No longer overlooked: Elena Zelayeta, envoy for Mexican cuisine

This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.

In 1934, Elena Zelayeta, an emerging chef of Mexican cuisine, was pregnant with her second child when her eyesight began to fail. She visited a doctor, who told her there was no hope: a mature cataract and a detached retina would eventually make her blind.

Her disability forced her to step away from Elena’s Mexican Village, the San Francisco restaurant she had owned for four years, where she served chili swims with ground beef and soups that simmered with cheesy mounds of fluffy dough in a tomato broth. Lacking a figurehead, the restaurant was soon crushed by debt, to the point of closing. Zelayeta herself fell into a depression so severe that she considered taking her own life.

But after two years of inertia, cooking put her out of her misery. Relying on her other senses, she cracked eggs in her palms and separated them by running the sticky insides through her fingers; smell fat deeply to judge its temperature; and poke the meat with her fingers to determine its doneness.

She would go on to write four cookbooks, a self-help book and a memoir, star in a cooking show in the early 1950s when food television was still in its infancy, and start her own frozen food brand in an era when Swanson TV dinners were just entering public favor. to win. All this made Zelayeta America’s most prominent evangelist for Mexican cuisine for three decades.

Her success came at a time when many Americans viewed Mexican cuisine in disparaging terms. “I think Mexican food was seen as a kind of approachable party food,” a granddaughter, also named Elena Zelayeta, after her grandmother, said in an interview. “I don’t think it was considered a kitchen.”

Elena Loshuertos was born on October 3, 1897 to a Spanish immigrant family in Mexico City. Her father, Don Manuel Loshuertos, and her mother, Doña Luisa Soriano, ran an inn and restaurant in El Mineral del Oro, a small gold mining town about 80 miles northeast of Mexico City.

Elena helped her mother in the kitchen, stringing vibrant cerise chiles to dry in the sun, grinding cumin seeds with a mortar and pestle, and moistening and heating tortillas.

What was intended as a family vacation to San Francisco eventually became a permanent residence when the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, when the family home was destroyed.

The family’s first months in San Francisco were “saturated with sadness as we tried so hard to adapt to the strange customs of a new country,” Zelayeta wrote in her self-help book “Elena’s Lessons in Living” (1947). Discrimination was routine: at school, students taunted Elena and her siblings for the staccato intonation of their speech. To make ends meet, she sold her mother’s tamales door to door.

It was during the Depression, when it was difficult to find work, that Zelayeta decided to realize her long-standing dream of running a restaurant. She and her husband, Lorenzo Zelayeta, whose family also came from Mexico, started serving chile rellenos, or cheese-stuffed peppers, in their seven-room apartment, covering the tables with pastel-colored cloths.

Their own restaurant was such a success that Zelayeta soon moved it to a building in downtown San Francisco. There, her jubilant personality was as appealing as her enchiladas, dancing in front of the crowd while shouting “Olé!”

It was a difficult time for Mexican immigrants, with white Americans accusing them of depriving them of jobs as laborers. From 1929 to 1936 the government carried out coercion sent more than one million Mexican and Mexican Americans to Mexico.

“To me, the importance of her work is popularizing Mexican food in the West, and ultimately across the country, at a time when many Americans were downright racist about the Mexican American people and our culture,” said Teresa Finney, who a microwave oven in Atlanta. bakery At Heart Panaderia wrote in an email.

As Elena’s Mexican village flourished, her eyesight deteriorated. Faces of regular customers and friends became unnoticeable to her. She could barely make out her own reflection. “I felt that blindness was something to hide, something to be ashamed of,” she later recalled.

But in time, she would take pride in her new identity as a blind woman. “At one point I cried out against His cruelty in depriving me of my sight,” she wrote in her memoirs, published in 1960. “Now I thank Him for the happiness this blindness has brought me.”

She taught herself to caramelize sugar without damaging the bottom of the pan, to light a stove over and over until it became second nature to her, to deep-fry chile rellenos without setting herself on fire.

Her recipe repertoire became so extensive that a group of home economists convinced her to document her knowledge in a cookbook, her first: “Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes” (1944).

The book was a collective effort: She collected her recipes—including quesadillas filled with taffy-like cheese, guacamole with jewels of pomegranate seeds, and wobbly caramel flan—and dictated them to friends, who in turn wrote them out on a typewriter. They then quizzed her with questions to make sure her instructions were watertight.

The cookbook, which was published during World War II, when Americans were increasingly curious about cuisines from beyond their borders, was an immediate success. It Reportedly sold half a million copies during her lifetime.

The appeal of her recipes was enhanced by their flexibility. For example, she wrote that powdering American chocolate with cinnamon would do the trick if readers couldn’t find Mexican chocolate in the grocery store. The Los Angeles Times described her as a “renowned authority on the culinary arts from south of the border.”

Even when tragedy struck Zelayeta – her husband would die in a freak car accident – ​​cooking kept her going. Her friends urged her to document her resilience in a self-help book, complete with recipes, which made her a local celebrity in the Bay Area. She started starring in a weekly 15-minute cooking session show, “It’s Fun to Eat with Elena”, aired throughout California. During the broadcasts, crew members pulled the strings attached to her ankles to indicate which of two cameras she should look at.

But it was Zelayeta’s subsequent cookbooks that launched her to national fame. Craig Claiborne, longtime food editor for The New York Times, crowned the third of those books, “Elena’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking” (1958), the “definitive volume on the subject.”

She then began packaging her enchiladas, tacos and Spanish meatballs into frozen meals, which were sold throughout Northern California under the Elena’s Food Specialties label. Her social circle included Julia Child and the foodie James Beard.

Zelayeta was 70 when she published her last cookbook, “Elena’s Favorite Foods California Style” (1967), a paean to the food cultures of immigrants – Mexican, Japanese, Italian – who had impressed the state’s tastes. By then, other cookbook authors would join in popularizing Mexican cuisine, even those with no ties to Mexico, such as British-born Diana Kennedy.

Zelayeta died on March 31, 1974 of complications from a stroke at a convalescent home in Pacifica, a city outside San Francisco. She was 76.

Reflecting on her career, she wrote in “Elena’s Lessons in Living”: “Of all the disabilities we suffer, anxiety is by far the greatest. We have it all. Everyone must work to conquer it.”

Mayukh Sen is the author of “Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America” (2021). He has won a James Beard Award for his food writing, and his work has been included in three editions of The Best American Food Writing.