In New Mexico, chile is about pungency, taste, texture, and color, but more than anything, chile is about culture." --- Carmella Padilla, author, The Chile Chronicles: Tales of a New Mexico Harvest
THE REVERED NEW MEXICO CHILE CHRONICLED
The Hatch Chile Festival provided a fitting venue for me to meet Carmella Padilla, the award-winning Santa Fe based author of The Chile Chronicles. Quilted with colorful New Mexico-style chile tales, the book is chockfull of lore and tidbits, and vivid photographs captured by Jack Parsons, whose work has appeared in regional and national publications, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Last Labor Day, as the valley danced with the pungent aroma of roasting chile, the soft-spoken artistes were signing their book beneath a sprawling old tree adjacent to Hatch Chile Express. "Que Viva Chile!" ("Long Live Chile!") Padilla carefully scripted in the inside cover of my newly purchased prize. Whether you're a diehard Red or Green Chilehead, or both, The Chile Chronicles will satisfy both appetites.
With wordsmith ingenuity, Padilla recounts cherished memories of growing up in a Hispanic family where chile played a central role in everyday life.
"I am a young girl, seated at the dinner table, surrounded by family," she writes. "Outside the large picture window that lets the world into our Santa Fe kitchen, snow is falling in diagonal sweeps through the dark December sky. Inside, the heat from my mother's cooking clings to the cold window surface, causing droplets of water to form and roll down the glass...The slightly sweet smell of pinto beans unfolds upon the smoky scent of green chile and pork. I place a cold slice of butter at the center of a warm tortilla and watch it melt...In my family, however, the true test of a hot meal is whether or not the chile is pungent enough for my father's fiery tastes."
But Padilla's lovely locution isn't reserved just for personal family accounts. Whether the topic is chile science, "No matter...how slick the marketing slogan, the multimillion-dollar New Mexico chile industry still boils down to a seed," or a chile harvest panorama, "...nearly a hundred chile pickers are bent low between the red chile rows, their straw hats and bandannas barely visible above the waist-high plants;" or chile factories, "...ceilings and other surfaces are splashed with the plasma of ripened chile pods while pavements are littered with castaway seeds and skins," or a chile wood sculpture, "As statuesque and curvy as a pinup girl...," I look forward to Padilla's eloquent visual renderings.
Padilla contrasts northern New Mexico farmers with their southern compatriots. "The farmer who tenders her isolated chile fields in the north grows mostly to feed her family...The farmer who oversees the large fields in the south grows principally to fulfill contracts with hot-sauce makers in Louisiana." Of the latter is Emma Jean Cervantes, one of the twelve chile farmers to whom Padilla pays tribute. Cervantes transformed her father's small chile field in Vado into one of the state's largest chile-processing businesses. Known as Cervantes Enterprises, the company ships its products nationally and internationally. Cervantes' tongue-blistering cayenne pepper pod is used in Louisiana Hot Sauce.
A book about the celebrated fruit isn't complete without mention of horticulture professor Paul Bosland, head of New Mexico State University's distinguished Chile Pepper Breeding Program. Padilla joined the "Chile Doctor" on one of his daily rounds in an experimental garden and filed this report:
"At 10 a.m. on a June morning...Temperatures are close to 100 degrees F, yet a group of summer school students is hard at work in the soil...rows are covered by long white swathes of nylon netting and are interrupted every few feet by wooden stakes, between which a different culitvar grows."
Padilla's book, aptly subtitled, "Tales of a New Mexico Harvest," will be treasured not only by chile worshipers but also by history buffs. In my limited but growing chile library, The Chile Chronicles, is a tasty favorite...a choice book to curl up with while munching red or green. The Chile Chronicles, published by Museum of New Mexico Press, is available in paperback ($29.95) and hardcover ($45).
FOOD ISSUES: BATTLES AND TRUCES
Carmella Padilla will share her scholarship as a Food Issues: Battle and Truces panelist at the Border Book Festival on Saturday, March 21 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. at the Mastery in Life Center in the Downtown Mall. Tickets cost $7. Other participants include moderator, Las Cruces psychologist Margee McIlvoy, and authors Margaret Randall, Regina Romero and Sunny Conley. The focus will be on the role food plays in our daily life at the personal, social, community, and political levels. For further information, call 524-1499.
