alt.food.mexican-cooking

The group and its era

alt.food.mexican-cooking sat in the alt.food.* neighbourhood, a stretch of Usenet that ran from the serious — alt.food.barbecue, alt.food.sushi, alt.food.wine — through to groups named after single restaurant chains. That a cuisine with a scholarly literature ended up here rather than in the older food hierarchy owed more to procedure than to standing: alt.* groups required no vote, only a control message and enough news administrators willing to carry them, as the alt hierarchy page sets out.

The rec.* food groups next door had the senior claim. rec.food.cooking descends from net.cooks, begun by Steve Upstill in Berkeley in January 1982 and renamed in the Great Renaming of late 1986; the moderated rec.food.recipes was split off later so that recipes and argument need not share a group. Those groups covered all cooking, which is why single-subject rooms kept appearing beside them: a cook who wanted Mexican food and nothing else could have one for the cost of a newgroup message.

The group ran through the later 1990s and into the 2000s. news2mail carried it to e-mail subscribers between 2000 and 2004; an archive of the run survives on Google Groups, with the usual gaps.

What was discussed

The group's central argument was also its subject: what the words “Mexican food” denote. On one side stood the regional cuisines of Mexico — Oaxacan, with its family of moles; Yucatecan; Poblano; the beef-and-flour-tortilla cooking of the north — each with its own chiles, techniques and vocabulary. On the other stood the Mexican-American cooking of Texas, California and the Southwest, and the question of whether it was a dilution of the first or a cuisine in its own right. Both positions were held firmly and neither carried the group; the argument was the standing weather, not an episode.

It had a documented history the posters inherited. Tex-Mex began as a railway abbreviation in the 1870s, came to describe Texans of Mexican ancestry by the 1920s, and was attached to food only in the early 1960s. Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico (1972) then set out the distinction between Mexican and Americanised cooking in terms both sides went on to use.

Underneath the argument lay the reference material, which is what the group is still worth reading for. Chiles came first, above all the fresh-and-dried name pairs that defeat newcomers:

• poblano, dried to ancho, with the darker mulato beside it — the same pepper dried riper by some accounts, a near relative by others;
• jalapeño, ripened and smoke-dried to chipotle, itself sold as morita or as the larger, smokier meco;
• chilaca, dried to pasilla — and a standing source of confusion in North American shops, where the name is routinely applied to the poblano instead.

Corn was the other pillar: nixtamalisation, the alkaline cooking that loosens the hulls, makes the grain's niacin available and turns maize into masa, and the resulting questions of fresh masa against masa harina. The mole family drew the same attention, the Oaxacan seven and mole poblano being long enough to reward a written treatment. And there was the problem the group solved best: where, in a town that stocked none of it, to buy dried chiles, Mexican oregano, epazote, achiote or a tortilla press, in years when mail order meant a telephone call and a posted cheque.

Context

Recipes moved as plain text, and the form had consequences. A posted recipe could be quoted line by line, corrected in the reply, re-posted in its amended state and archived by anyone with a mail spool. Usenet had rehearsed this: the USENET Cookbook, Brian Reid's mid-1980s electronic-publishing experiment, distributed edited recipes on alt.gourmand as plain text and in troff markup, so a contribution could be reformatted by machine. Ordinary posts were looser, but carried the same expectation of a fixed, checkable text.

That made provenance a live question. A recipe posted by the family that cooks it, with its household measures and its regional name for a chile, is a different kind of document from a cookbook recipe retyped into a follow-up, and the difference was worth stating in the post itself. Two further genres followed: measurement queries, translating between cups, grams and the handfuls of an oral recipe; and translation proper, where a Spanish ingredient name meant different things in different states.

Food blogs, web forums and eventually video took over the group's work, and did some of it better. What they did not inherit is the quotability of a plain-text answer: a corrected recipe in an old post can still be searched, cited and pasted, which a filmed demonstration cannot. The argument itself carried on elsewhere. Traditional Mexican cuisine was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list in 2010 — recognition for the regional Mexican side of it, though not a verdict on the other.