Holy Guacamole!

Table of Contents

 

 

“Clever, fast-paced ... A literate, deliciously well-written mystery.”—Earlene Fowler

 

“Not your average who-done-it ... Extremely funny ... A rollicking good time.”
—Romance Reviews Today

 

“
Crime Brûlée
is an entertaining amateur sleuth tale that takes the reader on a mouth-watering tour of New Orleans . . . Fun.”
—Painted Rock Reviews

 

“Fairbanks has a real gift for creating characters based in reality but just the slightest bit wacky in a slyly humorous way . . . It will tickle your funny bone as well as stimulate your appetite for good food.”
—El Paso Times

 

“Nancy Fairbanks has whipped up the perfect blend of mystery, vivid setting, and mouthwatering foods . . .
Crime Brûlée
is a luscious start to a delectable series.”

 

“Nancy Fairbanks scores again . . . a page-turner.”

CRIME BRÛLÉE
TRUFFLED FEATHERS
DEATH À L’ORANGE
CHOCOLATE QUAKE
THE PERILS OF PAELLA
HOLY GUACAMOLE!
MOZZARELLA MOST MURDEROUS
BON BON VOYAGE
Anthologies
THREE-COURSE MURDER

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
HOLY GUACAMOLE!
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / November 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Nancy Herndon.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-01045-7

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. Park Kerr and Norma Kerr for permission to reprint copyrighted recipes from the
El Paso Chile Company’s Texas Border Cookbook
, William Morrow and Co., Inc, 1992

Opera at the Pass and its members and singers are all fictitious, as are the plot and all characters except historical figures mentioned in passing. However, El Paso, its restaurants, and its chefs and food writers, except for Carolyn, are real people who have kindly agreed to contribute their names, recipes, and establishments to this book, for which they have my profound thanks: Lionel Craver for his sangria recipe; Annette Lawrence, owner and chef at The Magic Pan for her recipe for Tlapeno/Tortilla Soup; Jose Nolasco of Desert Pearl for his Crab and Lobster Enchilada; Mr. and Mrs. Henry Jurado of Casa Jurado for their recipes for
Enchiladas de Calebacitas
and
Pescado al Mojo de Ajo
, and especially to W. Park and Norma Kerr for permission to reprint recipes for guacamole, Green Enchiladas,
salpicon,
and crepes with
cajeta
and pecans from their wonderful cookbook,
The El Paso Chile Company’s Texas Border Cookbook.

Books I used for research in writing
Holy Guacamole!
are: Cleofas Calleros,
El Paso’s Missions and Indians;
Paul Horgan,
Great River/The Rio Grande in North American History;
W. Park Kerr and Norma Kerr,
The El Paso Chile Company’s Texas Border Cookbook;
Leon C. Metz,
City at the Pass/An Illustrated History of El Paso;
C. L. Sonnichsen,
Pass of the North/Four Centuries on the Rio Grande;
Reay Tannahill,
Food in History;
W. H. Timmons,
El Paso/A Borderlands History;
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, translated by Anthea Bell,
History of Food;
James Trager,
The Food Chronicle;
and Alan Weisman, photographs by Jay Dusard,
La Frontera/The United States Border with Mexico.
NFH

E
l Paso, Texas,
the city to which my husband, Jason, and I moved several years ago, has always seemed an exotic place to me, but I’m adjusting. The city is beginning to feel like home. It’s not a small, dusty border town, as you might think if you’ve heard the Marty Robbins song. El Paso has over 700,000 people and Ciudad Juarez, across the river, over a million, maybe even two million. So many people from the interior of Mexico flood in yearly to work in the twin plants and to immigrate, not always legally, to the United States, that Juarez officials have no idea how many people live there.

El Paso has developed during the twentieth century into a city with tall buildings, a university, museums, a symphony, opera, and drama, but its history is Spanish, rather than English. Here at the intersection of Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas—a land of desert and mountains—the first Caucasians were Spanish conquistadors coming north from Mexico to look for land and riches and Spanish friars in search of new souls to convert.

We may now have a wide variety of restaurants, but the food we miss when we are away from home is Mexican food, the ingredients and recipes for which are descended from the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, and North American Pueblo Indians. Our newspaper articles and conversation often circle around subjects such as the disappearing water supply, our stepchild status in our own state, and the third world diseases that come across the border or fester in our own
colonias
. We discuss the violence of the drug trade, which results in execution-style murders in Juarez and in El Paso because the cartels use our border to transport their product.

On the other hand, I feel quite safe here. El Paso has a low murder rate and an excellent record of catching killers and shipping them east for execution, Texas being a state that carries out a lot of executions, although less cruelly and more judicially than the rustler hangings of the old days. But violence is not new to El Paso. Our history is blood soaked, and our written history began in 1598 when Don Juan de Onate and his troops arrived at the Pass and claimed all the land drained by the Rio Grande for Phillip II of Spain.

Then he and his men continued north to found Santa Fe, and the El Paso area became, for two centuries of Spanish rule, the mid point for the caravans freighting supplies from Mexico City to northern New Mexico. The men and wagons took six months to reach Santa Fe, six months to distribute the goods, and six months to return to Mexico, and on the Camino Real, the route they took, they were always in danger of attack by Indians, particularly Comanches and Apaches. Las Cruces, only forty miles north of El Paso, is named after the crosses raised over the graves of those who died on the trail.

Mission Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, which still stands in downtown Juarez, then named Paso del Norte, was founded in 1659 and completed in 1680, but it was the Pueblo Revolt in northern New Mexico ten years later that led to settlements here. The various tribes under their leader, Pope, rose on the same day and slaughtered Spanish colonists—men, women, and children. Unable to fight off the rebels, the Spanish governor, Don Antonio de Otermin, gathered those Spaniards who survived and those Indians who wished to come and fled down the Camino Real. These survivors settled in Paso del Norte, and at new missions, Ysleta, Socorro, and San Elizario, each built for different Indian tribes. Before the end of the century, the Spanish returned, took back the New Mexico colonies, and resumed the long journeys from Mexico City, through Paso del Norte, to Santa Fe.

Along the Rio Grande the settlers and Indians dug acequias for irrigation, built haciendas, raised herds of sheep, cattle, and goats, and crops of wheat, corn, chiles, melons, beans, European fruits, and especially grapes, from which they made wine. But even as trade grew and the land was cultivated from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Apaches rode out of the mountains and the Comanches from the plains to the east to raid and kill the Spanish and their Indian converts.

In 1821 Mexico fought for and won its independence from Spain, but life went on much as before, continuing the transformation from the European ways brought over by the settlers to the Pueblo ways of New Mexico and Mexico as Spain became a distant memory. And then the Anglo traders came and brought a new era of bloodshed after Texas won its war with Mexico and Alexander Doniphan’s Missouri Volunteers defeated the local Mexican army and took Paso del Norte in 1846. For a time the U.S. Army settled here to protect settlers and travelers from raiding Indians, who didn’t care what country claimed the land.