Symbiosis in the Soil with Maricela Vega
On harvesting clay by moonlight, throwing fish, and resistance in existence
This week, we find ourselves literally digging deeper into the land, unpacking ancestral uses of clay as a culinary tool. Maricela Vega is an Atlanta-based chef, food stylist, culinary educator, and jardínera, whose work broadly composes a material study of clay in maíz. I met Mari through my friend Gerardo a couple years ago when they hosted a collaborative dinner at Lulu, which explored the possibilities of cooking with clay and masa. I’ve watched them both continue to tinker with these materials in kitchens of varying sophistication, including a particularly impressive makeshift cinder block setup during a slammed plant sale at Hot Cactus last December. Mari’s cooking has always demonstrated a deep curiosity and respect for the natural environment, so I was keen to understand how the American south fits into her practice.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
JS: I’ve seen you identify yourself as a chef-slash-jardinera. Was that something you always claimed or is that something you stepped into later?
MV: Definitely something I came to later. I was working as a line cook at Empire State South. It was the type of restaurant where, for example, we categorized not only the type of radish, but also the farm those radishes came from, because we knew what soil properties those farms offered, and how that impacted the taste. I started working with this agroecology urban farm in Atlanta, Grow Where You Are. I’d be there from like 9:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. and would make it back to the restaurant just in time for my shift. I became their little apprentice for five years, from 2017 until 2022. I ended up also running some of their after school programming with Cross Keys High School, which is a predominantly Latino, severely underfunded school. We had this program for anybody who identified as femme, and I would bring in seeds and different produce and provide gardening and culinary skills there. But you know, you can really do so much in your twenties.
JS: When did you end up in the South?
MV: I moved from California to Dalton, Georgia in the late ‘90s because my family worked in the carpet industry. I ended up in Atlanta by 2009 and worked in restaurants until 2022 – I was an executive chef – but I was always doing my own side projects at the same time. The first was called Chicomecoatl, after the Aztec goddess of maize and sustainability. I was eager to find a connection to the diaspora and connect to my ancestry. It was that period of time. I’m laughing, but also I was genuinely soul-searching.
JS: I went to a talk recently by Liana Aghajanian. She writes all about the Armenian diaspora and Armenian food ways in California. We were discussing how diaspora studies are interesting and complex, but how they also became a bit of a trendy buzzword at some point. I think it’s important to be able to situate that moment in time, maybe if only to dig deeper.
MV: It really was a moment in time, but for me, it meant a lot to stand up and be myself in the South, to proclaim that we’re more than just Tex-Mex food. That also came with a sense of responsibility; if I was going to claim this, I needed to really dive in and see what other Mexican or Mesoamerican scholars were saying. So the project evolved and took a left turn. I’m not even Aztec; my people are actually P’urhépecha. I renamed the project Chico, with a focus on milpa products. My grandparents are all farmers. They entered into co-ops, aggregating our crops, and selling them off to the main markets, but NAFTA really fucked that up. Chico was an act of resistance, with the goal of eventually turning it into a CPG brand. I took a research trip to Mexico. I was seeking to understand the foundations of the milpa system and how we even got to tools like the comal. I met this woman in San Marcos village in Oaxaca who was saying how her people practiced an ancestral method of harvesting clay by the moon cycles. In harvesting clay you’re also aerating and extracting soil, creating a space where you can put seeds down. I thought there was maybe a kind of symbiosis – perhaps there was some urge to make something of the soil that had been extracted, whether that was the comal to make tortillas, or the colander to strain the nixtamal solution. I was struck that these foundational tools possibly emerged in the process of cultivating the soil. Does that make sense?
JS: I’ve never really considered clay as something to be “harvested.” What needs to be done to that clay to use it for any sort of culinary purpose?
MV: So, I’ve seen this process here in Georgia and it’s similar to how they do it in Mexico. The good stuff is around four feet down — that needs to be filtered two or three times to remove any inclusions you don’t want in the clay. After you’ve completed the filtration to your liking, that material — I call it a dough — has to ferment. My maestros taught me to let it ferment, sometimes up to a month. After that, you work the dough again. You slab it around a bit, you might strain out any extra liquid, but then you can start molding. The open fire (rather than kiln fire) processing I observed in Mexico led me to think about how else people could cook with clay. I thought about the French technique of cooking en papillote. In 2022 I ended up at an artist residency in North Georgia, where Chef Lisa Donovan and her husband, who’s a ceramicist, led this workshop pairing chefs and ceramicists. That’s when I first tried wrapping fish in clay. The professors were really concerned it was going to explode, but I’d seen it done in Mexico. I butterfly the fish and then I stuff it with a bunch of herbs. I generally try to replicate the ecosystem. Oftentimes here it’ll be spruce tips, maybe some chamomile, sumac, whatever’s around. I also wrap the fish in leaves to protect it from the clay. I use something edible like Swiss chard or collard and then wrap that in fig leaf for even more aromatics, then that gets encased in clay and it basically cooks through convection. Everybody’s ancestors cooked with clay at some point – they knew that it was going to just act as an oven essentially.
JS: Do you know this writer Kiko Denzer? He has a book that’s all about making earth ovens – I’d love to build one some day. But I love how that same material can be applied in so many different ways, whether it’s to make a vessel, to make a larger cooking apparatus, or even this thermal coating. There’s also this tradition of baking in salt. I don’t know if that’s necessarily wasteful, but I’m hard-pressed to think of our ancestors being like, oh here’s three pounds of salt to cook one fish. Clay feels much more accessible at that volume. Can the clay you cook with be repurposed?
