The Border, Bill Greene, and the Real Mexican Food

by Joseph Harris

On a stepfather who brought avocados into a North Carolina kitchen in 1962, the bullfight in Juarez when I was twelve, and the Yucatán cooking that has finally found its way to America

This chapter begins, as so many chapters of my life do, with my stepfather Bill Greene. Bill is the subject of his own document and his own deepening list of stories — he was my mother’s second husband, married into our family in 1962, and was the most interesting man I have ever known. He gets a full introduction in his own file. For Cinco de Mayo what matters is this: Bill brought Mexican food into a North Carolina kitchen at a moment when no one else in our part of the country was cooking it, and he did it because he had lived in El Paso for years and knew what real Mexican food was supposed to taste like.

I grew up in the Carolinas in the late 1950s. The food of my childhood was southern — fried chicken, biscuits, country ham, greens, grits. It was good food. It was also the only food. The American South in those years was not a place where avocados or artichokes appeared at the grocery store. Then my mother married Bill in 1962, and the kitchen changed overnight. He brought artichokes into the house. He brought avocados. He cooked tacos with the right cumin and the right chiles — not the brittle yellow shells the country would later compromise on. He cooked enchiladas. He had spent years in El Paso working at White Sands on the Vanguard missile program, and he had eaten at the right places on both sides of the border, and he had learned the food the way he learned everything — from the inside, with mechanical precision, with attention to how each piece worked.

In 1965, when Martin Marietta laid Bill off, the family had to move from Florida to Los Angeles. Bill chose to make the move a two-month camping trip across the southern United States rather than a flight or a straight drive. I was twelve. We crossed the Gulf Coast, stopped in New Orleans (that story belongs to the Mardi Gras chapter), then pushed west through Texas to El Paso — Bill’s old town. He had friends in Juarez, the Mexican border city across the Rio Grande, much more accessible then than it is now. He took us across. I went to my first bullfight. I ate at my first Mexican restaurant — not the American approximation but the real thing, in the country where the dish was invented. I was twelve years old and I had been waiting three years for that meal, since the day Bill had first cooked enchiladas in

our North Carolina kitchen and told me that what he was making was an approximation, and that one day I should taste the real thing in the place where it lived.

That trip is also where I learned the El Paso style enchilada — not rolled, but laid flat. Tortillas stacked with the filling layered between them, two or three high, baked in the oven, cut and served like a casserole. It is one of my signature dishes to this day. Every enchilada I have ever sent out of a kitchen of mine carries the El Paso of 1965 in it, and carries Bill in it. It is fitting that it remains on the Cinco de Mayo menu.

My own cooking education started early and started at home. I made my first cake from scratch when I was six and my first pie from scratch when I was seven, with the help of my mother and my grandmother — the standard origin story for most chefs of my generation, the women in the kitchen teaching the boy who would not stop watching. By the time Bill arrived three years later with his Mexican repertoire, I was already a cook. He found a willing student. He gave me a continent’s worth of new ingredients to work through.

By the 1990s I was cooking professionally as a fusion chef in California — the great California fusion moment, when American kitchens were learning that the boundaries between cuisines were never as fixed as the cookbooks pretended. The chefs who taught me, by their published work and by the example of their restaurants, were Mark Miller at Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe and Bobby Flay in New York. Both built their careers on the proposition that Southwest and Mexican flavors could carry the same weight as French ones, and both were right. Mark Miller in particular treated Mexican ingredients — the chiles, the masas, the moles — with the seriousness a French chef brings to butter and stock. Bobby Flay’s recipes work, which is the test that matters. They became my mentors in absentia, the same way Paul Prudhomme had become my mentor on Cajun cooking. The pattern of my education: the people whose cooking taught me the most never knew I was learning.

The most exciting development in Mexican cooking in America right now is the rise of chefs from Yucatán. The cooking of the peninsula — cochinita pibil, the achiote-marinated pork slow-roasted in banana leaves; the seafood traditions of Campeche and Meréda; the citrus-and-habanero brightness that defines Yucatecan flavor; the Mayan roots that run underneath all of it — has begun to appear on serious American menus in a way it did not even ten years ago. Mexican cooking in America is in the middle of a generational shift. The first wave brought us Tex-Mex and the El Paso enchilada. The second wave brought us the regional honesty of Oaxaca and Puebla. The third wave is bringing us Yucatán. The menu tonight reflects all three.

The cochinita pibil — Yucatecan slow-roasted pork — is plated as an El Paso style flat-stacked enchilada. This is fusion of fusions. It honors Bill’s 1962 kitchen, my 1990s training, and the new Yucatecan cooking arriving in American restaurants right now. The sopa de lima opens the meal with the citrus-and-chile signature of the peninsula. The ceviche on butter lettuce is the seafood tradition of the Gulf coast of Mexico, executed with restraint. The tres leches closes the meal as it has closed Mexican meals everywhere in the Americas for over a century — sweet, drenched, cold, generous.

This is not the Cinco de Mayo of green sombreros and bottomless margaritas. This is the Cinco de Mayo of a stepfather who brought a continent of food into our house when I was nine, of a bullfight in Juarez when I was twelve, of a kitchen in El Paso where I tasted the real thing and decided I would spend my life chasing that standard, and of a generation of Yucatecan chefs who are doing right now what Bill was already doing in 1962 — cooking the food they know, with the ingredients it requires, in places that have not yet learned what they are missing.

¡Salud! To Bill, who showed me the food. To the cooks of Juarez, who served it to a

twelve-year-old as if it mattered. To the chefs of the Yucatán, who are bringing the

next chapter.

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