Cubism makes a comeback

A few years back, I went to Mexico City to learn to cook at the apron strings of my step-grandmother, Josefina Figueras viuda de (widow of) Carreno. Josefina is one of those women -- you'll find them anywhere in the world where home cooking has not been superseded by "home meal replacement" -- who shuffles into the kitchen at dawn and stays there until well after she's served her family dinner. Throughout the day, she busies herself toasting dried peppers, charring fresh ones, mashing various ingredients in a molcajete and blending others into chile powders and pastes.

On this particular day, we'd spent the better part of the morning roasting, peeling and stuffing poblano peppers, preparing a special-occasion dish traditional to my late grandfather's San Luis Potosi. The cheese-filled chiles would be floated and cooked in a large pot of rice boiled in milk, and it was into that milk that, with the deft nonchalance of a person who spends 12 or more hours a day in the kitchen, she (plop!) tossed a chicken bouillon cube.

Naturally, I was horrified. I come from a generation of American cooks who have had it pounded into them from every serious cookbook that in any recipe calling for stock, canned broth is a poor substitute for homemade (a handy cross-referenced recipe calling for 10 or more ingredients is provided). Bouillon cube? Perish the thought. I once dated a guy who was the sous-chef at Lutece (which was considered the finest French restaurant in New York at the time), whose idea of a shortcut to homemade meant stopping by Second Avenue Deli and buying its famous chicken broth.

As I spent more time with Josefina, I saw her toss bouillon cubes into rice dishes (plop), caldos (plop), beans (plop) and complex, labor-intensive moles and chile sauces (plop, plop).

Il dado in the pot

A few years later, I was dispatched to the mountains of Sicily to co-write a cookbook for Giovanna and Wanda Tornabene, who run a restaurant out of the 14th century abbey that is their home. The abbey is surrounded by groves of nut and olive trees whose fruits were used in our cooking. We made daily trips to town to buy fresh-baked bread and ricotta cheese made that morning from sheep's milk. And we had a helper named Peppe whose job was to shell fava beans and pick herbs when we needed them, and to gather mushrooms after a rain and wild fennel from the mountainsides during its short season.