The Mexican Wave of Brunches

This Mexican beginning – well, Mesoamerican really – was presumably in anticipation of us not-yet invented humans and our desire to eat a variety of beans with two types of chilli-salsa, garlic, bacon, onions, tomatoes, eggs, flatbreads and cheese on the Morning After the Night Before. It’s that type of long-term forward planning that makes one believe in Darwinism.

But, for a long, long time, the skinner among beans was all about how their time would come. “Just wait. You’ll see. It’s all about bean patient.” (A bad pun, sorry.) (You said it – Food Ed.) After waiting about two millennia and sprouting into around 40,000 different types, they’re now grown on every continent but Antarctica – but do get eaten there.

Beans were one of the first plants to be farmed. Eons ago in Mexico, they were grown together with maize and squash in a husbandry trio called the “The Three Sisters”. The tallest sister, maize – another Mexican first – was grown so that its long stems provided natural poles for the second sister, climbing bean plants. Ground-hugging squashes were the third sister that flourished at the shaded base, cutting evaporation from the soil and stifling life-sucking weeds.

Apart from all that and sombreros, what else springs to mind as being quintessentially Mexican? Yep, Tequila. Here’s what Lee Marvin – so immaculately suited and ruthlessly cool on-screen in Point Blank and Gorky Park – had to say about that world-welcomed Mexicana:

“Tequila. Straight. There’s a real polite drink. You keep drinking until you finally take one more and it just won’t go down. Then you know you’ve reached your limit.”

If you reached a “Marvin” on the Night Before, your Morning After is going to need a knockout remedy. And Huevos Divorciados – “divorced eggs” – is the left-right combo you’ll be looking to land.

This is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world’s hotly spiced, eggy brunches. Shakshuka? Piperade? Rancheros? Runners-up. Me-too imitations. Divorciados is a Mexican wave that celebrates victory over the Night Before. It’s so astonishingly good that it almost makes doing a “Marvin” seem like a sound plan.

On the Morning After, this might seem like a lot of recipe and cookery. It isn’t. Your food processor does most of the work. With a bit of post-shower focus and maybe a pair of helping hands, you can get this world-champion restorative tabled in under 40 minutes.

Huevos Divorciados for four hungry brunchers

Eric Broder van Dyk on Flickr (Commons)

First thing to do is to get your oven to 200°C. You’ll also need two eggs and one large tortilla for each bruncher, a generous bit of butter, six juicy limes and plenty of Parmesan.

Parmesan? Yep. It’s a fine substitute for a hard, Mexican cheese called Cotija which might be a bit tricky to find locally, but often gets referred to as “Mexican Parmesan”.

To speed things along, you can make the refried beans and the salsas at the same time. For the dividing line of beans at the centre of your Divorciados you will need:

1 tbs olive oil

250g good, smoked streaky bacon, diced

2 medium brown onions, finely chopped

2 fat garlic cloves, crushed

2 x 250g cans mixed beans, drained and rinsed

Salt and black pepper to taste

I prefer using mixed beans – red kidney, borlotti, white haricot and butter beans – for the variety of tastes and textures.

In a big frying pan, cook the bacon bits on a medium heat in the oil to give them some fat-melting colour. Add the garlic and onions and keep gently frying until the onions soften. Now add the beans, mix everything together and keep cooking and stirring for another five minutes.

Remove from the heat and roughly mash the beans with a potato masher and season with salt and pepper. Don’t mash into a puree, you want to keep this pretty chunky. Empty the beans into a serving dish and leave them aside for the moment.

Going alpha with the salsa – a red one and a green one. First the salsa roja. In a shallow dish, the plan is to roast the following ingredients cosily together on a high shelf in your 200°C oven for 20 minutes.

Salsa Roja

24 ripely-red cherry tomatoes

18 bird’s eye chillies, whole

6 fat garlic cloves, peeled but left whole

1 tablespoon olive oil, dottily splashed over the tomatoes, chillies and garlic

1 level teaspoon of sea salt and black pepper scattered over the lot

1 level teaspoon sugar, scattered as above

Juice from a lime

After 10 minutes’ roasting, give everything a turning stir and return to the oven. After its final 10 minutes, turn the oven down to 50°C, remove your dish and let its contents cool a bit before tipping the whole lot into a processor and zapping it smooth. Add the lime juice, check the salt and add more if needed. Keep it warm in a bowl in the cooling oven together with your bowl of refried beans.

