I’ve discovered food comes with an accent.  In Britain, at least.  I had cockney meals that were jocular and sardonic, and posh meals that had all the refinement and the subtle perfection of a good British boy sitting straight up and say, “Shall we go to the library, mum?”

Pie is straddling these two linguistic/culinary worlds.  It can express all the harsh barked syllables of cockney and the sweet skipping notes of posh.  Every country, I suppose, needs a unifying food, and Britain’s is pie.

Do NOT assume this is the American version of pie, that lovely, gooey mass of baked buttery crust and fruit filling oozing out from under a slop of ice cream.  Love that too, but it’s got nothing to do with British pies.

The British pie is stoutly savory.  If I were to anthropomorphize it, it’d have to be a squat little old man, smoking a pipe by the fire in a tweed cap.  It’d say things like, “jolly good, dearie, jolly good.”

It might look something like the rounded, red-cheeked baker at Borough Market who leaned over his case of pies with the authority of a man who knows what he’s meant to do with his life.  I’m always a little jealous of those people who have such presence in their lives, who seem to fit there just right without all this frantic scurrying here and there looking for what they’re supposed to be doing (like, ahem, someone I know).

The baker swooped into his case, snatched pies, slid them into brown paper bags and handed them out to his regular clientele with a nod and a wink.  Seriously.  I felt like the timid schoolgirl – “hi, I’m a blogger from America” – shuffling my feet and ogling the goods.  He looked at me with nothing less than horror when I asked if all the pies were heated.

“No, no no,” he admonished, “this one ‘ere, the steak n’ kidney, that’s warm.  But the pork pies, all yer pies over here, these are cold.  Sorta like yer version of a sandwich in America.”

Got it.  Apparently pies are the British version of a working class sandwich, which coal miners and the like trucked to work with them and broke out at lunch, cold and ready to eat.  However, there are also other, warm pies, the ones that contain that pocket of steaming love in the middle.  These are pub pies, or in yuppie Britain, gastropub pies.  You have them with a pint of beer while snug in that distinctly comfortable and protected nest of the pub.  Yes, they were originally all about using leftover (sketchy) meat, but nowadays you can find organic locally sourced lamb pies and goat cheese veggie pies as well as the same old standbys, pertied up for modern foodies.

And they’re good.  Dense as footballs, they seem somewhat impenetrable at first glance.  The “ahhhh” moment comes when you make that first cut into one and a puff of aromatic steam wafts up at you.  The pastry is flaky but firm, more like a pie crust on steroids than a croissant.  The ideal bite : wedge of crust, which goes buttery and smooth in your mouth, with a spoonful of piping hot meat interior, followed by a swig of ale.

Straddling the pie on either side will always be its faithful pals, peas and mash.  Yes, you read that right – peas.  Eating them brought me back to dinners as a 6 year-old when my parents would say, “Sarah Ann Menkedick, you are NOT leaving the table until you finish those peas.”

I shoveled spoonful after spoonful in dutifully, feeling less like a suave international foodie than the chastised little girl at the dinner table.  Alright, I’m done mom! Can I go play now? Once I’d gotten over the stressful nostalgic peas (which, being all organic and delicately cooked, not at all mushy, weren’t really all that bad) I could move on the mash, which is something the British can be rightly proud of.  Strong, with a drizzle of dark gravy and a thickness and consistency that allows for use of a fork, they swoon, “We’ll get you through this winter, dahlin.”

So there’s the pie, the peas, the mash; all of which, to get it just right, should be drizzled with vinegar.  This is the core of British cuisine.  It’s hard to call something like a pie “cuisine” because it’s just so loving and inviting, an old buddy you sigh your troubles into in a soft wooden corner of the pub.  But the pie manages to straddle all sorts of culinary boundaries, courting the posh, holding steady with the working class, inviting curious tourists, satisfying smirking hipsters.  It’s warm belly is where British food starts and ends.  Cheers.

Dear Chilaquiles,

So I know I should’ve stopped after the third beer, ok? And yes, how many times do I have to wake up feeling like a big ball o’ hell to learn that while that initial buzz from the beer-mezcal combo is exhilarating, the end result basically kills my Sunday? I am thinking back to that third, fourth, fifth Bohemia Oscura and each one is like a little blow to my brain.

But hey. This is why I love you so, chilaquiles. This is why I fantasize about you, and why I trek in a pounding hungover stupor with Jorge and the dog to hunch over the counter in pain, sip fresh-squeezed orange juice, and wait for you to arrive sizzling, popping and crackling up at me as if to say, “Demon gotya again, didn’t it?” But I know you love me.

The way those eggs mesh with the bright, sour, seediness of your tomatillo green sauce and and your steady, hearty fried tortillas, the way the thinly sliced onions meet the soft white quesillo and the floral bite of epazote, bringing a small tear to the edge of my eye – really, what else is love, my sweet chilaquiles?

I bow over you, deeply enraptured. I sip the juice, a healthy afterthought to all your sizzling gooey depth, and I devour you bite for bite, crunchy tortilla smothered in sauce dribbled with egg and spiked with white onion and strong creamy cheese and sunny green herb, and then I collapse in rhapsody and sleep all day.

Sometimes you just need a warm drink.  It could be whatever – w0rk that makes you feel like you need a brain massage, or weather that yanks your spirit around, or some irritating day grating on you, or just fatigue after too long of going going going.  Then, you need to sit down in a warmly lit room with a big dark sky outside and sip a steaming cup o’ love.

