With a small stack of handmade
tortillas at her side, a shy Mexican grandmother in a purple apron looked at
the camera and introduced herself to the world.
اضافة اعلان
“I’m going to present to you this recipe,”
Doña Ángela, or Mrs Ángela, says in her first YouTube video, from August 2019,
speaking Spanish in a dulcet tone that creaks slightly like a sturdy barn door.
“I hope you like it.”
Millions of people did. And they have
adored her ever since.
Doña Ángela, whose full name is Ángela
Garfias Vázquez, has quickly become one of the most watched and beloved cooks
in the extremely crowded market of online food shows. The roughly five- to
10-minute videos are recorded at her ranch in Michoacan, Mexico, by her
daughter, who tracks her dicing of onions and grinding of corn with a phone
camera.
Doña Ángela’s channel, “De Mi Rancho a Tu
Cocina”, which means “from my ranch to your kitchen”, has more than 437 million
views.
That is more views than Martha Stewart’s
channel (roughly 172 million) and the NYT Cooking channel (about 72 million)
combined. She has nearly overtaken Food Network’s YouTube page, which has about
590 million views and hosts several big names in food entertainment.
Rural appealWhat explains Doña Ángela’s popularity?
“At the end of the day, she is showing us that all you need is fire, a comal, and some ingredients to cook up these amazing meals.”
“The kind of rural space that Doña Ángela
represents is not as visible in food media,” said Ignacio Sánchez Prado, a
professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Washington University in St.
Louis, who specializes in Mexican culture. “And I think she hit a nerve with
that.”
Many fans and Mexican cuisine experts
believe the appeal lies in her grandmotherly aura, which particularly enchants
people of Latin American descent who see their abuelas, or grandmothers, in
Doña Ángela: her shirts flecked with flowers, the dark spots on her hands, and
a mysterious ability to handle burning-hot tortillas without flinching.
Of course, the food she makes is also just
delicious, said Richard Sandoval, the Mexican chef and prolific restaurateur.
The range of Doña Ángela’s seasonal dishes,
experts said, highlights the ancestral tradition of Mexican cuisine and the
persistence it takes to feed a family for decades in the countryside, as she
most likely has in Michoacan. Her recipes include earthy-tasting tacos filled
with huitlacoche, a bulbous, blue-gray fungus; fried pork skin soaked in green
salsa; chunks of salted steak served with tart bits of prickly pear cactus; and
a rich, mahogany-colored sauce known as mole that is packed with dark chiles,
chocolate, and cloves, ground with a stone mortar and pestle.
“There are folks trained for the camera, and there are people like Doña Ángela, whose charm is simply magnetic.”
“At the end of the day, she is showing us
that all you need is fire, a comal and some ingredients to cook up these
amazing meals,” Sandoval said.
Sunlight and warm vibesThat simplicity is also reflected in her
low-budget production values and earnest manner. Doña Ángela has a large comal
(griddle), a blender, pots, and daylight that casts her kitchen in a
pale-yellow hue reminiscent of chicken broth.
Doña Ángela is warm, but reserved. She
wants you to know, as perhaps your grandmother once did, that she has made this
food for you, and hopes you like it. “Muy sabroso,” she promises at the end of
each video. “Very tasty.”
“There are folks trained for the camera,”
said Steven Alvarez, a professor of English at St. John’s University in New
York who teaches classes on Mexican food. “And there are people like Doña
Ángela, whose charm is simply magnetic.”
In 2019, Doña Ángela amassed one million
subscribers after uploading just 15 videos. She has since uploaded more than
300. In 2020, Forbes Mexico named her one of the country’s 100 most powerful
women. But she does not appear interested in such fame.
Doña Ángela did not respond to interview
requests for this article. Even YouTube has had trouble reaching her. A
spokesperson for the company, Veronica Navarrete, said that she had been
“trying to get in touch with her for a while” and had failed.
When a team at YouTube tried to ship her
awards, Navarrete said, they realized the “not very tech-savvy” Doña Ángela had
no cell signal or Wi-Fi at her ranch, where she lives with her husband and some
of her children.
Information about her background is sparse,
though some tidbits have been reported. She is in her early 70s, and in 2020 she
told Notivideo, a news organization in Michoacan, that she had three daughters,
five sons and 20 grandchildren, and that her mother had taught her to cook.
“You can see in my mom the genuine joy it brings her to watch those videos. It’s like speaking a language that’s not invented. You just feel it.”
She displayed an entrepreneurial spirit in
that interview, saying that even though she was running out of recipes, “I have
to search for ideas to keep going.”
The comforting voice of a grandmotherSometimes it is hard to know if Doña Ángela
is fully aware of her culinary stardom, which makes her all the more endearing
to viewers. Still, she most likely has some idea. Doña Ángela’s daughter said
in a video that she reads online comments to her mother.
In that video, a teary-eyed Doña Ángela
looks at the camera and tells her fans: “I love you all so much. I give thanks
to all of you. And may God bless you.” Later, she shows an altar she made for
her parents and says, “I want you to know me more.” She then points at the
decorative offerings: Marigold flowers to welcome sprits with fresh aromas,
salt to keep the evil away, glasses of water for tired souls.
It was a scene familiar to Bradley Coss,
48, of El Paso, Texas, whose family is from Chihuahua, Mexico. He has watched
just about every one of Doña Ángela’s videos with his mother, Cruz Ortiz, 93,
who also grew up on a Mexican ranch. Recently, on a cold night, she grabbed her
walker and sat with her son in front of a monitor, snuggled in a blanket and
mesmerized by scenes so familiar to her.
“You can see in my mom the genuine joy it
brings her to watch those videos,” Coss said, noting how it sometimes made him
tearful. “It’s like speaking a language that’s not invented. You just feel it.”
Ortiz watched Doña Ángela, whose hair
appeared grayer than in her debut video, her voice slightly raspier. The
serranos on the griddle sizzled. The tomatoes in the blender whirled. As Ortiz
fell asleep to those sounds, her son, too, looked on, pressed pause and saved
the rest for later.
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