My Grandpa was like that. He was the kind of guy who liked to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. -- I've heard he once threw a tantrum while visiting my grandmother in the hospital, because she was getting more attention than he was. -- and nothing pleased him more than when he could adopt a new identity. Later after he'd brought the family back to the United States, he and my grandmother moved to Prescott Arizona, where he took to calling coyotes ky-yotes, and wearing a bola tie every chance he got.
That was my grandfather. Because of him, my family had very much of an expatriate-feel to it while I was growing up, even though we were living in Southern California. Mexico always felt like a second home to us, but not the way it does for people who are really of Mexican heritage. There was always a feel of consumerism about the way we looked at Mexico. It was a place we went for vacations, a place to have fun, not to live regular lives, and work, and raise kids and make a future for ourselves. Our future was in the U.S., and we knew it. But we felt ourselves superior, at once to the American tourists we saw, who didn't know the "right" places to go, the "authentic" ones that were "off the beaten track", and to the native Mexicans themselves. ...Not that we would ever have admitted it.
At home, we ate "real" Mexican food, not the Taco Bell stuff all the other white families in town ate -- Not even the tamale pies my Grandma from the other side of the family, the Texas side, used to make when we'd visit. My mom's having lived in Mexico gave her, we felt, the right to speak authoritatively on what real Mexicans did or did not eat.
They didn't eat flour tortillas, I remember, although Mother used to buy them for her gringo husband and kids. Or burritos; although you could get things that looked like burritos, called burros, in restaurants in Mexico, they did not taste like the burritos served at Taco Bell or our school cafeteria. They didn't put cheese on top of everything, or load every recipe in the world down with tons of meat.
The foods real Mexicans ate, could be found in two cookbooks by a woman named Elena Zelayeta: An expatriate herself, Elena got stuck in California where she'd been vacationing, when the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. She made the best of her new life in San Francisco, running a successful restaurant, and starting her own frozen food company. She also wrote two cookbooks that were veritable bibles in the 50's and 60's, for any American who wanted to cook "real" Mexican food, Elena's Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, and Elena's Secrets of Mexican Cooking.
My mom had both of them, of course (I think her parents gave them to her). She used to cook delicious, "authentically Mexican" dishes out of them, such as flan, tortilla soup, albondigas soup, and my favorite, sopa de fideos. Later on when my sisters and I grew up, my younger sister Robin was on-the-ball, and asked my mom if she could have Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, which was the better of the two books, and had all the best recipes. Being more awkward about asking for stuff, it never even occurred to me to ask for either of the books (although my mom later gave me Secrets of Mexican Cooking just to be generous).
I don't know if I would have used the other book much even if I'd had it. My sister and I are very different in a lot of ways, and one of those is in how we feed our families. Her approach is still a lot like my mother's: She makes casseroles a lot, anchors most meals around meat, and loves to prepare the recipes she enjoyed herself as a child. Me, I am lazier, or more casual maybe. I serve a lot more frozen meals than she does, a lot more vegetarian meals. And when I do cook from scratch, I rarely make anything that requires a recipe. Most of my best dishes are made by dumping in a little of this, and a sprinkle of that, then glaring at the kids until they at least taste to see if it's any good before rejecting it.
But now that I am aggregating the recipes I loved most as a child into one place, the sopa de fideos recipe had to go with the rest of them, and so I wrote to Robin and asked her for it. Here it is, along with her notes about how she modifies it for modern tastes:
1/2 package coiled vermicelli
1/2 cup oil [I just use a heavy coating of cooking spray]
1/2 onion minced
2 fresh tomatoes [I use 1 can of diced tomatoes]
2 cups chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
Fry vermicelli in oil until golden brown. Remove from oil. In same oil saute onion. When onion is browned add the tomatoes, chicken broth, salt and pepper. When broth is boiling add the vermicelli. Cook covered until dry (23-30 minutes). Serve sprinkled with cheese.
[I usually use Mexican cheese (queso fresco or something like that).]
The best thing about this dish is the texture of the vermicelli noodles. They're basically the same as spaghetti noodles in terms of ingredients, but for some reason they have a better, a more satisfying feel to them. It is a feel that is almost like a taste. Back when I was young and had never tried them prepared any way besides this one, I thought it was the preparation that gave them that nice texture. I got this recipe from my mother so I could enjoy it again. But then I never made any, because I was intimidated by the fat-content.
It never occurred to me to try cutting back on the fat like my sister has done. I was kind of worried that would spoil what had made the vermicellis taste so good. But then I tried serving vermicellis with marinara sauce instead of spaghettis once, and I discovered that they always taste good like that. Vermicellis are just a nicer than average type of pasta.
So nowadays I am still never going to make my mom's old recipe for sopa de fideos, because I no longer need to. I have learned ways to satisfy my vermicelli-cravings without it. But go ahead and try it, if you are curious. It's light and tasty, and because of the vermicellis, it has a complete-meal feel about it. And it's authentic of course. An entire generation of expatriates can vouch for that.
HyperSmash
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