to have healing powers and whose aura of sanctuary feels even more ancient than its thick adobe walls.
It is startling to leave the far highlands for the crowded bustle of Santa Fe, where the most dramatic revolution in New Mexican food has taken place. Beginning in the 1980s with an influx of primarily California-bred young chefs, some extraordinary Nuevo Mexicano dishes have sprung from some remarkable restaurants. But it’s indicative of the power of the original food that on any given day the lines outside the contemporary Cafe Pasqual’s are equaled or surpassed by those at the traditional Tía Sophia, up the street.
For context and amplification of the world we’ve just passed through, we visit the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, but although there are many more riches worth investigating in Santa Fe, we admit to feeling a little hemmed in. Consequently, we don’t linger long but take the Old Las Vegas Highway out of town, passing an impromptu roadside attraction where vendors offer firewood, natural paving stones, brick-red ristras (strings of drying chiles), and huge, playful wooden animals carved with a chain saw, all sold from the backs of pickup trucks. Touristy, perhaps, to some, but José Luis sees a modern version of a medieval marketplace, not unlike the plaza of Santa Fe in the 18th century.
We point the car south on U.S. 285 and turn onto N.M. 41, to enter the small village of Galisteo, where I lived off and on during the 1970s. Sitting on my porch then, on the steep hill that marks the western side of town, I remember looking east and thinking I had truly arrived at the edge of the world. Today, Galisteo remains distinctly unchanged. Aside from the occasionally open studio galleries of artists, the only commercial establishment is The Galisteo Inn.
Situated in a 300-year-old hacienda next to the Galisteo River and shaded by enormous cottonwoods, the inn offers contemporary creature comforts with old-fashioned New Mexico hospitality. This evening, there is a local Latin jazz combo playing on the lawn next to the dining patio. I sway slightly to the cool, liquid notes while spooning up a cajeta flan made with milk from village goats. We sip Viognier, clean and crisp like the light fragmenting through the trees behind the adobe courtyard wall. Somehow, in that flickering ambience, New Mexico still feels like the edge of the world.