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It’s easy to find a tortilla in PEI
An authentic, fresh tortilla as eaten in pre-Columbian Mexican households, not so much.
“They have a lot of additives and the taste – it’s not good,” said Diana Gomez, who currently works as a baker in Charlottetown.
“It’s very different. And if you want to make tortillas, you have to make tortillas with flour. But the flour is the same, they have additives.”
Gomez, who came to PEI with her family four years ago, said she craved that authentic Mexican taste so much that she decided to take matters into her own hands. Last year, she planted her own corn in a shared garden plot to make her own flour from scratch.
This kind of personal experience inspired Gomez to explore how other Mexican newcomers to the Island keep in touch with their traditional culture through cooking and how immigrant experiences can change their eating habits.
Gomez wrote an anthropological study based on her research after interviewing other migrant women in PEI. Her paper will be presented at a Latin American Congress of Sociology that she is participating in later this year in Mexico.
“I understand now that culture is dynamic,” she said. “Food is nourished by other crops and by the environment…
“Our options for what to eat cannot be the same because the environment is different, our resources are different, we have many cultures around us, we have many options.”
Hot peppers, pork rinds, chayote
Most of the people Gomez interviewed told her they still prepare Mexican dishes at home, although they often have to take in ingredients that are more expensive or of lower quality, or simply substitute something else.
Carina Cervantes has only been on PEI for about a year. She is a full-time carer who lives in Victoria by the Sea.
“I’m getting to know more of the shops around me so I can make chili and enchiladas and things like that. The food I used to cook in Mexico,” she said.
Although Cervantes said she can find some things at large grocers and more specialty stores, she said she sometimes has to get creative — especially when it comes to vegetables and other plant-based ingredients.
For example, for some soups you should substitute chayote, a pear-shaped green gourd, for the not-so-green, potato-shaped potato.
“Some of the hot peppers I can’t find here, so I order them online. And if we’re eating something like cow’s tongue . . . [to buy it] it’s hard here,” she said.
“[For a dish like] Enchilada with mole and hot sauce … they use Parmesan instead of Mexican cheese because we can’t find the same cheese here,” Gomez said.
“Chicharon [pork rinds] for example, we can find chicharron from Chinese stores and Walmart, but it’s not the same kind.”
Cultural exchange
Social factors influence eating habits as much as available resources.
Gomez said that in many cases diets change because people are exposed to cuisine from other parts of the world.
For example, she found that many of the people she interviewed gravitated toward Indian food, which is not as commonly available in most parts of Mexico as it is on PEI
“You can find many Chinese restaurants, but [not] Indian food,” she said. “It was amazing for me to discover this cuisine because the flavors are not the same, but they have a lot of spices and it’s similar to Mexico. It’s complex and it’s healthy.”
Cervantes said she started incorporating some Indian spices into her own cooking.
“I created new recipes because I started using all kinds of spices,” she said.
“Some of my partners at work, they’re teaching something and I’m like, ‘Okay, I can make like meatballs with these ingredients, I can use their ingredients.’
Searching for a home
Patricia Calzada Lorenzana came to PEI as a student and graduated last year. She said she misses many things about her home in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, but perhaps none more than her family’s cooking.
“I never knew depression in my life until I got here, and it was mostly because of the food,” she said.
Calsada Lorenzana grew up eating her grandmother’s recipes as they were passed down to her mother and her “nana,” one of her mother’s cousins. But she was alone on PEI
She said that during her early years on the Island, she mostly ate fast food and easy meals because she was too tired or too lazy to cook after she got home from school.
“I got tired of it, to be honest, because I started gaining weight first,” Calzada Lorenzana said. “So I started cooking for myself, adapting sometimes dishes from here or easy ones and adding some Mexican flavors. And then I started craving real Mexican food.”
Calsada Lorenzana asked her mother for her recipes and began working on her skills. Although she finds it challenging to deal with issues like not having the right ingredients, she said she’s getting there — even if her cooking still isn’t as good as her mom’s.
“It’s not bad anymore. At least I’m not burning anything. It’s not too salty,” she said.
In the conclusion of his study, Gomez writes that memories are at the heart of the search for authenticity in a dish. She said that when the body migrates, the “soul” is fed by evoking the positive emotions experienced in the past, perhaps those experienced while eating a certain meal with friends or family.
“Whenever you cook for someone, it’s because you’re showing them love,” Calzada Lorenzana said.
“For me, tasting my mother’s recipe reminds me of how she used to cook for us and [how she] express your love for us, you know what I mean? So it’s more than just a taste… You feel the warmth of your heart, that’s what we call it. It tastes like home.”
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