Chillies come in a wide range of colours, shapes, sizes and levels of heat. This photograph shows a small selection of that vast array.
Las Cruces in southern New Mexico is well known for its bountiful chilli harvest.
The earliest cultivated chillies in New Mexico were smaller than today’s; indeed, they were (and still are, in some cases) considered a spice. But as the varieties developed and the size of the pods grew, the food value of chillies became evident. There was just one problem—the many sizes and shapes of the chillies made it very difficult for farmers to determine which chilli they were growing from year to year. And there was no way to tell how large or how hot the pods might be until modern horticultural techniques produced more standardised chillies.
Today, New Mexico is by far the largest commercial producer of chillies in the United States, with about 14,000 hectares under cultivation. All the primary dishes in New Mexican cuisine contain chillies: sauces, stews, carne adovada, enchiladas, tamales and many vegetable dishes. The intense use of chillies as a food rather than just as a spice or condiment is what differentiates New Mexican cuisine from that of Texas or Arizona. In neighbouring states chilli powders are used as a seasoning for beef or chicken stock-based “chilli gravies”, which are thickened with flour or cornflour before being added to, say, enchiladas. In New Mexico the sauces are made from pure chillies and are thickened by reducing the crushed or puréed pods. New Mexico chilli sauces are cooked and puréed, while salsas use fresh, uncooked ingredients. Debates rage over whether tomatoes should be used in cooked sauces such as red chilli sauce, but traditional cooked red sauces do not contain tomatoes, though uncooked salsas do.
Chillies have become the de facto state symbol. Houses are adorned with strings of dried red chillies, or ristras. Images of the pods are emblazoned on signs, T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats and even underwear. In the late summer and early autumn, the rich aroma of roasting chillies fills the air all over the state. “A la primera cocinera se le va un chile entero,” goes one old Spanish saying: “To the best lady cook goes the whole chilli.” And the chilli is the single most important food in New Mexican cuisine.
The Arrival of the Anglos
New flavours travel to the Southwest
along the Santa Fe Trail
Following Mexico’s independence in 1821 and the opening of the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri, Santa Fe saw more and more trading (which had been prohibited by Spain, necessitating smuggling), and soon it was the terminus of two major trade routes from the east and the south. After Santa Fe fell to the Americans in 1846, the area really opened up as goods flooded in from the east.
Imported grains such as wheat became readily available with the arrival of the railroads. These grains were grown mostly on the eastern plains. However, imported flour was available, and corn was raised in small plots by both Hispanics and Native Americans. Agriculture was so primitive in the region that one critic, Antonio Barreiro, wrote in 1832: “Agriculture is utterly neglected, for the inhabitants of this country do not sow any amount, as they might do to great profit without any doubt. They sow barely what they consider necessary for their maintenance for part of the year, and the rest of the year they are exposed to a thousand miseries.”
Wagon trains bringing goods from the eastern states, as well as luxuries from Europe, began making regular trips across the plains from Missouri in the 1820s. The momentous opening of the Santa Fe Trail is reenacted each year.
One such misery was described by Susan Magoffin, the teenage bride of American trader and agent Samuel Magoffin. In her diary she describes her first taste of New Mexican green chilli stew in 1846: “Oh how my heart sickened to say nothing of my stomach . . . [from] a mixture of meat, chilli verde and onions boiled together completing course No. 1 . .
There were a few mouthfuls taken, for I could not eat a dish so strong, and unaccustomed to my palate.” However, she did become accustomed to spicy food and even wrote a “cookery book” so that her friends in the States (New Mexico was still a territory, of course) could experience New Mexican cuisine.
By 1846, champagne and oysters were available, and flour for making bread sold for US$2.50 per fanega. If that sounds expensive, know that a fanega was 65 kilograms. About this time, a Lieutenant James Abert was travelling extensively throughout New Mexico. Later, in his book Through the Country of the Comanche Indians, he described the market at Santa Fe: “The markets have ... great quantities of ‘Chilli Colorado’ and ‘verde’, ‘cebollas’ or onions, ‘sandias’ or watermelons, ‘huevos’ or eggs, ‘uvas’ or grapes, and ‘pinones’, nuts of the pine tree.”
Prices were relatively high. Corn was two (US) dollars a bushel, beef and mutton eight to 10 (US) cents a pound, sugar and coffee were 25 (US) cents a pound, and tea was very expensive at US$1.25 a pound. About this time, W. W. H. Davis travelled to Santa Fe and sampled the native cuisine. In his book, El Gringo, he described his encounter: “The meal was a true Mexican dinner, and a fair sample of the style of living among the better class of people. The advance guard in the course of the dishes was boiled mutton and beans, the meat being young and tender, and well flavoured. These were followed by a sui generis soup, different from any thing of the kind it had been my fortune to meet with before. It was filled with floating balls about the size of a musket bullet, which appeared to be a compound of flour and meat. Next came mutton stewed in chilli (red peppers), the dressing of which was about the colour of blood, and almost as hot as so much molten lead.”
After mentioning the albóndigas soup and the mutton, Davis described the standard beans, tortillas and atole (a corn drink) and then commented on chilli: “Besides those already enumerated, there are other dishes, some of which have come down from the ancient inhabitants of the country. The chilli they use in various ways—green, or verde, and in its dried state, the former being made into a sort of salad, and is esteemed to be a great luxury.”
The agricultural situation improved shortly after the U.S. Army raised its flag over Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors and New Mexico was opened up to further settlement by American pioneers. The introduction of modern tools and techniques and new crops such as apples, peas and melons helped the farmers greatly. By 1900, more than 2 million hectares were under cultivation in New Mexico.
Santa Fe survived the Civil War without a scratch and did well under American control. Hotels and restaurants flourished with the coming of the railroad. Gradually, wheat crops surpassed corn crops. However, wheat tortillas have not supplanted those made of corn; both are still equally popular.
Cattle had been introduced by Juan de Oñate but only assumed a significant role in New Mexico after the Civil War. By 1890, after the great cattle drives to the New Mexico gold mines (which took place to feed the miners) there were 1.34 million head of cattle in the state. Remarkably, the figure nearly a hundred years later (1988) was almost identical: 1.32 million head.
After the Homestead Act of 1862 and the arrival of the railroad between 1879 and 1882, settlers from the eastern United States flooded into the state. With the advent of the railroad came the first railroad restaurants, the Harvey House chain. New Mexico boasted 16 of these establishments, including five that were the grandest of the system: Montezuma and Castañeda in Las Vegas, La Fonda in Santa Fe, Alvarado in Albuquerque, and El Navajo in Gallup. Harvey hired young women between the ages of 18 and 30 to be his hostesses, and they were quite an attraction on the Western frontier, where women were scarce. The humorist Will Rogers once said, “Fred Harvey kept the West in food and wives.”
The Harvey Houses
