MEXICAN COOKING

MEXICAN

Mexican food, whether eaten at home or at a friendly restaurant, can be a delightful trip to a foreign landone that happens to be just across Arizona's southern border. There's also a touch of adventure when the selection of restaurants is as varied as it is in metropolitan Phoenix, and Tucson.

COOKING

A special devotion to Mexican food by gourmets half the world over has spurred chefs and restaurateurs to create ever delightful treats for the eye as well as for the soul. (LEFT) Lennita Sanchez of Tucson demonstrates her own "chef's special," tortillas with a twist. (BELOW) From range to platter in only minutes, Mexican food usually is created with simple ingredients, then topped with a spicy salsa. (RIGHT) An irresistible spread of exotic Mexican delights ignites the evening at Mi Nidito, Tucson. Clockwise, from left: a basic red chili; avocado salad; a chimichanga, burro, and flauta combination plate; and last, enchiladas.

Fred Treviño remembers a time when the tortilla was a badge of second-class citizenship. "When I was a kid, I would sometimes go to school with a lunch of tortillas with eggs and chorizo wrapped in them. When you did that, you were looked down on by the other kids."

The Reverend Treviño, fifty, today is pastor of Tucson's First United Methodist Church. It is a mostly Anglo congregation, and its attitude toward Mexican food is nearer worship than scorn. Last fall, when Treviño offered to fix enchiladas, 180 people showed up for dinner. "Mexican food has become more acceptable," Treviño observes, "as people have become more accepting."

More than merely acceptable, Mexican food almost is a religion in Arizona today. The best little tamale factories are shrines. Culinary fundamentalists argue over whose interpretation of machaca is most authentic. Certain lost sheep stray off to experiment with mexipizzas and butter pecan margaritas. And there are fanatics among us. I am one, a Mexico border boy who lost his jalapeño innocence by the age of six. Juliet England, born and raised on a ranch in the nearby Mexican state of Sonora, is another. She runs the Santa Cruz Chili & Spice Company, a venerable family chili pepper factory, just down the road from San José de Tumacacori. It is hard to say which is the more irresistible siren-the haunting remains of the old Spanish mission or the chili showroom, the veryaroma of which would glow in the dark. Here is the full orchestra of Mexican seasonings and sauces, and a few of their Anglo relations: cayenne pepper, Anaheim peppers, cartillas peppers, jalapeño peppers, cumin, oregano, red salsa, green salsa, jalapeño jelly, jalapeño mustard, andMrs. Renfro's Hot Chow Chow. It is the best whiff in Arizona.

"We get letters from service brides in Germany saying, 'Help! I'm suffering withdrawal symptoms. Ship me some ingredients to make Mexican food,'" laughs England.

What is it about Mexican food that inspires such devotion, and that has, in the last few years, fueled its emigration over half the globe? (There are forty-eight Mexican restaurants in Indianapolis, Indiana, and four in Paris, France.) I can suggest two reasons. One is that it offers us palefaces a way to participate in a neighboring yet exotic culture. This no doubt is the same im-pulse that prompts us to build Spanish Colonial-style condominiums and Mission Revival country clubs. More to the point, however, is the character of the food itself. Pardon me if I grow moist-eyed and slightly mystical, but there is something about Mexican cooking that is akin to the essence of life. Its forms are those of nature: the circle (tortilla), the cylinder (flauta), the arch (taco). Its flavors are likewise elemental:

Chili evokes fire; a fine guacamole laced with lemon juice and fresh cilantro captures the color and spirit of springtime. Yet it is a cuisine that also reflects the complexity of nature. I cite birria, a beef, goat, or lamb dish that filtered up to Arizona from Jalisco about four years ago. Simmered with assorted vegetables and spices in a clay pot for several hours, birria is in effect a pot roast. But while pot roast rejoices in the flavor of the meat alone, birria is a pantheon of moist, sen-sual flavors, jostling each other for dominance, yet mingling into coherence at the moment of truth. Eat pot roast, and you simply feel full. Eat birria, and you are cleansed.

