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Generations of Handwritten Mexican Cookbooks Are Now Online

The story of Mexican food is usually told as a happy merging of indigenous ingredients and techniques with those brought by the Spanish in the 1500s, as if the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was just a means to a better burrito. In fact, what we now know as Mexican cuisine is the result of centuries of shifting borders and tastes.

“When it came to culinary cultural exchange in the colonial period, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo referred to corn dishes as the ‘misery of maize cakes,'” says Stephanie Noell, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). “On the other side, Indians were not impressed by the Spaniards’ wheat bread, describing it as ‘famine food.’” The eventual confluence of native and European ingredients and traditions is, of course, what defines North American cuisine to this day.

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A rough timeline of this transformation exists in the UTSA’s Mexican cookbook collection, the largest-known trove of Mexican and Mexican-American cookbooks in North America. It started with a donation of nearly 550 books from San Antonio resident Laurie Gruenbeck in 2001, amassed during her decades of travel throughout Mexico. It now has more than 2,000 books, including some of renowned chef and scholar Diana Kennedy’s rarest books, as well as her personal papers. It has the oldest cookbooks published in Mexico (from 1831), elaborate vegetarian cookbooks from 1915 and 1920, corporate and community cookbooks, and much more.

The earliest book in the collection is from 1789, making it one of the oldest Mexican cookbooks in existence. This so-called “manuscript cookbook”—written by “Doña Ignacita,” who Noell believes was the kitchen manager of a well-off family—is a handwritten recipe collection in a notebook, complete with liquid stains, doodles, and pages that naturally fall open to the most-loved recipes. These manuscript cookbooks, never intended for public scrutiny, provide essential insight on how real households cooked on a regular basis. Though the UTSA only has about 100 manuscript cookbooks, they are impossibly rare documents that form the heart of the collection.

Written in flowery scripts and stained with the cooks’ DNA, these recipe-packed tomes feel like living histories that inform our present as much as they illuminate the past. “I’ve had students in tears going through these, because it’s so powerful to see that connection with how their family makes certain dishes and where they originated,” says Noell.

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Anyone can visit the collection, but, Noell says, “I want anybody with an internet connection to be able to see these works.” Toward that end, the UTSA has stepped up digitization efforts to get the majority of their older books—in particular the fragile, one-of-a-kind manuscript cookbooks—not just scanned but transcribed, so the contents are searchable. About half of the approximately 100 manuscript cookbooks have been digitized so far. While anyone can visit the collection, this global availability is a game-changer for not just students and scholars, but anyone interested in the development of Mexican and Mexican-American cuisine.

“Aside from the treasure of the recipes, many of these [manuscript cookbooks] read like stories themselves,” says Rico Torres, chef and co-owner of San Antonio’s Mixtli, one of the country’s most acclaimed restaurants dedicated to progressive Mexican cuisine. “Often there’s a hint of longing for a dish from a faraway place. There was a recipe I came across that was an interesting take on paella, substituting saffron with poblano chile, and Spanish chorizo with local varieties from Puebla.”

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Deciphering these densely written books is worth the effort for Mexican gastronomy obsessives. A close read of cookbooks from the late 18th and early 19th centuries shows vino de Parras appearing over and over again. It’s a reference to wine from the city of Parras in the state of Coahuila, the center of Mexican wine production even after winemaking was forbidden for everyone except clergy in 1699. The wine is offered as an alternative to both white and red wine (presumably imported from Spain) for cooking. It shows that this “forbidden” red wine was extremely common outside the church, and, as historical hearsay suggests, that it was light enough to stand in for wine of either color.

In the 1789 book, most of the “fancy” meat dishes include ingredients such as almonds, sesame seeds, raisins, cloves, and cinnamon, which—from our modern-day standpoint—seem like obvious precursors to the the flavorings added to mole. In the first published Mexican cookbooks of the 1830s, the same items are ground with dried chiles in recipes that read much like today’s mole recipes from Oaxaca and Puebla, but with names like mole gallego (Galician, of northwest Spain) and castellano (Castilian, of central Spain). The language used lends weight to the idea that mole sauces were intentional fusions of native and Spanish tastes, and that some of these luxury ingredients still weren’t considered Mexican, even 300 years post-Conquest.

