Asked what surprised her most while travelling the border, Jinich works through vegetarian pozol from a canyon in Chihuahua and Mennonite boiled empanadas before arriving at the Rio Grande Valley, whose Tex-Mex she notes is unlike the Tex-Mex of San Antonio or Laredo. She says Mexicans habitually treat Tex-Mex as the low end of Mexican food, or as not Mexican at all, and calls the discovery humbling.
…was Mexican, and one was American. And they're brothers, and it's a family. And they live under different codes of conduct, different languages, different laws, different rules, but they're a family and they share this business together and they're enriching these two countries at the same time.
What were some things that you tasted as you met all these people along the way that really wowed you and stuck in your mind?
…empanadas with the Mennonite community in Sabinad was another. But then of course, the different kinds of Tex-Mex food that I tried in the Rio Grande Valley, which are very different from the Tex-Mex foods from San Antonio and from Laredo. And this was very humbling because I think that Mexicans always think about Tex-Mex food as the lower end of Mexican food. It's not even Mexican food. And we have to understand that Tex-Mex food is its own beast of original cuisine. I mean, beautiful beast with many micro variations. And it's just humbling. I think people just shared so much food, so many stories. They were just so giving.
Those beans that you mentioned sound so amazing. I want to zero in on some of the recipes a little bit more. There are a bunch of different beans toward the front of the book, and they all sound so good and so varied. Can you tell us about a few more of your favorites?
Oh, yes, there are so many. I'm obsessed with beans. Let me tell you about a different kind of bean that I learned about when I was visiting the Thon Offem in southern Arizona, especially this wonderful cook named Amy Juan. She was the first one who gave me the tepari beans to try. And the tepari…
That sounds unreal. Real. How are the salsas in this border region across this region different from what you might see elsewhere?