Zora Margolis - making her own masa
When Zora Margolis cooks Mexican tamales, she makes the masa herself. That’s the spongy corn dough containing the stuffing. It may sound like no big deal. (She makes her own tortillas, too. And verduras escabeche - pickled vegetables. Everything at her Mexican feasts, in fact.) But you can’t get hold of the kind of fresh corn you need to make the masa anywhere in the greater Washington area. Huitzilopochtli knows, she tried.
“I didn’t know what kind of corn to use. The only thing I could find was big Peruvian corn. I tried making it with that. It was a difficult experiment – how to grind it. I used a Cuisinart. But I needed a proper grinder – everything bound up. [The challenge] became all consuming; I was determined to figure it out. And Peruvian corn doesn’t taste right.”
One day Rick Bayliss (of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago) showed up for a demonstration and book signing. “So I asked him about the corn and he said, It’s just plain field corn - but you can’t get it here.” According to both him and Diane Kennedy, the Mexican cookery expert recently in town with whom she also discussed the masa enigma, in Mexico all cooks were using was Maseca instant corn mix.
Margolis grew up in Los Angeles where her parents took the family out to ethnic restaurants at a very early age. “We ate Thai, Mexican. We ate French at big tables with strangers. There was one where the first course was always calf brains with mustard sauce.”
Her mother cooked “fairly well.” It was the ‘Fifties to ‘Sixties, when canned soups starred in so many meals. Margolis didn’t cook herself until she left home and dropped out of college to try her luck in New York theatre. “I was on my own at 18. I couldn’t afford to eat all meals out. I was working part time and very poor, getting to know other starving actors. My mother did a lot of cooking from scratch, so I had a good sense of what good food ought to taste like.”
She was a big fan of Julia Childs on TV and tried to copy what she saw for friends. She started with simple dishes and became more and more adventurous. By the time she met her husband, renowned bird artist Jonathan Alderfer then at Cooper Union art school, she was a pretty good cook. “One of the first times he invited me to his place, he was living in Connecticut in an old girls’ school building. He was in the former chemical lab in the basement. It was un-renovated and had a two-burner hot plate, an industrial sink and a tiny fridge. Every dish was dirty. I cooked him Chicken Marengo, rice pilaf, asparagus with hollandaise sauce and he was mine. It was a forgone conclusion,” she says with a grin.
Married, they moved to Vermont where they built a log house by hand in the woods. Margolis started a catering business with a friend who took her with her when she got a job as an executive chef in a fancy restaurant. Here and at a nearby Marlboro restaurant she gradually acquired more skills, until she decided she wanted to get back into show business and the couple returned to LA.
While she waited for the casting op that would turn her into a star, she took cooking classes at Ma Cuisine, a little school opened by the son of the Paris restaurant owner of Le Tour d’Argent. The teacher of the general class was a young unknown called Wolfgang Puck. The pastry teacher, also fresh from Europe, was Michel Richard. “I learned so much in those two classes, a tremendous amount of technique.” She kept cooking and entertaining and watching good chefs on TV, turning the produce from her garden into preserves and herself into a successful private chef.
When it became clear, despite starring in a Virginia Slims ad campaign, her acting career was going nowhere, she decided to become a psychotherapist. She took herself back to school, getting a BA at Antioch West and an MA in social work at UCLA. In 1996, her husband was given the chance to buy his grandparents’ home in Washington DC’s Palisades area in whose garden they had been married. So they moved to the capital. And quickly became homesick for the flavors of Mexico that had been so easy to come by in LA.
Margolis is not very complimentary about the South of the Border food available in the capital. “I looked around, went to couple places and said, What is going on?” It was long before Oyamel first opened in Crystal City. Because Mexican food had been so good on the West Coast, it was something she rarely cooked there. But now she was on a mission to make it like it should be – and not finding the ingredients. So every time she went to Los Angeles she brought back a suitcase full of fresh field corn to make her own masa. Then she discovered the Moctec tortilla factory in Landover, started by Texan Victor Vasquez. “If you ring them up and go out there, they will sell you fresh masa. It’s the only real tortilla factory left on the East Coast.” And it supplies masa to Oyamel.
When Margolis makes her own, she adds the calcium oxide that turns the starchier fresh field corn a bright yellow and breaks down its outer husk making it a more nutritious – and grindable – food.
She goes to Trader Joe’s for her five different kinds of chilis and to the Dupont Farmers Market for her fresh poblanos and a chicken that she brines with herbs and lavender flowers in a plastic freezer bag for 24 hours before drying its skin out a couple of days in the fridge and roasting it on a wood grill.