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Many of the dishes at Mixtli, from several of their mole sauces to a recent dish of pickled mussels, were inspired by the university’s collection. “Having the UTSA Mexican Cookbook collection as one of our resources has been incredibly valuable to the message of our restaurant; to preserve, protect, and promote Mexican gastronomy,” says Torres.

Noell also stresses that “this collection is an attempt to preserve the culinary heritage of all of these different regions of Mexico and also of Mexican-Americans.” It traces the period when Mexico was New Spain and idealized European dishes, to the era after the second Mexican Revolution, when pride in native dishes took center stage. Earlier books have multi-day recipes, while later books prioritize convenience, including packaged and frozen foods. And throughout the centuries, the books are dessert-heavy.

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Given that most of the southeastern U.S. was part of Mexico for centuries, the collection brings to life local culinary history as well. “Today we identify Tex-Mex with large goblets of margaritas and nachos, but the gastronomy of the Texas Mexican terroir predates political and national boundaries,” says Torres, noting that many of the ingredients mentioned in the cookbooks, such as maize, chiles, and nopal, are eaten on both sides of the border. As both a culinary resource and historical record, the UTSA Mexican cookbook collection shows how intertwined Mexico and the U.S. have always been, and continue to be.

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What a Viral Video of a Coyote and Badger Says About Interspecies Duos

When he saw the video of the coyote and badger, Neal Sharma was speechless. “The playful body language of the coyote first got my attention,” he says. “But when the badger snout entered the frame, it blew me away.”

Sharma is the wildlife linkages program manager at the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) , the organization that recently released a short video shot under a highway near the southern part of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. In it, a coyote dances playfully at the entrance to a culvert (a tunnel beneath a roadway), appearing to wait for the badger that follows. The pair then travel into the tunnel together. Nature-video gold.

They may seem an unlikely duo, but coyotes and badgers have a long-recognized relationship as occasional hunting partners—a phenomenon known to Native Americans and early settlers (and described in an 1884 paper in American Naturalist).

Out on the prairie, both species go after animals such as ground squirrels, but in different ways: Coyotes search, stalk, chase, and pounce, while badgers “are basically backhoes,” excavating tunnels and digging up animals hiding underground, says evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While shared prey makes them competitors, joining their skill sets turns out to be mutually beneficial.

Specifically, scientists have shown that a coyote’s hunting area increases significantly when the canid hunts with a badger, and that pairing up saves the coyote energy, and probably search time as well. With a badger working the scene, a coyote can mostly wait in the brush, then scramble at the last minute to capture the fleeing rodent flushed out by the badger.

While a little harder to assess, badgers also appear to save time and energy by hunting with coyotes, spending more time underground eating their quarry than aboveground searching for and digging after it. And when squirrels sense a coyote’s presence and stay put in their burrows, the badger can go after them—the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

But the two species aren’t always so friendly. Back in 1980, Bekoff and his colleagues observed coyotes working together to kill badgers. “We don’t know how often this occurs—badgers are really nasty to approach,” he says. But it does happen.

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Also, he points to a coyote pack he studied in Grand Teton National Park that didn’t associate at all with the local badgers. “They were not friends or partners,” he says. “They clearly avoided each other.”

Importantly, the animals that do pair up aren’t then sitting down and eating together, notes evolutionary ecologist Emily Latch of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “Badgers often take the meal underground,” she says. “But coyotes will absolutely swipe it if they have the chance. It’s a hunting association, not a food-sharing one.”

While biologists consider these associations to be temporary and hunting-related, back in 2016, Kimberly Fraser of the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado observed a coyote and badger that simply seemed “happy to be together. They’d rush forward to greet each other, sun themselves right next to each other, explore, and travel side by side.”

Between September and late November that year, she observed the pair outside her window many times. Sometimes they’d investigate a spot where the badger had been digging, she says, “but I never saw them actively hunting. They were simply together.”

“It just shows how flexible these animals can be,” says Bekoff. “And it shows that they have different personalities, different moods.” Each relationship is its own case, he says, affected by the age of the animals, their past experiences, and their current circumstances. “We can’t make generalizations about how animals get along.”

