Octavio Paz's Bread and Mole

Pero, Señora ¿qué podemos saber las mujeres sino filosofías de cocina?

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

la cocina mexicana es, con la china y la francesa, una de las tres grandes cocinas existentes en el mundo. … La cocina mexicana responde a una filosofía , a un sistema, a un discurso del método. (30)

Alejo Carpentier

Octavio Paz comes to this topic as a native speaker, of sorts, in two cultural and culinary discourses, with all the benefits signaled in the epigraphs from Sor Juana and Carpentier. Already of a philosophical turn of mind, he brings to his work the metaphorical depth and imagination of the poet, including a richly contextualized body of food metaphors. Likewise, in a number of his essays on the United States, he highlights the inherent comparative advantage of a deep immersion in the Mexican culinary philosophy, which enhances his intellectual appreciation of culture from both sides of the U.S.A./Mexican border. At the same time, the essays in Paz's oeuvre that support this line of reading also make clear that the U.S.A., with its laughably weak food culture, has very little basis to support its end of a potential debate. Thus, alongside his explicit comparative discussions of Mexican and U.S. political and cultural systems, we find sprinkled in brief discussions of Mexican cuisine and U.S. food, as well as other essays that focus even more specifically on the topic, often with titles like: "La mesa y el lecho" (this key essay was written in Cambridge, Mass in 1971, and included in Ogro), "El banquete y el ermitaño", "Hartazgo y náusea," "Conocimiento, drogas, inspiración" (Corriente alterna), "Lo lleno y lo vacío" (Vislumbres), "La pluma y el metate" (In/mediaciones).¹ To follow one line of metaphor prominent in these essays, we might be tempted to conclude that it is not the Protestant Reform and the Catholic Counter-reformation that defined the much-referenced civilizational differences between the two nations, but the presence or absence of a developed "filosofía de cocina."

And he started young. As he tells his reader in one of his autobiographical asides, his childhood was marked and shaped by his kindergarten experience in the United States, where his father, Octavio Paz Solórzano, was exiled during the Mexican Revolution to drum up support for the Zapatista cause, and where six-year-old Octavio junior joined him for several months at the end of 1920. The new, Anglo-dominated, school was terrifying. There were only two Mexican-Americans in the class and young Octavio spoke no English. He describes his first day as an exhausting blur of incomprehension, followed by a break for lunch and recess. Both were traumatic:

Al cabo de una eternidad llegó la hora del recreo y del lunch. Al sentarme en la mesa descubrí con pánico que me faltaba una cuchara; preferí no decir nada y quedarme sin comer. Una de las profesoras, al ver intacto mi plato, me preguntó con señas la razón. Musité: "cuchara", señalando la de mi compañero más cercano.

(Itinerario 16)

With the unthinking cruelty of six-year-olds everywhere, the other children began to taunt him with versions of the word "cuchara," and as soon as they exited the cafeteria for the playground, Octavio found himself fighting several of his classmates, returning home that day with a black eye, scratches, and a torn shirt. "[P]oco a poco, todo se normalizó," he concludes, "ellos olvidaron la palabra cuchara y yo aprendí a decir spoon" (Itinerario 16). Paz does not tell us in this essay what the cafeteria served for lunch that day – a triviality, really, since he could not eat whatever needed to be spooned up. Nor does he tell us who won the unequal fight. He does, however, signal a distinct difference in manners, including table manners: his silence, and his classmates' yelling, his refusal to adopt any of the alternatives that might occur to a gleeful child, such as eating with his hands or slurping soup from a...