Chapter 4

CHOCOLATE FOR TURKEYS

Martina Tlacoxolat looked a bit troubled when I asked if she could whip up a batch of mole, and I couldn’t figure out why. As accommodating as people come, surely she would comply with this simple request from a visitor sent by her son in New York. That this was a three-day job should not deter her; life in San Juan Huilico Atlixco offered its spare moments. Then I realized the problem. After she and her family and I tasted some of the mole, where would she find another fifty people to finish it?

Growing up in Tucson, I considered myself a Mexican food gourmet of the highest order. That is, I studied the textured intimacies of tacos, enchiladas, and tamales, unbothered that they were no more than antojitos, the snack street food so close to the hearts of us sons of the Sonoran Desert. I knew only that mole—pronounced mo’-lay—was chocolate chicken, and I did not want to go there. But, mole and all, the chocolate trail starts in Mexico.

Real Mexican food, of course, is infinitely complex, as regionally based as French cuisine, with just as much pain in the preparation. And if there is anything to rank with gigot d’agneau as a defining dish with festive connotations, it is mole. Though this dish is mostly made with chicken these days, the old recipes call for guajolote, the tasty if tough little Mexican turkey. Properly done, mole does not come in small batches.

Anyone invited to a fiesta can determine whether it is a casual gathering or a serious celebration with the simplest of questions: ¿Hay mole? That is, will they serve mole? A priest and a ring are required to consecrate a marriage in Mexico, but everyone knows no union is consummated until the families dish up mole to the immediate world. Done properly, mole is not thrown together on a kitchen range but rather assembled over days, with friends and family all working to soak, pound, chop, roast, or stir gently atop an outdoor charcoal stove.

Mole usually refers to the whole dish—fowl included—but the word specifically means the thick sauce itself. I had a rough idea of what went into it, but I needed an up-close lesson. Lucky timing and the kindness of friends landed me at Martina’s door, which was shaded by banana leaves and opened onto an immaculately swept dirt patio in a little village south of Puebla. By then, I had spent more time than I had planned looking for the perfect mole mama.

Things seemed to have fallen into place when I mentioned my search to Sara Jenkins, a young New York chef of amazing skills learned in Italy at the knee of her mother, Nancy Harmon Jenkins. “Talk to me,” Sara said. “My entire kitchen staff came from Puebla.”

Sara was jammed with work at a new restaurant, which had outdoor tables in lower Manhattan but no one from Puebla on the new staff. She would get back to me as soon as she could. In the meantime, I brushed up on the subject.

Since the Aztecs, the chocolate time line follows a trail of mole. The word means only a complex chili-based sauce. But when modified with poblano—coming from Puebla—it means a chili-based sauce with a nuance of sweetened chocolate to balance the other flavors.

Chocolate mole is also made in Oaxaca, in different and more varied versions, and Oaxaca is now the real chocolate heart of Mexico. But the old colonial metropolis of Puebla, eighty miles southeast of Mexico City, with as many churches as there are days of the year, seemed like the original source.

According to historically based legend, or legend-laced history, seventeenth-century nuns at the Santa Rosa Convent in Puebla cooked up chocolate mole in their convent kitchen to impress a visiting viceroy. There are various versions of what transpired. One has a clumsy sister dropping chocolate into the sauce, the way a slippery-fingered cook in France accidentally put almonds into chocolate for the Duc du Pralin, thus inventing what the French call praliné. Another has it that a flustered nun, chattering in Spanish as she pounded away at her stone mortar, mispronounced the verb for what she was doing as “mole” instead of “meule.” This, for some reason, launched her companions into fits of laughter, and the moment was immortalized with a new name.

Etymologists offer a simpler explanation: the Nahautl word for sauce is mulli.

Puebla was a jewel in colonial times, a lovely city built along Spanish lines but laid out and landscaped by people with a sense of proportion and grandeur. I had last seen it forty years earlier as a summer student in Mexico, and it had stayed fresh in my mind. Mission-style churches faced grand buildings with rich tile and iron-grille balconies. Bracing mountain air and reliable rainfall produce lush flowering plants that fill public squares.

The proud city of Puebla was where Mexican forces overran Emperor Maximilian’s troops on May 5, 1862. The French took back Puebla a short while later, but that historical detail does nothing to dampen joyous celebration all over Mexico each year on Cinco de Mayo.

Mostly, I remembered the restaurants. Every corner seemed to have a few, if not proper eateries with sturdy tooled-leather chairs and silverware, then at least holes-in-the-wall exuding come-hither aromas.

Driving in on a Saturday morning, I found the Malthusian nightmare. Population growth on top of a systematic flouting of any sensible rule of planning had blotted out the charm. The narrow lanes built for horse and carriage were choked beyond belief with cars and trucks. Ahead of my taxi, someone paused to take a rare parking spot. A driver was maneuvering out of a tight space. Within a nanosecond, an earsplitting storm of horn noise impelled us forward. Not that the drivers’ impatience sped up traffic. We spent fifteen minutes on that single block.

