Tsiri

Ancestral Michoacan Foods by Chef Marlene

Pain, respect, love – these are some of the ingredients that I cook with. I invite my ancestors to help me in the kitchen, mainly as I am a migrant from Mexico and many of my family members cannot come visit me when I prepare our traditional dishes of corundas, sopes, enchiladas and more. I have my two daughters help me occasionally, whether it’s flattening tortillas with their tiny hands, stirring la cazuela de frijoles, or chopping the onions we use to garnish tacos or use in our pozole. I tear up sometimes, thinking about how I had once been told to cook in my first marriage was part of being ‘a good housewife.’ Finding the force to leave those relationships, I never forgot that my rich ancestral traditions that I had originally learned in the kitchen from my mother, grandmother, and greatgrandmother, deserved better. I teach my daughters those lessons, in all their complexity, while I improve myself and our culture.

Our cooking traditions are living. They live on in my kitchen, that sacred place where I bridge generations. Pictures of my family on both sides of the border, some of loved ones who are buried, some of those who are still with us, guide and provide inspiration for me and my family as we prepare meals for ourselves and for sale. I look up when working, close my eyes to concentrate, and think of the advice that my grandmother would give me on how to prepare the Nixtamal for our tortillas or how to take care of the herbs and plants that she used to grow, especially as I could not take the trip to Michoacan to say my final goodbye to her.

Like my traditions, food is alive. I work with it as I create art in my kitchen. Whether the herbs that I grow in our community garden, the local produce I seek out at farmers markets, or the meat that I strive to find from local sources in the Bay Area, the meals that I prepare are celebrations of life.

I work hard in my kitchen. And I know that the workers, wherever they are, perhaps in Florida’s tomato fields, milking cows in Wisconsin, or piscando strawberries in the Central Valley, also labor to provide me with the quality produce that I use. But too often, they are made invisible, forgotten as we try to cut costs and buy things cheap to make profit. I resist – as you should too – participating in this system of exploitation. For this reason, when I say ethically sourced products, it’s not just a tagline, hashtag, or slogan, – it’s what I believe and bring to you in my food. You can ask my farmworker uncle, and others in my family who still labor in the fields, about my sincerity.

I only cook with quality ingredients, namely, the love of my children, respect for farmworkers, and the memories of my ancestors. Taste what I make and you will have the honor, if only for a moment, to share in my traditions.