Matilde, my grandmother, never said gelatina. What she offered as dessert on certain Sundays was called jaletina, and she presented it in a most exotic way: a two-toned ring mold crowned with peach halves or whole prunes suspended in a gleaming, flavorful layer that contrasted with the creamy bottom made of milk. All her grandchildren would laugh when she passed around the plates of jaletina, which to us was simply gelatina. But that was her, and she went to her grave without ever pronouncing the word that I believe caused her genuine offense: gelatina.
Now, as I leaf through recipe books from nineteenth-century Puebla de los Ángeles, I keep coming across recipes for jaletinas, and the mocking laughter of a dozen children who had no idea where the term came from comes flooding back to me. Guided by these documents, I try to imagine the afternoons in those Talavera-tiled Poblano kitchens of the early twentieth century—the hours set aside for making sweets beneath an atmosphere fragrant with cinnamon, orange blossom, and freshly made caramel.
In those days, milk was measured in cuartillos, flour and sugar in pounds and ounces; syrups were prepared just in case, orange-blossom water and tequesquite water were kept close at hand, and no one thought twice about using thirty egg yolks if the recipe called for it. Pastry creams, meringue kisses, muéganos, buñuelos, camotitos, mamones, jericayas, gaznates, and jamoncillos were arranged in baskets for the delight of young and old alike. Among them was the pitayate, a jamoncillo made from pitaya fruit prepared in the month of May and requiring an entire afternoon to make: sugar, red pitayas, milk, a copper pot, and a wooden paddle for stirring without pause until the bottom of the pot came into view. Difficult to prepare, the pitayate can now only be found, if at all, in a convent in the city center—and sometimes even the modern-day nuns have been unable to reproduce it.
Traditional sweets undeniably demand precision, dedication, patience, and time. Add to that the fact that there were no refrigerators back then, that not every home had an oven, and that the tools that now make clarifying, straining, grinding, and various other techniques so much easier simply did not exist—and what was achieved in those kitchens over the heat of coals that never went out becomes quite remarkable.
I say they never went out because, as Doña Alicia Enríquez once told me—a woman whose cotton-candy hair concealed stories worthy of a collection—kitchens had braziers, and on those braziers, after the main meals were cooked, the afternoon sweets were made. In those days, charcoal vendors were plentiful throughout the city, and every household kept a supply of charcoal and ocote pine. Once the fire was lit and the coals were brought to a glow with the bellows, they were tended carefully; after cooking was done, the fire was not put out. The embers were placed in a clay bowl and covered with ash. The fire slept, and the next morning the still-glowing coals were uncovered and coaxed back to life with fresh charcoal. Then the pot of beans was set to cook, with a small plate of water balanced on top; the water warmed gradually and was added to the beans whenever needed. Pouring in cold water would shock the beans, so that little warming plate served its purpose. The beans, like the milk, were boiled daily to keep them from souring, and to cool the milk, its pot was placed on the wrought-iron macetero rings of Puebla's balconies, left to the evening dew to cool it down.
For want of ovens, cooking was done over two fires. The modern recipe's closing instruction—"place in a 180°C oven for 50 minutes"—is the updated version of the phrase that graced the final lines of late-nineteenth-century recipes: "cook over two fires." Cooking over two fires was nothing more than receiving heat from both above and below; to achieve this, clay pots were set on a small brazier and covered with large griddles upon which red-hot coals were laid.
Likewise, the instruction "insert a toothpick, and when it comes out clean the cake is done" was tested in those days by the directive "insert a popote." But this was not the straw resting in a sweethearts' milkshake. The popote was a kind of firm palm strip used to make brooms and brushes, which in that era also served to check whether something was properly cooked.
Other preparations were cooked in a bain-marie or al rescoldo—that is, at the edge of the hearth. Or, as I found on one page of the family recipe book, making a pear preserve required that the pot, once filled with chopped fruit and sugar, be sealed and buried beneath the stable manure for 30 days. A rather daring version of slow-fermentation cooking, to say the least.
The revisited concept of "soft-ball stage," "hard-crack stage," and their kin has been center stage in every era. A punto de espejo, a punto de caramelo, a punto de bola, a punto de turrón, a punto de cajeta. Textures that in kitchens of old were mastered to perfection without the use of electric mixers, balloon whisks, or a Thermomix. Stages that strike me as enchanting metaphors speaking of particular movements, textures, and direct contact with the body.
Rainy afternoons in Puebla's capital will always be the perfect occasion for making those sweets brimming with egg yolks, for slowly burning milk over a low flame, for letting seasonal fruits release their syrups, for letting pumpkins drunk on piloncillo candy and crystallize, for letting white meringues fill juicy gaznates—or for letting gelatinas be called jaletinas once more. Because the same iridescent sheen that rain leaves on the pavement is the color you will always find when you peer into the bottom of a copper pot while making caramel.
María del Carmen Castillo / Puebla, Puebla
A version (now revised) was published in 2013 in Animal Gourmet.
