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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  popular publications

All material used with the kind permission of the author, given to me personally.

from VILLAGES

"Chicos—Corn in the Husk

I don't know where, or how, “Chicos” got their name, but “Chicos” are one of the tastiest foods in pueblos and villages across New Mexico. My wife Viola thinks they got their name from shrunken kernels of corn. She says, “After the ears of corn are cooked in the husk and hung on the line to dry, the kernels shrink to half size. Chico literally means 'small'.”

Corn is a grain of the New World, so it stands to reason that “Chicos” were first cooked by our Indian friends and the rest of us learned the art of making Chicos from them. To make Chicos, we fired up a hole in the ground with wood, and, after several hours, we threw the ears of corn in the hole, in the husk, and covered the hole with three or four inches of soil. It held the heat overnight, and by morning the savory Chicos were done.

The corn was harvested in the late afternoon out in the fields when it was in the milk stage. We cut the ears of corn from the stalks, which were called elotes, and loaded them in a horse-drawn wagon and took them to the beehive horno (oven) near our house. It was an alternative to a hole in the ground. The Spanish brought the idea for the horno from Spain. Most every house in the village had a horno, for baking bread and pastries, and roast green chile. The horno was used year round and was very handy to make Chicos when corn was in the milk stage.

By dusk, the horno was hot as Hades. The ears were unloaded straight into the hot horno and the door of the horno stuccoed and sealed to hold the heat through the night.

In the morning, we stood by the stuccoed door of the horno, waiting for the mud door to be removed, and then raked out the cooked ears. We sat around and husked and ate the steaming hot Chicos. Most of the time, we husked two ears of corn and tied the husks at the tips and hung them on a clothes line to dry. As we worked, we kept eating... one for the tummy and one for the clothes line; like piñons, it's hard to stop eating them. They were a delight.

When they dried up, after about a week on the line, the family sat around the patio and husked the kernels from the cobs and put them in flour sacks. Then we carried them to the attics of our homes and hung the sacks on a nail, nailed to a rafter, to keep them dry and to protect them from mice. Chicos attracted boys as well as mice!

During the winter, mother sent one of the older children to bring Chicos from the attic to mix with pinto beans, and sometimes throw in a mutton bone. That was a popular way to cook and prepare Chicos. As they cooked, they absorbed water, swelled, and reverted to their original size, more or less. The pintos got brown as they cooked, and the chicos were kind of whitish, and multicolored, depending on the kind of corn planted, and gave the pot contrasting colors. Chicos also gave the beans a special flavor, treasured in villages and pueblos.

Mother sometimes added some dried chile pods to the pot, that gave chicos y frijoles a hot and delightful taste. Looking back through the years and remembering “mother's cooking,” I can see how tough it could be on our poor wives. Unless they came from a similar background, their cooking was continuously compared to “mother's cooking.” It was most unfair. Today, when so few dishes are cooked from scratch and so much comes from frozen departments of Supermarkets, the comparisons are less severe.

The tradition of cooking pinto beans and chicos, sometimes called Posole, which Viola says is wrong because Posole is made from hominy, a different process, is disappearing from the villages and pueblos as the cornfields disappear from the landscape.

To those of us raised on small farms and villages and pueblos of New Mexico, the memory lingers on. “Las veredas quitaran, pero las querencias cuando.” (The trails may be erased, but our wonderful memories never.”