Lessons in back-breaking Mesoamerican cooking: How to season a metate

Yesterday I trucked down to Mercado Merced and bought my metate, the lava-rock tablet and grinding stone I need for my cooking class.

I was a little worried that I’d pick the wrong one. Would it have enough of a slope? What if I got the wrong-size grinding stone?

When I got there, most of the metates looked the same, and there wasn’t much of a selection to begin with. (“There’s not much of a commercial demand,” one vendor explained.) I ended up choosing one with only a slight slope and a surface that didn’t look too porous. It cost 370 pesos, or about $30 USD.

The vendor wrapped it in string y ya, I was done; I carried my new metate on the Metro all the way home. My friend Julie, bless her heart, came with me to help bear some of the weight.

Yesterday at cooking class, everyone sat down to use their metates to grind nixtamal, the corn treated with slaked lime that would eventually become tortillas. Yuri had one question before we could all proceed: “Is there anyone here who hasn’t seasoned their metate?”

I waved my hand in the air. Naively, I had no idea what was involved.

A few minutes later, he explained. “You’re not going to work on the tortilla masa. You need to season your metate first. So you’re going to do four corn, four beans, four rice, and then three of soaked rice. Okay?”

I thought I understood — I just had to grind each variety four times, right? I could do that in like, 15 minutes, and then finish with enough time to make tortilla masa.

“Sure,” I told him.

It wasn’t until a classmate clarified that I realized I was wrong. One turn meant taking a small handful of dried corn, tossing it on the metate and pulverizing it into dust. Literally grinding the thing to death until it resembled sand. I had to do that four separate times, with four separate handfuls, for corn. And then four separate times for dried beans. And four for dried rice.

I was going to be there grinding until dawn.

If you’ve never used a metate, I can’t describe to you how tough it is. You kneel in front of it and grip the metlapil (the Nahuatl word for “mano,” or grinding stone) on either side. Then, you use your wrists to kind of rotate the metlapil forward, while at the same time pressing downward, hard, with the palms of your hands.

The idea is to create contact between the metlapil, the bits you’re grinding, and the tablet; you don’t want to just scrape the metlapil back and forth, or else you’d never get anything done.

You might get perhaps 10 good grinds in one go. Then you collect what’s on the metate, sweep it back toward the center and go again. It’s taxing on your wrists, fingers, knees, toes, shoulders and lower back. (One student said yesterday that it might be more comfortable if we all took off our shoes. Not something to try in cooking class, but maybe at home.)

I ground everything — small handfuls of corn, beans, rice and then soaked rice — for more than 2 1/2 hours. Took breaks about every 30 minutes or so to stand up and stretch. Not surprisingly, my legs had become wobbly. I could not believe that women used to do this type of work every day, for five or six hours at a time — and in rural parts of Mexico some women still do it.

By 10 p.m. I had finished curing my metate. I still had time to roll and press a few balls of tortilla dough, which the other students had prepared. Most had sat at their metates grinding for two hours just as I had.

The taste of those tortillas, though. I’ll never forget it. It wasn’t just that they were delicious. They smelled intensely of corn, and that they had this kind of fresh, pastoral taste, similar to what wafts into your mouth when you wander by a stand offering grilled elotes. This was a whole different feeling, beyond the taste itself — it was like I was eating something absolutely whole and complete. This tortilla was not just a piece of unleavened bread, but something with substance. It suddenly made sense to me how people could survive off tortillas in pre-Columbian times.

As I ate — my hand kept reaching into the tortilla basket, because metate-grinding works up an appetite — I kept thinking of a comment I saw on Serious Eats a week or two ago, regarding a post on making tortillas with Maseca. Some commenters were justifiably upset that the author hadn’t taken the time to discuss the important role of real masa nixtamalizada in Mexican cooking.

Cristina Potters of Mexico Cooks! was one of those commenters, and she wrote: “The purpose of a tortilla is not to accompany the meal. The tortilla IS the meal.” I didn’t understand what she meant until yesterday.

A final note on my metate: it’s now ready for me to actually use it. Thankfully we don’t have class again until next Thursday, because right now my hands are so sore I can barely lift a glass of water.