This is American food.
A town's mercado should be your first stop.
We arrived in San Miguel de Allende, a town that’s known for being both breathtaking—hilly, narrow cobblestone-lined roads, incessant church bells, golden rooftop sunsets, cinematic turns everywhere you look—and, because of this, full of wealthy visitors from Mexico City and a lot of retirees (a.k.a. newfound artists), including many American ex-pats, perched in their 5 million dollar homes. Still, you’d have to be pretty cynical to deny San Miguel its beauty.
Fruits and vegetables abound
Just like a passion fruit.
If you think SMA is too gringo-y for you, it’s because you’re not looking in the right places. “Real” Mexico exists all over this city.
The easiest place to find any country’s soul is in the market. It’s always my first stop. It’s even better if you have an insider and we were lucky to have Paco Cardenas—the owner of a French bakery called El Petit Four (Mesones, #99), and a 12-year resident of San Miguel—take us on a little tour of a pleasantly modest market called Mercado Ignacio Ramire El Nigromante. There, the vendors—mostly women dressed traditionally in the colorful but practical aprons over their dresses—sell everything from nopales to all sorts of handmade tortillas to cheeses, greens, chilies, fresh chickpeas, grilled corn and more. Herbs far beyond cilantro, include rosemary, chamomile, thyme, even lemongrass and a bitter plant Paco said is called rueda, which, combined with chocolate, is used to make a tea to help alleviate headaches. In the fruit stalls, we tasted everything from mangos to Mamey (which strangely tastes like a cooked sweet potato even when it’s fresh) and another fruit akin to a passionfruit.
Corn ready for a squeeze of lime
The biggest myth about Mexican food is that it’s a massive, 10-pound, cheese bomb of an Americanized “El Combo Platter.” In reality, traditional Mexican food is immensely healthful, you just have to visit the market to see what’s being cooked at home. We munched on fresh chickpeas, grilled corn and Oaxaca cheese (a tastier version of our string cheese). One of the most delicious things we ate though, was a tortilla filled with chilies, nopales (high in iron) and quelites—a wild green also known as Lamb’s Quarters, with a mild taste like spinach. (Mariquita Farm grows them and has some recipes here.)
Vegans headed to Gracias Madre, rejoice: Your Mexican food might just be the original.
Painstakingly removing all the thorns from cactus paddles
Potatoes, nopales, chilies and greens—ready for a tortilla
Vegans, rejoice