Cosmologically Reflective Plating Patterns: Western Mexico

Cosmologically Reflective Plating Patterns: Western Mexico

Culinary behaviors reflect cultural influences, including ethical systems, cosmologies, and other traditional ways of envisioning one’s place in the universe.

In pre-Contact Western Mexico, in the regions of present day Nayarit-Jalisco-Colima, the sculptural style of one period in particular followed a somewhat regular pattern: a group of elements – people, animals, buildings – were grouped around a ritual center.

Model reflecting ritual center


This ritual center – which has been interpreted as a kind of omphalos, axis mundi, or navel of the world – was repeated in a thousands of clay tableaux, some of which (like the one above) are now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago.

I believe that this composition of elements around a center is duplicated, subconsciously or preconsciously, in the present day arrangement of foodstuffs on dinner plates in modern day Western Mexico. Take, for example, three platters, selected randomly and sequentially from stevez's seminal Puerto Vallarta post:

stevez wrote:Café de Olla Mexican Combination


Café de Olla Huevos con Chorizo


Café de Olla Chilequiles con Chorizo

In each of these dinners, we see the clear delineation of a central point of focus, a core –a piece of meat, chunks of cheese or a splash of crema – around which other elements on the plate are grouped. This plating pattern is reflective of a culturally specific way of looking at the universe, a cosmology characteristic of Western Mexico. East in Teotihuacan/Tenochtitlan, or even further east in the Yucatan, the dominant geometric forms are the pyramid or the rectangle: think Avenue of the Dead or any one of the hundreds of ball courts, so common almost everywhere in Mexico except this Western region, where the perception seems to be that the flow of life is circular. The natural medium for ritualistically repeating this circular vision on a regular basis is, of course, the dinner plate.

Associated with the omphalos is the shaman – the magician, bridge between this world and the other, shapeshifter and transformative agent who presides over all ceremonies of change. It seems there could be no more appropriate everyday example of the shaman than the chef, who presides over the central and quotidian transformation of the raw to the cooked, the natural world to the human, as part of the ecology of eating.

I am not, of course, contending that every plate, or even most plates, of food in Western Mexico conform to this deep structure. I do, however, believe that many current day chefs and servers arrange elements on a plate in a way that pays silent homage to an enduring, archetypal pattern of perception, embedded in the collective psyches of this region’s inhabitants.

Hammond

As someone with no small experience in this area, I can say with confidence that you could easily spend 9-13 years working this up as a thesis in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago.

I remember being taught early on to always plate in odd numbers. Seems the Greeks figured that it was more attractive to the eye, only they were referring to their temple columns, not medallions of veal or whatever.