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Cases in point are the many observations of interspecies “friendships” recorded around the globe, often between animals in captivity but sometimes in the wild—even between predator and prey. With animals there are exceptions to virtually every rule.

The now-famous coyote-badger footage actually includes a round-trip crossing (going north, the badger leads the coyote). “This is, to my knowledge, the first report of these two species using a human-made crossing structure together,” says POST’s Sharma.

The clip is from one of more than 50 remote cameras set up between the Santa Cruz Mountains and neighboring ranges—part of a POST study, in partnership with Pathways for Wildlife, that’s taking a biological inventory of the area and looking at how wildlife interacts with major roadways in the region. Even when not built specifically for the animals, bridges and tunnels, Sharma points out, can have significant conservation value as habitat becomes more and more fragmented by roads and other development.

As for the behavior on camera, “the coyote doing that little play bow—it looks like it’s saying, ‘Come on, come on,’” says Latch. “And in a sense, that’s what going on. Coyotes do encourage badgers to move and search for prey by scrambling around, leading, and play bowing.”

She also notes that the badger’s posture suggests ease: “With that tail up, trotting away, that means the animal is pretty comfortable, pretty content.”

Wildlife ecologist Stanley Gehrt of Ohio State University, who has studied both species, agrees. “As scientists, we’ve seen this relationship for quite a while,” he says. “But the value of this video is that it conveys pure companionship, happiness, a camaraderie. They seemed happy to be with each other.”

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The Radical Anti-Abortion Bill That Won’t Go Away

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On February 11, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing concerning the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a proposed law that threatens doctors with jail time for failing to provide medical care to live-born babies following unsuccessful abortion attempts.

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ABC, Motion Picture Academy Spiked a Postpartum Pain Ad From the Oscars Telecast, Calling It ‘Too Graphic’

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Bodies do not bounce back instantly after giving birth, despite what the movies and cheerful postpartum Instagram posts might lead you to believe. And yet, first-time mothers are often unprepared for the six to 8 weeks it typically takes  to recover from vaginal birth, probably in part because major networks think its…

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The Trump Family’s ‘Charm Offensive’ Could Be the Reason We Are Stuck With Brett Kavanaugh

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Imagine, if you will, the Trump family sitting around a large table brainstorming ideas for how to charm an important man. “What if I show pictures of all my endangered rhino heads?” Don Jr. might suggest, while Eric nods eagerly. Good, the others might agree, but not great. “What if I bring a five-year-old to a…

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In the Shadows of Men: THE BEGINNING

THE BEGINNING

I was born in a patriarchal society, into a conventional family with ordinary behaviors and average education. My mother was fifteen when her family arranged for her to marry my nineteen-year-old father; marriage was one way to keep his behavior in check.

My mother gave birth to me shortly after she turned sixteen—a child giving birth to a child, I always thought. I was raised in the midst of my parents’ teenage dreams and the uncertainty of their new adult lives. Memories became lost in the flow of life. This made us forget what had been and simply carry on moment to moment.

Each of us grows, and inside are the lost dreams and thwarted wishes of our mothers. You are the origin of her dreams’ demise. You are asked to rise to the appointed challenges because, in spite of being a woman, you will face this world and prove you are worthy to exist within it.

Girl after girl after girl was born, and the dreams of our mother broke around us, their shrapnel scattered and then reshaped into another dream far away from us—the dream of the male. The boy. No matter how abundant and well-bred girls may be, they can never make up for the absence of a boy.

As I grew up, this conflict left a crack in my identity. I was the eldest daughter, the one responsible for the long line of sisters that followed. Each time my mother gave birth to another girl, faces would frown and the sky’s colors would fade. Strangely, I didn’t see this disappointment in the males of the family. But the tears of my mother, the gossip of my grandmother, and the words of my neighbors haunted me. “It’s okay. May God compensate you.” Even the word mabrouk—congratulations—went unspoken. However, we girls continued to grow, one after the other, and we were treated with compassion.

