Recipes from Fonda San Miguel

Austin locals know the restaurant Fonda San Miguel as a great place to gather with families for a special occasion. Its Sunday brunch is legendary. As one of the Southwest's top restaurants, not only is the food top quality, its ambiance and art transport patrons to

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a romantic hacienda in Mexico.

When the Fonda San Miguel cookbook was first published in 2005, it was an instant hit and won awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals and Independent Publishers Association. Fonda San Miguel: Forty Years of Food and Art is now updated and reissued with a lavish compilation of recipes and art from one of America’s premier restaurants serving interior Mexican cuisine.

To celebrate, we've pulled a few recipes from the book for Thanksgiving week. Feast well!

We've partnered with BookPeople and Edible Austin for a talk with restauranteur and author Tom Gilliland on Thursday, December 8th at 7pm. He'll speak about the book and there will be some bites to taste along with his talk. Don't miss it!

From Fonda San Miguel: Forty Years of Food and Art

Spicy Red Snapper Bloody Mary—or María

This is your spicy Bloody Mary but with a fun twist. You can make it with your choice of gin, vodka, tequila, or mezcal.

• 5 ice cubes
• 1 6-ounce can tomato juice (the best you can get)
• 2 ounces gin, vodka, tequila, or mezcal
• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons bottled hot pepper sauce (Salsa Valentina)
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon brine from a jar of olives
• 1 pinch hot chili powder
• 1 pinch garlic powder
• 1 pinch ground cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon celery salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon prepared or freshly grated horseradish

Garnish

• 1 celery stalk with leaves (from the heart of the celery)
• 1 small dill pickle
• 2 stuffed green olives
• 1 freshly cut lemon wedge

Place ice cubes in a cocktail shaker. Pour in all liquid ingredients and season with all the rest. Cover and shake until the outside of the shaker is frosty.

Pour all contents, including ice, into a 12-ounce highball glass. Before serving, garnish with celery, pickle, olive, and lemon wedge. Serves 1.

Higaditos con Higos Y Jalapeños
Chicken Livers with Figs and Jalepeños

This may sound like a strange combination, but the sweet/sour/spicy joining of figs, onions, jalapeño, and vinegar is a perfect foil for the livers and their savory richness. These are great served with cocktails.

• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter 
• 2 red onions, peeled and thinly sliced 
• 1 fresh jalapeño pepper, chopped 
• 1 2/3 cups chicken livers, trimmed of sinew 
• 3 tablespoons granulated sugar 
• 4 ripe figs, stems removed and halved 
• 5 tablespoons red wine vinegar 
• 4 slices sourdough bread, toasted 
• Extra virgin olive oil 
• 1/4 cup fl at leaf parsley, roughly chopped 
• Zest of 1/2 lemon

Melt half the butter in a large frying pan. Add the onions, jalapeño, and a pinch of salt. Cook over gentle heat for 20 minutes, until the onion is soft and starting to brown. Remove to a plate and set aside.

Thoroughly pat dry the chicken livers on paper towels. Season well with salt and pepper. Add the remaining butter to the frying pan and, once it foams, add the livers. Fry over medium heat for about 2 minutes on each side or until cooked through. Cook in batches if needed. Set aside with the onions.

Turn the heat to medium-low. Sprinkle the sugar over the pan and add the figs, cut side down. Cook for about 1 minute, until the cut side starts to bubble and brown; turn over. Add the vinegar and bubble for a few seconds, until syrupy. Return the onions and livers to the pan. Correct the seasonings and stir together.

Spoon the fig and liver mixture over the toast. Splash with olive oil and sprinkle with parsley and lemon zest before serving. Serves 4.

The World as Seen Through Turkeys

By Nicolas Trépanier

If Thanksgiving taught me anything, it is that the United States is a foreign country. They do things differently here.

When I moved across the border from my native Québec in order to pursue my doctoral studies, I brought with me a firm conviction that I would find myself in known territory. I had already spent a quarter century consuming American cultural products, after all, and I was relocating only a few hundred miles from my hometown. Later that Fall, as Thanksgiving was approaching, I did not expect much more than the Thanksgivings I was used to: a day off school, a meaningless but welcome hole in the collective schedule just when I had a 

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term paper in desperate need of being written.

But what I actually ended up encountering was one of the highlights of the annual calendar, a celebration with well-established rituals and social obligations that emptied the graduate dorm where I lived and that caused much pity to be cast upon us, poor international students who (as we suddenly discovered) were expected to feel deeply depressed to be away from our families on such a special occasion. Thanksgiving, I realized, was completely new to me.

And why should it not? Thanksgiving might be the most American of holidays, both because of its gravitational pull in our calendars and because it does not have a real counterpart outside Anglophone North America. This strongly regional character, in turn, means that a deep look at Thanksgiving can yield a lot of insights about the culture that created it. It’s a way to look over America’s shoulder as it waits in line to cash out at the supermarket, and to draw all sorts of conclusions on the way it lives its private life.

Looking into a culture’s shopping cart and drawing all sorts of conclusions about it is also what I do in my book Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia—except that it involves another kind of Turkey. Looking at a region that was about to become part of the Ottoman empire, the book examines the various ways people interacted with food (growing it, buying it, eating it or avoiding it for religious reasons) in order to reconstruct the texture of daily life in a culture far removed from our own, far from the bird turke and from cranberry sauce.
Food can be a pretext to document almost anything. Let’s take the way that food enters a house and reserves are managed, for example. Fourteenth-century sources include a number of anecdotes where men, after several days of deep immersion in religious rituals, are suddenly snapped out of their devotions by worries about supplying their homes with bread and meat. In another set of anecdotes, we encounter devout young women who, having taken bread and oil from the house to feed a wandering dervish, have to bear the wrath of their sinful mother-in-law, herself blinded to sainthood by her jealous management of the food pantry. These, and a host of other anecdotes, superficially center on food provisioning. But they also paint a vivid picture of the distribution of power and responsibilities among genders and generations, the collaborative and conflictual character of their interactions, and the contrast between the ways social roles played out outside and inside the house.