Over the blitz of a whirring blender, Emilio Pérez, a chef and partner at Casa Jacaranda cooking school in Mexico City, yelled, “Check this out guys, come here.”
Standing in front of a burner, he incinerated a tortilla, its charred remains bound for mole sauce, before directing our attention to the blender to taste the spicy red salsa. Then it was back to the burners to see shriveled raisins — another mole ingredient — plump up, before mixing dough for tortillas.
For the next several hours, my attention volleyed from ingredient to ingredient, dish to dish, as our class of eight students prepared a Mexican menu of green tamales, chicken mole, two kinds of salsa and blue corn tortillas under the energetic tutelage of Chef Emilio, as we called him.
For cultural spice, he threw in observations such as, “We domesticated the corn and it domesticated us.”
I had come to Mexico City in February seeking just such culinary and cultural immersion. A friend had recently returned from Italy, raving about her four-day cooking school, which was more than $1,000 a day.