My memories of my father during my childhood are limited. He was a workaholic, too busy providing a life my mother insisted should be better. She would not accept the idea of sending us to public school, despite the fact that we were girls. Instead, we were sent to expensive private schools that only the rich and highly educated could attend.

Though my grandfather was a tyrant, he invested in our education, as he had done for our aunts before us. Perhaps he had done the same for the boys as well, but his sons were not as diligent as his daughters. One of my aunts attended college in Egypt in the 1960s, and my youngest aunt, who is not much older than me, went to a private school, the same school my sisters and I would later attend.

I can’t say whether or not the school was a fundamental turning point in the formation of my character, or if my life changed there. The school community was completely different from that of my home environment. My classmates came mostly from elite, educated families, and their religious backgrounds varied. I had a more modest upbringing. Nevertheless, the fact that my parents could afford the expensive tuition for decades made my classmates assume we were rich.

From my father, I learned modesty and self-sufficiency. From my mother, I learned to face and overcome challenges. I lived my life by these qualities—modesty and richness, contentment and ambition. Still, there was always one thing I had to remember : I am a girl.

Behave like a man but remain a female. Be responsible and never forget that your strongest weapon is your beauty. Grow tired, strive, struggle, and resist, yet, of that one thing always remain aware: You are a woman. Your horizons are limited. Your mother keeps your freedom locked up, and your father holds the key. Your actions come with great responsibility. Any misstep is a black mark that will later reflect on your sisters. Never forget that your arrival was a good omen, but only conditionally. After all, seven more girls trailed behind you.

 

Australia’s Platypuses Are Invisible Victims of the Bushfires

The platypus—furry-sausage body, duck bill, beaver tail, venomous heel spurs—lives what might be considered a cryptid lifestyle. The semiaquatic, egg-laying mammals are notoriously hard to spot, skulking around in Australian streams at night. They’re predictably hard to catch, and escape easily from the conservationists trying to track them, including Josh Griffiths, an ecologist with Cesar Australia, an environmental consulting firm, who has studied the creatures for 12 years. On a typical survey night near Melbourne, which lasts anywhere from 14 to 16 hours, Griffiths might catch two or three of the strange, slippery creatures.

The recent Australian bushfires, which have burnt tens of millions of acres* and killed approximately a billion animals, have spotlighted the plights of certain species, from koalas to the lesser-known Kangaroo Island dunnart (a mouse-size marsupial). But there has been little news about how the platypus has been faring, in part because their status is still largely a mystery to science. After all, they’re incredibly hard to spot even when there aren’t raging bushfires. “The short answer is that we simply don’t know,” Griffiths says. “The scale of the fire we’ve got at the moment is unprecedented.” All the sites he usually monitors for platypuses have been declared emergency zones and are inaccessible. “It’s one more nail in their coffin,” he adds.

In 2008, after bushfires and floods swept through Victoria, the Australian Platypus Conservancy conducted a survey of the creatures, according to Geoff Williams, a conservancy biologist. At the time, they found little relationship between platypus populations and local bushfires. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to platypuses, so they retreat to underground burrows when things get too hot. These may have provided a critical refuge—one that more terrestrial or arboreal animals such as koalas often desperately need—according to Tom Grant, a biologist who has spent nearly 50 years studying the platypus. (Grant wrote the definitive book on them, and Griffiths calls him “the Godfather of platypuses.”) And in times of drought, platypuses move into the refuge pools that persist in many dried-out streams. These strategy are how platypuses have survived for as long as a million years, Williams says.

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But those studies focused on smaller, localized fires. “These most recent catastrophic fires present a different situation, where the vegetation consolidating the banks, in which they dig their resting and nesting burrows, has been devastated,” Grant writes in an email. He predicts that when rain does finally fall in these areas, the banks will erode, degrading water quality and stifling the small, bottom-dwelling invertebrates that platypuses depend on.

To make matters worse, January and February are the time of year when, baby platypuses tend to emerge from their mothers’ burrows, Grant says. “They will be attempting to find their own food in streams devastated by the fires and in many cases reduced to disconnected refuge pools by the current severe drought,” he says. He predicts many of these platypus young will die this season.