MV: Actually, you could break it down and reintroduce it into the earth. When we did this at Hambidge, the clay came from the mountains nearby, so it felt very beautiful to just throw it out and let it go back into the soil. In a hippie-dippie world, that’s ideal; I compost here at the garden and I make soil like probably two or three times a year. Clay just feels so modest; you just need to dig a hole.
JS: Even a hole can be a kind of rudimentary oven. I was looking at your Instagram post with Norma (Listman) and Saqib (Keval, from Masala y Maiz) where you were baking in the ground.
MV: I was just about to say, we dug a 4-foot hole for the barbacoa. It’s a method that just makes sense. It’s so easy. In an agricultural society, you’re always working in the dirt and always extracting. There’s always going to be a pile of clay around.
JS: It’s a very humble cooking medium, but I also don’t think just anyone should go in their backyard… if people are interested in doing this, where can they get clay for cooking? Can they go to their local ceramics studio?
MV: Probably not - anything that’s mass-produced gets sticky. You need to look in places that are a bit more niche. Down here, StarWorks is producing good clay in North Carolina – and what I mean by that is, it has fewer chemical additions than other clays. That’s something that you should know anyway if you’re firing off mugs or vessels for consumption. It’s not very sexy, but it’s just reality.
JS: What are you looking for in clay for culinary uses?
MV: When we cooked at Lulu, for example, we used a Japanese-style cone 10 clay. It’s a little wet and very malleable. If it’s too dry, it gets a little bristly and will pop and break.
JS: You’re obviously doing a lot of field research, but what other resources are you consulting for your projects?
MV: Right as I was beginning my research Elizabeth Morán published this book called Sacred Consumption. It’s maybe 100 pages, but I’ve reread it so many times. I was really into making tamales, and she writes about the rituals of cooking and eating, and symbolism of ingredients for Aztec ancestors. The masa always symbolized the human body, and the fillings, the peppers, the garnishes, the colors – everything carried meaning. Even the husk, which is old and dried, whereas the fillings are fresh. You have this meeting of old and new, the past with the present.
JS: In many cultures, humans are believed to have been formed from clay. I love this variation on that theme, where the masa is not only moldable, but nourishing. It’s clear that you talk to a lot of different people as part of your work.
MV: A lot of my research is vocal. Conversations are crucial because oftentimes publications catering to a broad audience lack nuance. Keep in mind, I was looking into all of this before the third wave masa trend. There was a lot of knowledge sharing among my peers in the culinary realm, but I wanted to find academic research. Not that I discount folklore. I actually love folklore more, but I think in just dealing with assholes your whole life, you’re just like, “All right, I’m going to give you two versions of it, motherfucker.” So I find the scholar version and then I also pull up the folklore to support it.
JS: There’s a Greek archeologist called Yannis Hamilakis, who has written a lot about indigenous archaeologies. He posits that archaeology as a modern practice is an inherently colonial exploit, but people have engaged in different kinds of archaeology for millennia. He has this great essay about indigenous archaeologies in Ottoman Greece, where the Brits were “excavating” in Eleusis. They were trying to remove a bust of Ceres from this field – the locals had basically turned it into a sort of protector and fertility icon, heaping manure onto it to enrich the soil. The workmen - all locals - refused to collaborate in its removal, and in fact, the ship carrying it back to England ultimately sank, and several seasons of poor harvest followed. This is all to say, I think it’s important to remember that these ancient items and practices are often deeply enmeshed in the present, and just because an interpretation might sound a little woowoo to you doesn’t mean that it doesn’t carry these other meetings for another person. I think you’d really enjoy his questions about archaeology and whose histories are taken seriously. Did you uncover any unexpected connections between the Southeast United States and Mesoamerica through your research?
MV: You know, I always wondered how I could connect to the south as a Mexican and this was actually a revelation. There’s significant archaeological evidence suggesting that the Olmec came to this region or at least traded with the local populations. We see large scale archaeological mounds in Georgia, similar to what they were creating in Mexico. At the same time, agricultural researchers – folks like Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, Martha Wilcox of MILPAIZ, and David Shields at the University of South Carolina – have discovered remarkable genetic connections between Oaxacan pastor rojo maiz, the bloody butcher corn we find here in the south, and the rostrato rosso flint maize grown for polenta in Bergamo. A takeaway for me was that we’ve always been present, across Turtle Island and beyond. I was trying to “fit in,” which I thought was important at the time. I’ve also found that cooking with clay points to a more universal ancestral truth. When we pass, our bodies will go back into the earth, decaying into sediment. Much like how we encounter pieces of ancient civilization through ceramic remains, one day someone may encounter our sediment, mixing it into a clay that can be turned into a vessel for food. Our bodies participate in this full circle of life.
JS: I do like the cyclical framing, how we all come from clay and become clay. You mentioned Anson Mills – what’s your relationship to grits? Do you have one?
MV: That’s funny. An artist friend and I were trying to turn this concept into an exhibit with the mounds and we wanted to call it G.R.I.T.S.: Girls Raised in the South. It’s a country thing.
JS: If you were looking for a Mexican counterpart, I suppose it would be atol?
MV: Yeah, though atoles can incorporate a variety of ingredients. Maybe you didn’t have enough corn so you supplement with whatever dried crops you have: Sorghum, garbanzos, peanuts, wheat berries…
JS: See, those crops to me more readily evoke the Southeast United States.
MV: Being in the south, there’s often this layer of like “you’re not from here,” but my family back in Mexico is growing those same damn crops. I love to bring up this intersection. Life is all about these relationships, and if you examine plants and what you can make from the terroir I think that’s always going to reveal something. Tune in!
