“Probably not,” I said, and realized I might be stepping on my own tongue. I didn’t know what Estelle wanted. I did know that it hadn’t been long since I’d finished eating my afternoon snack, but already my stomach rumbled in anticipation of further samples.
Fernando was patient and pre-dinner traffic slow, and Aileen adept at covering the orders that trickled in. He took us through the construction of a Burrito Grande step by step.
“And you know,” he said at one point in the tour, “some people think that the chile is the heart of Mexican cooking, but it is not. It is not. You cannot save bad food with good chile. That’s what most people forget. Use chile that is hot enough, and you might conceal some mistakes. But that’s all.” He held up an admonishing finger again. “The roast, whether it is pork, or chicken, or beef, must be the best. Some will prepare the dish with these enormous chunks of meat, you know, full of gristle and fat,” and he grimaced. “Like something dipped out of an old stew. And to make matters worse, they soak everything in some kind of soup until the meat is unrecognizable.” He shivered in mock horror. “That is not the way. The meat must be the best. Even if it’s but lowly ground beef, it should be the best.”
“Makes sense,” I said, marveling at how wonderfully detached and disciplined Estelle Reyes-Guzman could remain through this gustatory seminar right at dinner time, jotting her clinical notes without drooling.
“Now, the tortillas need to be as only my wonderful wife can make them-not like some of those things that stick to the roof of your mouth, they are so thick and gummy.”
He walked over to another cooler and opened the door to reveal shelves full of small, neatly wrapped packages. He slipped one out and opened it for inspection. The flour tortillas were generous in size, remarkably uniform in thickness and texture. Again he ticked off the ingredients for Estelle. He shrugged expressively. “Nothing has changed in the recipe for two hundred years.”
He watched Estelle jot notes and then slid the package back in the cooler, selecting a smaller one in its place. “If you use cheap, bulk cheese,” he said, “that’s what your dish tastes like.” He peeled off a label, handing it to Estelle. “This is made by the Costillo dairy in Mesilla. It is a sharp cheddar that has some life. I have been buying my cheese from them for twenty years. Never a change. Never.”
He tossed the block of cheese into the cooler, then maneuvering around Aileen, advanced on the sink where she had been working. “If you use tired, frost-burned lettuce, or tomatoes that are hard and tasteless, then, well, you know…then the chile can’t save them. But,” and he shrugged, holding his shoulders up for a long moment. “If everything is good, and the chile is fresh and the best…then you have something worth eating, ¿verdad?”
“Verdad,” I said, risking just about the full extent of my knowledge of Spanish.
Estelle rested against the sink, eyebrows locked together, examining her notes. “When you prepped either yesterday or this morning, did you do anything differently, Fernando?”
“No, nothing. Maybe this morning a little more care than usual in the presentation for him. I know…we know…that George is, how do you say it, delicado?”
“Frail,” Estelle added.
“That’s it. He has not been so good, you know. That’s why the meal comes to him, not him to the meal.”
“Was there any ingredient that came from a fresh batch of something?” I asked. “Something that was just delivered, maybe?”
“It is always fresh,” Fernando said, trying not to sound hurt.
“But you know what I mean,” I said. “In the ebb and flow of all this, there must sometimes be a little glitch, or a new batch of something that is maybe just a little different. Not of lesser quality, but just different in some way.”
Fernando’s face scrunched up in thought. “I can not imagine what that would be,” he said. “You know, there are some…places,” and he said it as if he were deliberately sidestepping naming names, “who accept what vendors try to deliver.” He held up a hand that halted the process. “They just take what the truck delivers, without question. I will not do that. I accept what I want to accept, and the vendors all know that.”
“What about the chile itself?” Estelle asked.
Fernando frowned and returned to one of the coolers. He selected a plastic bag, perhaps two or three pounds, of green chile. I could see the pods were nicely cleaned, split in half or thirds lengthwise, with very few seeds. “This is today,” he said. “And yesterday, it was another small bag, but from the same batch.”
I leaned against the table, regarding the bag of chile. “How do you prep this?”
Now totally resigned to our probing, Fernando sighed with good-humored patience. “Now you are asking for secrets,” he chuckled. He selected a long knife from the block, wiped the blade on a clean towel, and nudged a couple of chile pods out of the bag. “It must be this way.” With amazingly rapid, expert chatterings of the knife, he reduced the chile into elegant little strips, like miniature French cut string beans. I looked at Estelle thoughtfully as she held a plastic bag to accept a sample.
“Do some folks like it cubed?” she asked. “Or maybe diced is the word?”
“The way Victor fixes it,” I added, and Fernando grunted something I didn’t catch. He didn’t bother feigning politeness by asking, ‘Victor who?’
“’Fixes it’ directly from a can,” he said. No love lost there, but then again, Victor Sanchez brought it on himself with his continual imitation of an annoyed rattlesnake. “That is not the way I will do it.”
“You’ve never run out of chile and had to resort to the can?” I knew I was on thin ice with that one. He didn’t grab a cleaver, though.
“You only run out if you don’t plan ahead,” Fernando said flatly.
I nodded at the shelves clearly visible in the roomy pantry beyond the coolers. The fat #10 cans marched in rows on the upper shelves, and the distinctive labels of the canned chile were easy to spot.
“Ah,” Fernando said, and ducked his head just a touch, embarrassed at being caught out. “I use the canned chile when I make…what do you call it…the stock for the sauce.” He straightened his shoulders. “There are some who use soup, you know.”
“Awful,” I added.
“Yes. I pureé the canned chile as a stock, then add more of this,” and he touched the plastic bag of sliced pods. “Just this.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded first me and then Estelle, both hands resting flat on the butcher block, knife at the ready. “You’re not telling me everything,” he said. He jerked his chin at the envelope in Estelle’s hand. “What do you have there? You brought me something.”
For whatever reason, Estelle wasn’t yet ready to share the photos with Fernando, and I didn’t run interference for him. The diced chile so obvious in the photograph indicated Fernando leaned on the canned goods a little more than he cared to admit. We didn’t want him slamming up his defenses.
“Did you know that Mr. Payton usually drank a glass of red wine with his meal?” she side-stepped.
“Now there,” Fernando said, wagging a finger, “is something to investigate,” and he leaned on each of the four syllables for emphasis. “If George could find a bottle of wine for three dollars, why pay four? You see?” He frowned again. “There’s a word for that poison that he favors.”
“Rot gut?” I offered.
“Exactly. It makes my mouth hurt just to think about it. Maybe the problem lies there.”