Cakes and Chillies

I made my way down Juarez Street, the city’s principal thoroughfare and drew level with a large copper plated building with spires and clocks. It looked like a casting of a classical Victorian railway terminus and contained the central produce market. I wandered across the  concourse (more mounds of chillies, tomatoes and peppers) and followed the trail of a sound which I was to hear many times during my wanderings around the nooks and crannies of Guanajuato – the chop-chopping of metal on wood, the sharp rapid slicing of roasted joints of pork and chicken; layerings of meat slipped in between slices of bread, accompanied with lashings of hot chillie sauce; or for those with a bigger appetite, rows of whole chickens slowly turning revolutions on spits.

I approached a counter and pointed to a large casserole dish that I could see inside the glass display cabinet. It brimmed over with chillie con carne. I asked for a plateful and was met with a quizzical look. The chap gave me a teaspoon of the stuff to taste, which I slipped down my gullet. I coughed strongly, gasped for air and felt my eyes water.

It was an uncomfortable mistake. The dish contained not so much chillie con carne as extra red hot concentrated chillie sauce, a slight dash of which when slipped into a pork or chicken sandwich would infuse it with a considerable kick and there was I requesting a plateful of the stuff. I changed the order and opted for a pork sandwich instead, without the dash of sauce, the after affects of which lingered long after in my mouth.

It reminded me of Christmas night 1999, sat in a Lucknow restaurant, Northern India. Outside the streets thronged with traffic, thousands of people were out for a festive constitutional. The restaurant was opposite Lucknow Cathedral, whose frontage displayed an electronic screen that flashed the message ’Peace on earth, good will to all’.

I ordered a nan bread and something called chat in a basket – the menu’s account of the eight separate ingredients that made up this edible basket led me to think it was a variation of a thali dish – small individual portions of different vegetable concoctions, served in compartments on a silver tray. Indian families surrounded me and I felt myself start to go bright red as my meal arrived. Chat in a basket, as it turned out, was not something you would order as a main meal. Rather, it was a desert consisting of a range of fruit, sticky cakes and cream. Ordered by itself, it would not have given me a problem, but being served a nan bread as an accompaniment put matters on a different level – it was a bit like asking for a wedge of dark chocolate gateaux and chips on the same plate. I did not lift my head to see who was watching, or rather laughing. I just put the nan to one side, ate the desert and left. But anyway, back to Mexico.