Cooking in a Fragrant Garden

Guatemala's First Cooking School

Articles and Photos by Katherine McIntyre

Maritza's assistant cooks tortillas

Slapping tortillas into a thin circle on a sunny February morning, at Antigua Cooking School, looked easy—it was not! Mine were lumpy too thick, or too thin. Vilma McConsey, my instructor for the day, explained that making tortillas is a skill like cooking itself. She and her niece, Militza De Leon, are both cooking experts and they provide cooking lessons to lucky travelers who discover their school .

While my tortillas sizzled on a hot pan, I chopped up onions and tomatoes with a razor sharp knife for a Guatemalan version of enchiladas. McConsey has a different set of recipes for each day of the week. Each day she brings the day’s ingredients, carefully measured in separate small glass dishes. “Our original recipes were very labor intensive,” she comments, but we simplified them for North American cooks. Guatemalans used to spend all day cooking; now it is just about two hours in the kitchen.” McConsey enlivens our lesson with stories of the country’s culture and history.  She explained that  Guatemala’s unique cuisine combines beef and spices introduced into the country by their Spanish ancestors with local indigenous staples—hot chile peppers, native fruits , vegetables, black beans, cacao, and corn. 

The tortilla ready to serve.

The cooking school has been operating for over a year, but it took nearly two years to get it up and running. The stainless steel stove and custom-built work center fits under a canopy in a lush garden fragrant with orange blossoms—part of what was once an elegant private house. “At home we cook with a pinch of this, a handful of that. It took us nearly three months to standardize our recipes with ingredients that you find in North American markets.”  explained McConsey. “With everything in place we opened for business.”

While McConsey describes the intricacies of Guatemalan cooking, our class roasted, toasted, fried, and blended sixteen separate ingredients for chichitas. We enclosed our mixtures in a tortilla-like dough, wrapped each one firmly in a corn husk and dropped them into boiling water to cook for thirty minutes. I translated this recipe into a challenge that turned out to be labor-intensive by North American standards.

Cooking completed, it was time for Bueno Provecho (Good Appetite) in the bright yellow dining room, just as the bells of nearby Convento Santa Catarina chimed one o’clock. We were ready for our enchilada garnished with, Parmesan Cheese, chopped parsley, thinly sliced onions, and slices of hard boiled egg accented with a fragrant spicy sauce. A cool drink of Rosa de Jamaica, a fragrant blend of hibiscus flowers, sugar, and cinnamon complemented our desert—warm, sweet, brunelos, a Guatemalan specialty. 

One cooking experience was not enough. Lisa Foure, of Art Workshops in Guatemala, set me up with a team from her writing group to sample indigenous cooking. We climbed into the back of a pickup truck and headed down a dusty, winding road to the little village of Santa Catarina Barahona. Zoila Garcia, her three daughters, and many grandchildren greeted us warmly and led us to the open kitchen at the back of their tidy, cement block house. The preparation of Guatemala’s national dish pepian was on the menu.

Crouched in front of a charcoal fire, Zoila demonstrated how she slaps a tortilla into a perfect circle and flicks it onto a hot pottery platter. We tried and failed again. Undaunted we helped Zoila chop up carrots, potatoes, green beans, and peppers. Tossing in a handful of herbs, she roasted the vegetables until they sizzled on a hot iron pan. To her own sauce recipe—a secret blend of tomatoes, onions, cinnamon, chiles, cilantro, sesame and pumpkin seeds—she added pieces of cut up chicken, and the freshly roasted vegetables. She simmered the fragrant mixture for a couple of hours on an ancient two burner gas stove in her windowless indoor kitchen. While the pepian bubbled, we looked, touched, and bought from a collection of rainbow colored Guatemalan weavings hanging on her clothesline.

Hot and spicy and served in big pottery bowls, we sat on old stone wall, like swallows on a fence wire, and mopped up the peppian with tortillas hot off the griddle. Again it was a Bueno Provecho—Guatemalan style.

Katherine McIntyre is an 84-year-old world traveler. She has been writing off and on for about 40 years and hopes to write for another 10.