May 21, 2004 -- A heady 7,000 years of tradition suffuses the finest Mexican cooking. Spices combine into fine moles, building layer upon layer of flavor revealing Spanish, French and ancient indigenous influences. This isn't the kind of stuff you taste in most US restaurants, which serve a sort of watered-down Mexican-American food. If this description sends you slavering, you can learn the subtlest secrets of Mexican cuisine at the Mexican Home Cooking School outside Puebla, near Mexico City.
For the past few years, our readers have raved about the weeklong classes at this school. You stay in the home of Mexican chef Doña Estala Salas Silva and her American husband Jon Jarvis, taking cooking classes every morning for five days. Trained by her grandmother, Silva started cooking in restaurants at age 9 and worked in Mexico City and San Francisco before opening the school in 1996. Groups are small, at 4-6 people, and your work becomes everyone's lunch and dinner. The two-and-a-half-hour classes include lots of hands-on time for each student.
This is a vacation, not just a class, so afternoons are free. The school is five miles from Tlaxcala, a charming colonial city hitting the half-millennium mark. Jarvis will also help set up trips to a nearby dormant volcano, or to the nearby Mayan sites of Xochitecatl and Cacaxtla.
The best part: though Silva raised prices for most people this year, Frommer's readers get a major discount if you book by December 31, 2004. The general rate for this 7-day, 6-night course is $1,200. Mention Frommers.com, and you'll get it for $900. You can bring a non-cooking guest for $500.
That $900 includes all meals and B&B accommodation, but it doesn't include airfare. Jarvis works with a US-based travel agent to try to secure you the lowest possible airfares into Mexico City (75 miles and a $12 bus ride away) or Puebla, a small city nearer to Tlaxcala where school staffers can pick you up at the airport.
For pictures of the school and sample recipes, head to www.mexicanhomecooking.com. Call Jarvis at 011-52/246-468-0978, or e-mail him at mexicanhomecooking@yahoo.com.
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