Viceroy’s Dinner Fit for a King

MEXICO CITY —  Dripping in heavy cream, thick with ham, sausage, almonds and sesame oil, the rich meals consumed by Spanish Colonialists were “fatal,” says Mexican chef Victor Nava. Pure calories and carbohydrates.

But maybe the viceroys who were sent to Mexico in the 17th Century to represent the Spanish king were “the ones who knew how to live,” Nava says with a mischievous grin. And their rich diet “was baroque, part of the splendor of the time.”

Trying to re-create some of that splendor, Nava served a Viceroy’s Dinner last Saturday in the central patio of the Museo de la Ciudad. The museum, once the Palace of the Counts of Santiago de Calimaya, was remodeled in 1779 after an earthquake and is a century more modern than the meal presented there. But its sweeping arches and stone columns served as a perfect backdrop to the royal dinner, part of the Fifth Festival of the Historic Downtown.

Nava, a well-known chef of traditional Mexican dishes, took several of his recipes from the cookbook of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, who lived in the San Geronimo Convent a few blocks away from the Colonial palace in the mid-1600s.

Nuns such as Sister Juana frequently cooked for the Spanish viceroys, using an army of black slaves and Indian servants to prepare the laborious menus. Nava, who has no such army, simplified some of the recipes for his dinner for 100 and substituted for others that he deemed too rich.

Nava said the sopa de leche, or milk soup, of that period would have taken 24 hours to cook and was “a meal in itself,” with bread, cream, ham and chicken, among other ingredients. Instead, he substituted a delicious white almond soup served in traditional clay bowls. Next to them, he placed round breads on the table to be broken and shared by neighboring diners.

Candle-lit and covered with lace, the long, U-shaped table was also of the period; no round, restaurant-size tables of eight for those eating in the name of the king. Rock salt was served in seashells rather than shakers, and the centerpieces of greenery were decorated with lemons and limes.

The main course was a spicy, sweet and sour chicken dish called mancha manteles, literally, “stains tablecloths”--and it does. The recipe, a dark chile sauce with fruit and vegetables served over chicken breasts, is still found in Mexican cookbooks today.

The mancha manteles was accompanied by Turco de maiz cacahuacintle, a white corn tamale “in the shape of a Turk’s hat,” similar to those served on the viceroys’ tables. However, instead of the spinach pudding that the viceroys would have eaten, Nava served small spinach tarts or quiche. “The pudding would have been too heavy for us today,” he said.

But how did the viceroys manage to eat all that rich food? It is especially remarkable in light of the fact that they often ate five to seven times a day.

“It was a different life, a different rhythm of life,” said historian Guadalupe Perez San Vicente. “They spent the whole day sitting down. They died younger, but smiling. Their life expectancy was 50.”

They were fatter than most people today, she notes, adding that even early this century, “weight was considered beautiful in older people.”

Fortunately. Because, on top of the rich meals, the viceroys loved sweet desserts. Most of the recipes in Sister Juana’s cookbook are for desserts with large quantities of sugar. They were Old World recipes that grew even sweeter in Mexico. European cooks used beet sugar, which was far milder than Latin America’s cane sugar, but no one bothered to alter the measure in the New World recipes.

Nava finished off his meal with a sweet ante de cabecitas de negro, a creamy fruit paste served over sponge cake. He reduced the sugar called for in the old recipe and tempered the rest by using the slightly tart fruit guanabana , or soursop.

“All Mexican and Colonial desserts are rich, heavy, because they use egg yolks,” Nava said. That, he explained, is because the painters of that era used egg whites as a stay for colors in their frescoes and sent the egg yolks to the convents, where the sisters put them to good use.