Now for the salsa verde. To be muy autentico, this should be made with tomatillos – sort of like cross a between a small green squash and a tomato. They’re very Mexican but not something you’re likely to find locally. So, this verde uses green peppers instead. It’s certainly green… I suppose you could use green tomatoes, but I reckon there’s enough tomato in the rojo.

Salsa Verde

3 green peppers, peeled and deseeded (Peeled? Right, peeled. Same as you’d peel spuds.)

8 green jalapeno chillies

6 spring onions – keep as much of the crisp green stems as you can

2 Tablespoons water

1 teaspoon heaped salt

1 Tablespoon olive oil

30g fresh parsley and coriander, finely chopped, stalks and all

Lime juice

Salt and ground black pepper, to taste

The roughly chopped peppers, chillies and onions go into a pot with the water. Bring it to the boil and then give it a frequently stirred simmer for about 20 minutes. Idea here is to cook off the water as everything thoroughly softens.

Once that happens, pour the lot into your processor, add the olive oil, parsley and coriander, and give it a thorough blend. Season with salt and pepper and just enough lime juice to give it a tangy, citrussy zing. Pour into a serving bowl and put it into the warming oven alongside the beans and the salsa rojo.

‘The Michelada Interlude’ – recommended but not essential

That’s most of the cooking finished so now’s a great time to enjoy a Michelada. That’s a reviving Mexican beer cocktail which is grand if you’re a tad cruda (literally “raw”, but also meaning hung over) having been mangled by a Marvin.

Mi-chel-ada is possibly a lovely mix of Mexican vernacular that combines the slang for beer, “chela”, with the words for frost, “helada”, and “mi” for mine – as in something that’s yours. Stir together and you get “my frosty beer”. Fab, hey?

Etymology aside, to make one Michelada, you’ll need a cold half-litre beer glass that’s a third full of ice cubes. You’ll also need a couple of limes, some Worcestershire sauce and a bit of Tabasco. Since this is a Mexican cocktail, you’ll want a cold beer like a Corona or a Sol. And when I say cold, I don’t mean bottle-store chilled, I mean cold.

Squeeze into your icy glass the juice from a lime. Add a very little splash of Worcestershire sauce and a few drops of Tabasco. Cut two slices from half a lime and add them to the glass. Give the spicily and citrussed ice a stir and then pour in your arrestingly cold beer. Michelada!

Michelada image by Rene Arizmendi from Pixabay

Okay. Time for eggs and tortillas. The tortillas need to be fast-scorched – and I mean fast – for about a minute on each side in a hot pan coated with a little olive oil. This olivey scorch gives them a bit more flavour.

Far more important, it gives them an essential, slightly crisped surface seal that stops them going soggy when topped by the eggs, beans and salsas. Keep the stacked tortillas in the warm oven.

Now, fry the eggs – in hotly foaming butter’s my preference, to your brunchers’ liking. Soft-yolk, please. For the sake of swift service, the eggs should ideally cook in a pan that’ll take all eight of ’em. And it’s grand if your helping hand is hotly adding some slight crisp to the tortillas at the same time.

To serve, top a warmly plated tortilla with a central swathe of beans. Place an egg either side of the division. Cover the white of one egg with salsa rojo and the white of the other with verde. Just the whites. What a picture!

Your fellow cruda brunchers can dress their Divorciados with as much parmesan as they wish. But they should certainly raise their icy Micheladas in a grateful toast to you and your helper: Sin rendición!

‘No surrender!’ Salud! DM

Tomatillos note: David Smale runs Baha Taco Bar, in Grant Avenue, Norwood, Johannesburg. David’s a knowledgeable fan of Mexican food and drink. He cooks with tomatillos and also sells them canned. Tel: 076 694 7400