Went to San Felipe de Neri mission church in Old Town today, then next door to the former convent, now a gifte shoppe, where the treasured parish cookbook, Memories and Recipes, San Felipe de Neri Parish is for sale. It’s recipes as well as the sociology of working class Hispano Albuquerque and their posadas and dias de los muertos, among many many other things.
I was eating a big bowl of green chile chicken stew at Flying Star and reading the cookbook when I met a new friend. Like me, she was raised in Bolivia. Like me, she went to grade school in the 1950s and was taught — very well indeed — by wounded Nazis at the Deutsche Schule in Oruro.
My fourth grade teacher in Cochabamba, Miss Hallek, looked like Adolf Eichmann, and tried to convert us to some kind of scary bleeding heart Lutheran religion with a really interesting flannel board.