So the other day, already anticipating the surfacing of this need, I went to the market and got ingredients for traditional holiday ponche (just in case you didn’t make the connection, that’s punch in English).  This is not your wimpy little kindergarten punch diluted with whatever kool-aid and served with ice; huh-uh.

It is spiced and flavored with cinnamon, cloves, raisins, allspice, a good heap of piloncillo (a dense cone of brown sugar), sugar cane, tecojotes (small crab apples whose sourness can’t be stomached raw but blends perfectly into the sweetened punch), pears, pineapple, small yellow guavas, and oranges.  The result is sort of an apple cider gone madly tropical – let’s say apple cider takes a vacation down South and goes on a wild mating mission with the local population.

The tecojotes are the punch’s staple.  You can play with it from there – adding or subtracting pears, other types of apples, oranges, guavas, pineapple, and raisins and/or prunes.  The idea is to get that balance between sweet, sour, and pungent.   A good punch has got to have body and spice to it, period.   The Mexican version will have sweet and wincingly sour fruits whose combo is played up by warm spices like cinnamon and allspice.

Then, of course, the adults can add a shot of rum, tequila, or mezcal, transforming the ponche into ponche con piquete- punch with a sting.   Of course, we got stung.

Added benefit of punch-making: you can gnaw on the raw sugarcane if you manage to find it in your area.  I was always puzzled by people doing this at the market or walking down the street – it seemed like they were gnawing on raw, shaved turnips.  But damn, once you take a bite into that juicy sweet stalk of sugarcane you get it.  It only stays sweet for a few seconds, and for some reason that stimulates you to want to keep sucking and sucking.  It gets majorly addictive.  I spent the whole afternoon with a stalk of sugarcane dangling from my mouth, hypnotized by the power of ponche long before the first sip.

Barbacoa en México

Barbacoa, let it be said, is NOT barbeque.  It’s denser and meatier, with a different kind of smokiness and an emphasis on spice over sweetness.  It has ground chile paste where barbeque has hickory, dark gamey goat where barbeque has beef.  The meat peels off the bone and dissolves in your mouth, piqued by a sip of mezcal with lime and mellowed by smooth black bean paste.

Jorge’s uncles buried a chile-rubbed goat in a big square pit with a bunch of avocado and maguey leaves and left it there for twelve hours.  It slow cooked over a pot of coals.  When it was time to extract it at 3 p.m., the hour of the massive, siesta-inducing Mexican comida, the whole family gathered round to watch.  Kids clamored to get a peek at the covered pit, the men adopted an air of esteemed ceremony, and a few older sombrero-d types who’d already been hitting the mezcal with affection started sending off fireworks in random directions.

Jorge photographed, I gaped.  The men peeled away straw mats to reveal the slow-smoking goat, removed the cooked leaves, and placed the goat parts carefully in a big white bucket.  Then, they heaved the unimaginably heavy pot of soup, full of diced veggies cooked in a spiced tomato broth into which dripped the goat-chile juices, onto a small fire.

We ate.  Out came bowls of creamy bean paste and guacamole, plates of garnishes, limes, peanuts, more beer, more mezcal, tortillas wrapped in warm cloths, small bowls of caldito, and the goat.

This is how we spent New Year’s : with toasts of “Felicidades!” between shots (sipped) of mezcal, handfuls of spicy garlic peanuts (beware the blind grab, or you’ll end up, as my stepmom did on her visit to Oaxaca, taking down a whole clove of roasted garlic.  Pungent.  You’re then a walking garlic bomb for the next two days) and plates of barbacoa decorated in fresh cilantro, sliced onions, and guacamole.  And beer.  Another cold one would surface just as you were down to the last murky quarter of the old one.

The bus ride home was a vague, satisfied rumble along dirt roads, the sun setting in wide pale streaks across the valley.  After we’d stumbled into the house ready to sleep at 8 p.m., there was a knock on the door.  Jorge answered it.  Blurred sentences drifted through the doorway.  Jorge beckoned me forward.

On the stoop was our elderly neighbor, who comes down from Mexico City two weeks a year to get utterly blasted all day long and sing his favorite Mexican classics.  He gives the famous turkey call (“ay ay ay ay ay ay!!!”) with mock sobbing and everything, reaching his peak around 2 p.m.  For some reason, he’d held out longer on New Year’s Day.

“Vecinos!” he slurred.  “Vamosacompartiruntraigo.”  In the name of neighborly peace, there was no way we could turn this down.

“Bueno,” we said, bleary-eyed but resolute.  We stood on the edge of the doorway, the man hoisting the bottle of mezcal and grinning at us, and we shared sips.

He mumbled for awhile about the New Year, about life and work and something about “sexual beings” with a wink in my direction we chose to ignore, and then he said,

“You know, sometimes we need to leave the computer.  We need to leave the computer to live a little, you know, live…in…(sigh)…the world.”

He must’ve been catching glimpses of me all day long, furiously crouched over the keyboard at work on some project or another.  He pinned down my New Year’s resolution in a nutshell.  Go slow.  Slow food, slow, conscious experiences.  Maybe drinking a beer on the balcony and just watching the sky, maybe taking a whole day to go walking somewhere, maybe cooking a mole, grinding all the spices by hand in the mortar and pestle.  But getting away from the computer to live in the world a little (and then coming back in a fervor of stirred up energy to write about it, of course).