It’s rare that her husband takes her out to a restaurant. Unfortunately for Margolis, he knows he can eat better for far less at home.
“I didn’t know what kind of corn to use. The only thing I could find was big Peruvian corn. I tried making it with that. It was a difficult experiment – how to grind it. I used a Cuisinart. But I needed a proper grinder – everything bound up. [The challenge] became all consuming; I was determined to figure it out. And Peruvian corn doesn’t taste right.”
One day Rick Bayliss (of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago) showed up for a demonstration and book signing. “So I asked him about the corn and he said, It’s just plain field corn - but you can’t get it here.” According to both him and Diane Kennedy, the Mexican cookery expert recently in town with whom she also discussed the masa enigma, in Mexico all cooks were using was Maseca instant corn mix.
Margolis grew up in Los Angeles where her parents took the family out to ethnic restaurants at a very early age. “We ate Thai, Mexican. We ate French at big tables with strangers. There was one where the first course was always calf brains with mustard sauce.”
Her mother cooked “fairly well.” It was the ‘Fifties to ‘Sixties, when canned soups starred in so many meals. Margolis didn’t cook herself until she left home and dropped out of college to try her luck in New York theatre. “I was on my own at 18. I couldn’t afford to eat all meals out. I was working part time and very poor, getting to know other starving actors. My mother did a lot of cooking from scratch, so I had a good sense of what good food ought to taste like.”
She was a big fan of Julia Childs on TV and tried to copy what she saw for friends. She started with simple dishes and became more and more adventurous. By the time she met her husband, renowned bird artist Jonathan Alderfer then at Cooper Union art school, she was a pretty good cook. “One of the first times he invited me to his place, he was living in Connecticut in an old girls’ school building. He was in the former chemical lab in the basement. It was un-renovated and had a two-burner hot plate, an industrial sink and a tiny fridge. Every dish was dirty. I cooked him Chicken Marengo, rice pilaf, asparagus with hollandaise sauce and he was mine. It was a forgone conclusion,” she says with a grin.
Married, they moved to Vermont where they built a log house by hand in the woods. Margolis started a catering business with a friend who took her with her when she got a job as an executive chef in a fancy restaurant. Here and at a nearby Marlboro restaurant she gradually acquired more skills, until she decided she wanted to get back into show business and the couple returned to LA.
While she waited for the casting op that would turn her into a star, she took cooking classes at Ma Cuisine, a little school opened by the son of the Paris restaurant owner of Le Tour d’Argent. The teacher of the general class was a young unknown called Wolfgang Puck. The pastry teacher, also fresh from Europe, was Michel Richard. “I learned so much in those two classes, a tremendous amount of technique.” She kept cooking and entertaining and watching good chefs on TV, turning the produce from her garden into preserves and herself into a successful private chef.
When it became clear, despite starring in a Virginia Slims ad campaign, her acting career was going nowhere, she decided to become a psychotherapist. She took herself back to school, getting a BA at Antioch West and an MA in social work at UCLA. In 1996, her husband was given the chance to buy his grandparents’ home in Washington DC’s Palisades area in whose garden they had been married. So they moved to the capital. And quickly became homesick for the flavors of Mexico that had been so easy to come by in LA.
Margolis is not very complimentary about the South of the Border food available in the capital. “I looked around, went to couple places and said, What is going on?” It was long before Oyamel first opened in Crystal City. Because Mexican food had been so good on the West Coast, it was something she rarely cooked there. But now she was on a mission to make it like it should be – and not finding the ingredients. So every time she went to Los Angeles she brought back a suitcase full of fresh field corn to make her own masa. Then she discovered the Moctec tortilla factory in Landover, started by Texan Victor Vasquez. “If you ring them up and go out there, they will sell you fresh masa. It’s the only real tortilla factory left on the East Coast.” And it supplies masa to Oyamel.
When Margolis makes her own, she adds the calcium oxide that turns the starchier fresh field corn a bright yellow and breaks down its outer husk making it a more nutritious – and grindable – food.
She goes to Trader Joe’s for her five different kinds of chilis and to the Dupont Farmers Market for her fresh poblanos and a chicken that she brines with herbs and lavender flowers in a plastic freezer bag for 24 hours before drying its skin out a couple of days in the fridge and roasting it on a wood grill.
It’s rare that her husband takes her out to a restaurant. Unfortunately for Margolis, he knows he can eat better for far less at home.
Posted on Tuesday 25th November 2008 in
Americas & Caribbean, Chefs
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