Spanish-era buildings had been carved into shops selling secondhand auto parts, ugly furniture, and junk tin kitchenware. And the restaurants were gone. On the main square, the zocalo, the ubiquitous golden M marked an overlit hangar full of kids. There was homegrown fast food: greasy fried meat or tortas—sandwiches. A few dubious places offered “Continental” fare.

Asking around, I decided my best chance for good mole poblano, outside of someone’s kitchen, would be at the Hotel Colonial.

It was a perfect setting, the ornate home of some early grandee, and it dominated a well-kept pocket of old Puebla. During Mexico’s early years, visiting presidents inflamed the masses from its balconies. Broad staircases edged in blue and yellow ceramics curved between floors, their dark wood railings worn smooth over the centuries. Narrow, cranky elevators had been added, but no one seemed certain where they went, or if they ever got there.

Dining areas meandered across most of the main floor, and additional alcoves, a story higher, looked onto an indoor patio and an outdoor fountain. A kindly waiter took me through the kitchen, brought toward modern times in fits and starts but otherwise just as the old artisans had built it. Tiled ceilings arched over blackened fireplaces and monster stoves. Dishes towered above stone sinks. The Colonial was no architectural masterpiece; it was simply old Mexico the way tourists like me loved to picture it.

I ordered mole and waited. It was good, all right, but no better. As the chicken is boiled, its bland taste puts heavy responsibility on the sauce, which is supposed to be slightly hot, and not sweet enough for sugar in the chocolate to be noticed. The two dozen ingredients must blend to the masterful mix that Mexicans treasure. The Colonial’s came close. It had none of that hint of burned tire that overpowers bad mole. But I knew I had to keep looking.

After lunch, I stopped at the Santa Rosa Convent to see the now-famous kitchen where those nuns reportedly discovered mole. My trusty copy of Frances Toor’s New Guide to Mexico, published in 1944, makes no mention of the incident. It merely notes a “beautiful all-tile Colonial Kitchen.” This whole nun-mole business might, in fact, be one of those instant legends that are always so good for tourism. I was curious to find out.

Modern guidebooks commend the convent as a high point of Puebla, but no one seems to have told the people in charge. A ratty little room marked TICKET OFFICE announced frequent times for guided visits. I waited all morning and saw only a few mystified tourists. Finally, a disheveled man bustled in to collect ticket money and then led us off with all the warmth of a coyote taking illegal aliens to Arizona.

The kitchen is breathtaking. Handmade tiles cover every wall, window seat, vaulted ceiling, floor, and fireplace. Centuries have added a warm patina to the tones of blue, green, and cream on the old glazed tiles. Starbursts are set into each flat plane. Alternating patterns decorate work surfaces and hearths. I am fairly sure of this, at least. The guide whipped us through before I could set an f-stop.

I tried to stall a moment by asking questions. The guide answered each on the trot. I started to reach into my pocket to rent more of his attention. But something warned me not to believe a word he said.

Frustrated, I sat down to regroup by a broken fountain under dead palm trees. I was beginning to have enough of Puebla. Rather than stay the night, I returned to Mexico City. Late the next morning, still puzzling over Plan B, I checked my e-mail. Sara had scored. She had dashed off a message in such haste that half the words were scrambled. Her friend Sergio Tlacoxolat had given her his mother’s number, although he had not yet warned his mother. When I called, a confused but accommodating Martina gave me directions. Moments later, I was headed back toward Puebla, bound for a small village under the volcano.

 

 

The Tlacoxolats’ farmlet nestles at the edge of San Juan Huilico Atlixco, down a track off the highway south of Puebla. The backdrop is Mount Popocatépetl, a conical mountain of brooding beauty in shades of purple with a white mantle of snow. Sometimes it smokes and gurgles. That day, it just sat there, the perfect emblem of a Mexico that I remembered.

A solid little house anchors the family compound, a ragtag collection of open sheds, mud huts, and verandas shaded by flowering vines. A rooster that had lost its watch was crowing its head off at one in the afternoon. Burros brayed, and birds made a racket in the mango trees.

In nearby fields, Martina’s husband, Tirso, grows corn, beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers, as well as enormous gladioli. He has a pickup, a horse named Horse—Caballo, actually—and a lot of work. She makes a little money selling chocolate she brings from Oaxaca.

Glancing around, I saw signs of recovery in the American economy up north. A concrete-block barn was back under construction. A new scooter leaned against a fence. Family fortunes rise or fall according to help from the six of their eight children who work across the border.

On Sundays, the Tlacoxolats try to take it easy and appreciate life. But they were gracious to my importuning visit. By the time I arrived, Sergio had telephoned from New York to explain the circumstances. Martina plunged into the assignment. She showed me her normal mole pot, a blackened clay cauldron the size of an industrial waste container. We would use a smaller one.

Tirso, Martina, and I drove to a town market down the road. Rosa Rosas was in her usual spot, behind a mountain range of chilies. Mexican cooks depend upon a dizzying variety of peppers, from the basic green guajillo to small red habaneros that can double as rocket fuel. Rosa had them all, but Martina’s mole recipe requires only three: the long red poblano, which Mexicans elsewhere call mulate; the flat, wrinkled pasilla; and the workaday guajillo, which is like an Anaheim chili.

