Sanborn's Mexican food

[Mike Salovesh]

Barry's communique from Mexico said:

> Sanborns is a chain like VIPS; it also has a menu in English.  Sanborns has been around since 1903.
>    They serve "Our Famous Swiss Enchiladas."

Barry has finally come close to answering his own question about
enchiladas suizas.  There's a very good chance that the dish was
invented at the original Sanborn's Restaurant.  That's the one in Mexico
City, about a block from the Palacio de Bellas Artes, in the Casa
Azulejos -- the House of Blue Tiles. I remember that their menu of
1944-45 said "Sanborn's famous enchiladas suizas". . .  on the English
language side, of course.

If you think of enchiladas suizas as a form of enchilada, and look for a
Swiss connection, you'll miss the point.  Think of them, instead, as
chicken-filled relatives of crepes served with a sauce of cream and
cheese.  (I've heard it said that they're called "suizas" out of
cross-language misinterpretation of "crepe suzette".)

Before 1911 (which is to say "before the Revolution"), Sunday breakfast
at Sanborns Azulejos was where you'd see the elite putting on airs and
demanding everything "continental".  (That reaches back to the time of
Emperor Maximilian and the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s.)
The turn-of-the-century Sanborns Azulejos was famous for its French and
French-influenced bakers as well as its French cooks. Sunday at the
House of Tiles still was the place to go, to see and be seen for the
elites among writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians up through
the 1960s -- by which time the Sanborns chain was owned by Walgreen's
Drug Stores.

To this day, a Mexico City wedding isn't really posh unless it features
a Sanborns wedding cake.

I don't know if Sanborns still ship all their wedding cakes from Casa
Azulejos. I remember weekends in the old days, when that narrow, one
block street that shows the blue-tiled wall was a major tourist
attraction.  At the right hour, you could see a chorus line of
elaborate, multi-tiered wedding cake constructions glittering
sugar-white in the sun. Some of the Everests among these peaks were over
five feet tall. As they waited for the limousines that would haul them
off as essential guests at the wedding feasts of the elite, the cakes
sat with only flattened cardboard cartons between them and the sidewalk.

Sanborns in the 1940s and 1950s had only a few Mexico City branches, and
a line of way-station stops on the highway up to the U.S. border.  When
they started to open more and more places all over Mexico City, to keep
up with VIP's and Denny's, I think they diluted and eventually murdered
the old charm.

As the three big chains expanded, their competition wiped out a vast
variety of smaller restaurants. The great scope of Mexico City
restaurant cuisine evaporated in the face of the standardized menus as
the new branches of Sanborn's, VIP's, and Denny's metastasized. This was
accompanied by the rise of Burger Boy, and MacDonald's, and Pizza Hut,
and similar franchises -- up to and including Taco Bell. (Taco Bell, of
course, is to real Mexican food as chop suey is to great Chinese
cooking.  The only thing that keeps Taco Bell going in Mexico City is
that its menu has a certain cachet as foreign food.)

Another blow, from which the cuisine has yet to recover, came from the
Mexican economic crises of 1976 and 1982.  Before the collapse of the
peso, one of the treats of eating in Mexico City restaurants was a
traditional bread roll called a "bolillo". Bolillos were ubiquitous,
incredibly cheap, and at least as good as the French baguettes that were
their original model. Bolillos, however, are a wheat bread, and Mexico
has never raised much wheat. The fall of the peso made imported wheat an
extravagent luxury. Bakers had to choose between raising their prices
out of reach or compromising on both the size and the quality of their
bolillos. When most bakeries went to an inferior, modified, and cheaper
form, the big restaurant chains followed suit. People-watching while
snacking from a basket of fresh bolillos lost its attractiveness when
the bolillos lost theirs.

In the late 1960s, my wife and I got to know a tourist guide who
provided a special service to his clients in the U.S.  As they were
setting up the menus for gala affairs in glitzy suburbs, they'd call him
in Mexico City with orders for bolillos.  On the day of the event in the
U.S., he would pick up fresh-baked bolillos by the gross at Mexico City
bakeries, pass them on to friends who worked for Mexicana de Aviacion,
and they would go up to Chicago with the crew's hand baggage on the noon
plane. The guide's clients would arrange have the bolillos picked up at
the airport and delivered to their affairs. That business ended with the
precipitous decline in the quality of Mexico City bolillos.  (My wife
and I have toyed with the idea of running thein reverse. We know a
couple of fine bakeries in Chicago's Mexican barrio that make really
great bolillos of the old style. Maybe there could be a niche
opportunity in running an airlift of bolillos to the hyper-rich of
Mexico City . . . )

I think I'm going to go have a sandwich.

--  mike salovesh       <salovesh at niu.edu>              PEACE !!!