The 2008 study also examined stable rivers and streams that still held a substantial water after the fire had passed. But the country’s extreme, ongoing drought has taken a toll on refuge pools, Grant says. And according to Griffiths, the small creeks that once connected habitats have gotten vaporized by the current bushfires, further fragmenting platypus habitat and maybe putting distant remnant pools off-limits. Travel over land to get to these places would expose them to predators, and lingering heat, even at night, could prove fatal. It is, perhaps, a perfect storm, and Griffiths, Grant, and Williams all see the possibility that local populations may go extinct.

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In some places, conservationists air-dropped food, such as carrots, to help some stricken wallabies, but that’s not an option for the more finicky platypus. “We can’t do food drops because they only eat live prey,” Griffiths says, including waterbugs and yabbies, a type of freshwater crayfish. “And we have to be careful when spreading live organisms around.” Williams says he’s heard of some prior attempts to feed vulnerable platypuses live earthworms and yabbies, but that there was never any evidence that the food was actually eaten. Plus, this solution is simply not scalable in a crisis like this, he says.

Another option could be to capture and care for some platypuses, but that’s also proven tricky. “You can’t just put in cave traps, you have to use highly specialized nets that can only be used in shallow waterways,” Griffiths says. And the species consumes at least 15 percent of its body weight per day in live prey, making it a huge drain on resources for any zoo or facility, most of which are already stressed to their limits, according to a statement from the Australia Platypus Conservancy. Relocation is also a bad option, since any surviving rivers likely also hold surviving platypuses and other species, competing for the same meager habitat and resources, Williams says. The only thing that might make this possible, as it did following a 1983 bushfire, would be to move surviving populations into places where others had died out. It’s a long-term plan, though, and biologists still have limited access to the survey sites they’ve been studying.

When the state of emergency passes, Griffiths says, he will return to his monitoring project, a collaboration with the San Diego Zoo called the Great Australian Platypus Search. The project relies on environmental DNA, or eDNA, the genetic traces platypuses leave behind. But the bushfires might have thrown a wrench into this project, too. When Griffiths surveyed a site near Melbourne after Australia’s 2009 Black Saturday Fires, he found charred soil; the fire had burnt off the eDNA. And any samples he finds now might be from platypuses that did not survive all the environmental stress.

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Though the bushfires are a serious, recurrent problem, the real menace to platypuses is likely to remain the drought. Since European colonization of Australia, the species has lost nearly half its historic population across the eastern part of the mainland and Tasmania, according to Gilad Bino, a researcher at the University of New South Wales Centre for Ecosystem Science. “There’s been a change in what we call the shifting baseline, a change in our collective memory,” he says. “When we see two platypuses in a pool, we think that’s a lot of platypuses, but it’s a fraction of what it used to be.” Bino published a paper modeling the platypus’s future decline, and potential extinction, in the February issue of Biological Conservation. His research identifies a toxic soup of factors beyond fires that threaten the strange mammals’ future, including prolonged drought, climate change, land clearing, and the construction of dams that break up habitat.

The platypus is such an iconic species that it’s almost surprising its decline has happened without much fanfare. European scientists first encountered the platypus in 1791, but argued over its anatomy for nearly a century, according to a 2019 paper in the Journal of Mammalogy. Aboriginal people, who called the platypus mallangong, tambreet, gaya-dari, boonaburra, and lare-relar, among other names, had developed a deep ecological understanding of the creatures, though European scientists characteristically ignored this knowledge, suspecting the specimens they saw were some kind of elaborate hoax.

Bino hopes his paper will lead to a national risk assessment of the future of the species. “There’s a desperate need for more information, and for government funds to monitor platypuses,” he says. “Not knowing what’s going on is not an excuse to assume everything is fine.” And if you are in Australia on a midnight stroll and happen upon a platypus, consider marking it in platypusSpot, a citizen science project Griffiths helps run.

Meanwhile, researchers continue to toil away for long nights in pursuit of the elusive animals. “The more data we’re getting points to that they should be at least listed as vulnerable, or endangered,” Griffiths says. “At least then, people would have to pay attention to them.”

* Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the recent bushfires have burnt two million acres. They have burnt tens of millions of acres.