Cinco de Mayo
Wikipedia usually has to “lock” its Cinco de Mayo page. I suspect it may be related to the sudden appearance of sites opposing the celebration of this semi-holiday and others who have a hissy fit about any Mexican holiday being celebrated in the US.
In Mexico Cinco de Mayo or Batalla de Puebla, is only a really big celebration in the state of Puebla, where the battle took place.
The Mexican army won the Batalla de Puebla on May the 5th, 1862, but the French went on to Mexico City in 1863 after receiving reinforcements and installed Emperor Maximilian.
It has the status of St. Patrick’s Day in the US, an excuse to eat different food, and drink different booze, and be obnoxious show an interest in other cultures.
Margaritas, tacos, and the destruction of piñatas, that’s what it is really about, although some people have other interpretations.
8 comments
You link to that picture every year, and it gives me a chuckle every year :).
I’m going to celebrate by eating some real tamales (not the stale kind in a can, the kind made by some little Mexican woman with corn husks, masa flour, and meat filling). Otherwise I’m not much for celebrating, penguins tend to be rather formal creatures…
The amazing thing is that the bars on the beach are celebrating, while most of the Mexican restaurants are reacting in line with CG. Out local Mexicans prepare their food differently than the same dishes in Texas or California. I personally prefer the Baja – SoCal versions.
I admit it took me a bit to figure that picture out.
Try the New Mexico versions someday. Be prepared to have your scalp lifted by the pepper content, but the flavor is wonderful. And I say that as someone who grew up on Tex-Mex.
I have only 15 minutes left of Cinco de Mayo, and it looks unlikely I’ll manage to have any Mexican food. Fortunately, in Houston, for Mexican food, as Little Orphan Annie might have sung, there’s always mañana…
No interest in burning out my insides with peppers, as alcohol is the only way of cleansing the oils, and I don’t drink anymore. I’ve cut back on my vices over the years and that one was expendable.
You can get the flavor without the fire, and it is more enjoyable for me. The secret is having the right ingredients and cooking them properly. If the basics are correct, then you can add the embellishments. Too often the peppers are used to cover the mediocre quality of the basic ingredients.
In the last few years we have gotten some real Mexican food, and even have a couple of real Mexican grocery stores. Alas they are all from the southern states. The tamales are good, better than the Baja versions, but most other things just don’t taste right.
Oh, yes, beginning in Texas and heading West, there is always mañana…
Yes, I celebrated with two tamales today. They were good. That was the entirety of my celebration, it got too bloody *HOT* (95F) to celebrate much other than the fact that my place of employment is air conditioned (though the air conditioning was struggling, still, better than the outside was!).
I can’t get my head around temperature like that in the Bay area. We often went to San Francisco [Russian area] from Monterey [DLI], and jackets were always part of our kit.
Well, the temperature was more normal today — topped out about 72F, was 60F by the time I headed home around 6:45PM, probably around 50F now. Normal for this time of year. I don’t know what the deal was yesterday, the weather thought we were in the Central Valley or somethin’…
We would freeze in class when we had to shift to summer uniforms at Monterey. Salinas was, of course, hot, but hitting the mid or upper 70s was summer along the coast.
The weather is just screwed up.