Barbacoa

mexico city, mexico

There seems to be an unwritten law that going on honeymoons is like joining the Masons... secret and mysterious, and the fewer questions asked the less embarrassing for everybody. ~Martha Byrd Porter, Straight Down a Crooked Lane

This time last year, András I were on a plane bound for Mexico City, en route to our honeymoon. When we arrived, we checked in here, in a plain but perfect room flooded in light with an old footed tub in the middle.

The next day, our friend Nick had arranged for his cousins {and now our friends} Mary and Ro to take us for a day of authentic eating, starting with barbacoa at 8 o'clock am Sunday morning. From what I had read, barbacoa was something like barbecue, though that description hardly does the trick. Mary and Ro took us on a drive 30 minutes to the far side of the city {which side I couldn’t tell you} through unkept residential roads and alleys far from chic Condessa. Soon we were standing before the scene above ordering steamed, simmered hunks of meat lifted from a maguey leaf-lined pit, chopped on a smoothed old wood stump, weighed and served by the pound.

We hadn’t told them András is a vegetarian, though it didn’t matter. Barbarcoa is served with dozens of hot corn tortillas made by the magic of young hands that move like a dance over hot cast iron barrels, releasing the steamy golden disks into stacks.  Our appetite for masa awakened ravenous gratitude for their craft. We returned to their barrels over and over to watch and to refill our emptied basket, washing it all down with salsa, cerveza and hot-sweetened coffee. 

The moment was as unfortgetable as the meal, an ancient tradition seeped in the colors of Diego Rivera’s Mexico, the steam that soaked the air with stewed meat and the painterly quality of it all that appeared on film through the old camera I’d taken with us, leaving us with a longing for Mexico, with all its secrets and mysteries.