Clearly Delightful

**Mexican panaderías in the United States transform gelatinas into folk art**

Words by Claudia Kolker

Tongs, a tray, and an appetite are typically all you need to savor a Mexican bakery.

In Houston, Tres Amigos panadería is no exception. Its self-serve shelves are crowded with classics: molasses pig cookies, crispy-soft bolillos, flaky palmeras and guayaba, pineapple or caramel empanadas.

But there’s one specialty here that’s too big – and, frankly, too wobbly — to be plucked with pincers. It’s the bakery’s majestic version of the Mexican gelatina de frutas, a gleaming ring of faintly sweet translucent gelatin, 10 inches in diameter and embedded with giant green grapes, fresh slices of mango, and clusters of blackberries and raspberries suspended in three dimensions like planets in space.

“You remember kaleidoscopes? For me it’s like watching one of those, seeing all the variations and colors of Mexican gelatinas,” said Graciela Montaño, a chef and cooking teacher in Mexico who is writing a book about the creations.

Originally an aristocratic delicacy in France, gelatin became an exuberant Mexico City specialty in the 1940s, with the arrival of refrigeration and handy powders to replace boiling animal bones into aspic. In the United States, this was also the era of the gelatin mold – celebrated for convenience, modernity, and thrift. In Mexico, though, gelatinas were and still are considered happiness food: valued for their protein content, adored for their imagination and charm.

In the hands of resourceful homemakers and vendors, gelatinas quickly became a folk art.

*Customers at La Ideal. Founded in 1927, it is one of the oldest operating businesses in Mexico City’s downtown historic district. Photos by Gerardo Magallón for palabra*

*Adults only: traditional gelatinas enlivened with tequila. These gelatinas are sometimes sold in plastic shot glasses with a wedge of fresh lime. Photo by Gerardo Magallón for palabra*

Adults only: traditional gelatinas enlivened with tequila. Sometimes these gelatinas are presented in plastic shot glasses with a wedge of fresh lime. Photo by Gerardo Magallón for palabra

For Mexican families today, no birthday is complete without a frosted cake and a glorious gelatina. In Mexico City, individuals craving an array of the trembling, gem-colored creations can head to Pastelería Ideal, a 95-year-old bakery in the city’s center. There, at the front of the two-story shrine to breads, pastries and towering wedding cakes, refrigerated cases display hundreds of brilliant gelatinas. They are shaped like Minions, Mickey Mouse or Spider-Man; spiked with tequila or infused with milk; and crafted into elaborate “mosaics” studded with tiny gelatin blocks of strawberry, orange, and grape.

Elsewhere in the city, Mexicans treat themselves to gelatinas at smaller bakeries and vendors roaming markets, plazas, and schools with lantern-like cases and carts.

“The Mexican president Porfirio Díaz was in love with Europe and European tradition,” and he popularized the French technique in the 19th century, Montaño said. “He served them at Chapultepec Castle. Over time, the Mexican middle class started to copy them, and then they were sold in the streets. They added all the Mexican flair. So we have all the colorful shapes – chickens, sunflowers, you name it. We embrace them with love — they are very easy, affordable, fun and nutritious.”

In Mexico, she added, vendors who sell small gelatinas often do it as a way to survive.

For mothers who may have fewer economic options, it can be “an honorable and dignified way to earn money,” she noted. “They will complement the family income with it, use it to send their kids to college. My mom, who was a teacher, would sell gelatinas and we would use the money for school supplies.”

In recent decades, the intricate dessert has been embraced as far away as Singapore and Vietnam, where online posts of gelatins decorated with seascapes and bouquets are a folk art of their own. While Asian cuisines have long included jelly desserts made of ingredients like agar, today’s over-the-top gelatins may have made their way East from Mexican bakeries in the Southwest – like Tres Amigos.

Pastelería La Ideal operates five branches that are still considered neighborhood bakeries. La Ideal bakery is one of the few businesses downtown that has not been bought by large food industry conglomerates in Mexico. Photos by Gerardo Magallón for palabra

*Fruit gelatinas are often designed to celebrate holidays such as Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, and birthdays. Photo by Gerardo Magallón for palabra*

Oddly, though, the bakery’s current owner, William Gómez only recently discovered gelatinas. The 51-year-old Gómez grew up on the Mexican side of the border, in Matamoros, heavily influenced by pop culture from the United States. “I think everyone who is Hispanic, when they walk into a bakery like this, feels the nostalgia of what they grew up with,” he said. While Mexican breads and pastries were central to his childhood, some treats from the interior of the country – such as gelatinas – didn’t have much of a presence.

Instead, Gómez learned about them two years ago, after buying Tres Amigos with his wife, Elizabeth. He had just finished a 32-year career as a computer engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Elizabeth, a school counselor, loved baking and cooking, so the pair decided to buy the bakery in Houston’s Long Point neighborhood, as a retirement project.

It was at Tres Amigos that former cashier Elsa Sánchez, taught them about gelatinas. Sanchez didn’t start off as a professional baker. Growing up in the Mexican state of Michoacán, she had been entranced by the gelatina lesson in her middle school nutrition class and always wanted to make some of the colorful, whimsical creations she saw at local bakeries.

When she came to Houston as an adult, she got a job as a restaurant cashier. Impressed with her, one of her managers recruited Sánchez after Tres Amigos opened its doors. Sánchez decided that the bakery needed something special – a differentiator – to attract customers. With encouragement from the bakery’s original owners, she experimented, studied YouTube tutorials and practiced until she could make stunning, outsized gelatinas with embedded fruit and blooming flowers.

*Tres Amigos cashier Elsa Sánchez introduced William Gómez to the joys of gelatinas*. *Photo by Claudia Kolker for palabra*

The owners’ support reflected their general entrepreneurial spirit, Sánchez said. The bakery’s three founders were Mexican, Chinese and Hindu – hence the name Tres Amigos. Today, under the Gómez ownership, Sanchez crafts her magisterial gelatin cakes full time. In the kitchen, behind the trolleys of fresh-baked conchas and croissants, Tres Amigos employs experts for other items. There’s a cookie baker, a cake decorator, and a specialist in individual mini-gelatins.

On a typical weekend, Sánchez makes and sells 10 gelatinas, which cost $30 a piece. On holiday weekends – Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day – she makes 60, including surreal-looking creations with pastel-pink and purple flowers, each petal created with a syringe with a special flat needle that injects colored gelatin into the partially hardened gelatin mold.

Surrounded all day by empanadas and conchas, Sánchez and her coworkers rarely take any baked leftovers home. They get enough sweets during the workday. Occasionally, she said, they have to toss out unsold and old cookies and breads.

That, however, never happens to the grand gelatinas de frutas, Sánchez said with a small smile. Almost every one makes it home to a celebration.

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Claudia Kolker is a writer who has lived in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. She often writes about innovators, entrepreneurs, and immigrants. Her book, “The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope” was an O Magazine selection. She lives in Houston with her family and their big-hearted dog.