All this is gospel to the queue that spills from a nondescript stucco storefront onto Washington Street in downtown Tucson every weekday noon. These are downtown's worker bees, and this hole-in-thewall, El Rápido, is the source of their nectar.

Aurelio Perez, who is remembered as a gracious, humble immigrant who loved to eat-and cook-opened up here in 1933. He made corn tortillas and cooked the barbacoa for the annual Tucson Electric Company employee picnic. His specialty was personal delivery to the neighborhoods nearby-on foot. Then, in 1937, he bought a new Plymouth sedan and named the business El Rápido - The Speedy One.

Midmorning today finds Perez' grandson, Tony Peyron, dressed in T-shirt, apron, and plaid shorts, running the tiny kitchen. Over flames simmer three-gallon cauldrons of shredded pork, refried beans, and red chili con carne, the latter a burbling, red-orange stew that would have served Puritan preachers nicely as a prop to illustrate fire and brimstone. El Rápido no longer delivers-urban renewal displaced most of Aurelio Perez' old customers twenty years ago but the menu has expanded to include several kinds of tamales, burros, and quesadillas.

"I was a cook in the Army; I like to feed people," Peyron says. "But we don't want to get super big. A lot of people have told me don't go into partnerships. As it is, we have a good little business. I go home early every day to my family, and we're not open on weekends."

The weight of family tradition bears on Peyron's shoulders, but he appears to view it more as gift than burden. He still uses recipes perfected in the 1950s by his aunt. His brimstone con carne still is made in the most time-consuming fashion, starting with dried chilis hand-ground into the paste that flavors the sauce.

Downtown Tucson is the dining room. Some customers take their lunches to eat under trees at the Plaza de las Armas beside City Hall. Some hike three blocks in the opposite direction to a little vestpocket memorial garden on Granada Street, where they sit on Barbara Grygutis' user-friendly ceramic sculptures and munch on burros. A fringe benefit of Mexican food is that some of it is quite portable, and you get to eat the wrapper.

El Rápido's opposite pole is Famous Restaurants Inc., an upscale chain that is headquartered in Scottsdale and that operates twenty-eight Garcia's Mexican Restaurants from Anchorage, Alaska, to Eatontown, New Jersey.

Garcia's beginnings, like El Rapido's, were humble. Julio and Olivia Garcia founded the business as a Phoenix takeout in 1956. However, the Garcia family was amenable to expansion, and today they are stockholders in a public company that serves more than fifty million dollars worth of Mexican food in a year.

Garcia's has been both beneficiary and customers generally are not fanatics in search of fire.

"I go looking for the little restaurants in South Phoenix myself," he says. "I'm from the Midwest, but I've acquired a taste for Mexican food much hotter than what we can do for a mainstream market."

Between El Rápido and Garcia's is a spectrum of Mexican food unknown in the Arizona of even a decade ago. In Phoenix, Oaxaca flaunts tradition with mushroom enchiladas. In South Tucson, a little place called The Crossroads offers a complete Mexican seafood menu, until recently written only in Spanish. How many hapless gringos passed over camaron al mojo de ajo, not knowing it is shrimp bathed in the ambrosia of butter and garlic?

Increasingly popular are Mexico City-style food (in which bacon lurks in the tacos), Cuban-style chicken (marinated overnight in tropical fruit juices, then charbroiled), and a not-unwelcome Texas import, fajitas (marinated skirt steaks cut into strips and served with a mild salsa of tomato, garlic, onion, and peppers). I also happily report that the Anglo community is beginning to shuck its soggy cornflakes and venture into Mexican food for breakfast as well, jump-starting sluggish hearts with an electrifying scramble of eggs, chorizo, serrano peppers, onion, and garlic.

How to plunge into all this? Elin Jeffords, restaurant critic for The Arizona Republic, has simple advice for people looking for good Mexican food: "Look in a Mexican neighborhood."

She also has one other piece of advice: "Don't ever get started on it. It's a mixed blessing. You'll crave it for the rest of your life. After two weeks in Europe, I have an insatiable craving for Mexican food. My brother moved to Detroit, and he was miserable without it. We kept sending him canned ingredients. It didn't help. He still had to come home every six months-for Mexican food."