Martina sorted carefully among the mounds, hefting each likely pepper to examine its pulpiness, texture, and ripeness. Meantime, Rosa rhapsodized about mole.

“We always make a lot when we cook it, because we never know how far it will have to go,” she said. “That is what is so wonderful about Mexico. It’s our tradition. If someone shows up, we feed him. He is a welcome guest, part of the family. He could be a cabinet minister or a barefoot campesino who happens to wander by.”

And, she added, making mole is always a social event. “There is so much to do that we share the labor,” she said. “Everyone helps, passing the time with gossip, jokes, songs. When you make mole, you have to have fun.”

The chicken was selected with equal care from another philosopher-vendor. Mole poblano was first eaten with wild turkey, which was what people found centuries ago when they took their muskets out to the woods. The taste for turkey grew stronger after the bird was domesticated and fattened to party-size proportions. These days, the butcher said, a lot of people still demand turkey for mole as it should be. But chickens are so much easier to handle.

After a while, Martina’s load was substantial. She trotted down the street with bulging bags in each hand. Tirso walked behind, unburdened. I started to reach for a bundle but thought better of it. Every culture has its ways. Instead, I helped the man of the house protect his wife’s flanks.

Mole starts with chilies. We worked over each pepper with our fingers, removing stems and veins and then scraping any remaining seeds into a dish for use later as seasoning. For our small batch, Martina used twenty of the poblanos. These, along with a handful of guajillos, were for flavor. She added four of the longer red pasillas for heat. As we hurried along, I focused hard on the first rule of Mexican kitchens: When your eyes start to water, as they will, for God’s sake do not rub them.

When the charcoal in her courtyard brazier burned down to glowing coals, Martina quickly roasted each chili. One by one, she dropped the peppers onto the fire until their skins blistered and blackened. For tongs, she used her fingers until they, too, were blistered and blackened. Mostly, Martina smiled at my obvious concern. Two or three times, a heartfelt “Ouch!” blew her cover. She dumped each roasted chili into a bucket of water to cool, soften, and shed its singed skin.

Martina poured sesame seeds onto a plate, and we plucked out the bad ones. She toasted the rest in a heavy iron skillet and put them aside. Then she poured sunflower seed oil—just some supermarket stuff—into the pan and deep-fried slices of those large green bananas that are more properly called plantains.

When the plantains were removed, golden brown, Martina dropped several handfuls of raisins into the bubbling oil until they puffed up into fat little globes. Next, she spilled the chili seeds into a colander and toasted them in the oil. Each ingredient, in turn, was added to a large clay olla. She tore up chunks of bread and old tortillas and left them to toast in the oil in the skillet. Then she scurried to the kitchen to check on the chicken she had simmering on her stove.

As I watched her, Martina might have been my Jewish grandmother making soup: a pot, a chicken, salted water. But there would be no celery, carrots, or garlic, and certainly neither kreplach nor matzoh balls. She wanted only simple broth to add to her mole. The bird was meant as mere backdrop, bland enough to absorb all the other flavors and not get in the way of their blended bouquet.

Suddenly, a screech called her back to the fire. Her teenage daughter, still far from mole mama status, had forgotten to equip herself with a spatula. “Run! Run!” she yelled as she watched helplessly. The tortillas were black. Edges of the bread had burned to carbon. Martina only chuckled. Scraping off a token bit of char, she tossed the bread and tortillas into her mix. “You’ll see,” she said, with an unsettling trust-me grin.

One by one, other components went into the clay pot: almonds roasted in oil; a head of garlic left on the stalk, charred briefly in the flames; cloves and cinnamon sticks pop-toasted in the colander over the fire; grilled raisins that had been softened in boiling water; anise and black pepper. Mexican lore demands twenty-seven ingredients in a mole poblano. But Mexican reality is that rules are subject to change according to a cook’s inspiration and the contents of her larder.

Finally, it was time for the chocolate. Martina spilled some chicken broth through a strainer into a dish in which she melted a sizable chunk from one of the brown hockey pucks she buys in Oaxaca. Each disk of chocolate, molded in a simple tin circle, is composed of two and a half parts of sugar to one part cacao.

This last step—the addition of sugary chocolate—is crucial for the right balance. If there is too much, the final result cloys. If too little, the mole has a powerful kick to it, and you’ve missed the point. The problem, of course, is that few decent Mexican cooks actually measure. Martina simply senses how hot the chilies might be and how much blackened char got into the mix.

We had reached the stage where the real work was supposed to start. By tradition, the well-stirred contents of the olla are spilled onto a metate, a flat stone on four stubby legs, and worked over for hours upon hours with a stone roller. This is women’s work, naturally, backbreaking labor done on bended knees. As Rosa had said in the market, women who make mole have got to have a sense of humor about it all.

In our case, we took the sensible shortcut. We carried the olla down the road to a crumbling adobe shack. Inside, a cheerful old woman turned on her milling machine, which looked like a cross between Gutenberg’s printing press and a torture device from the Spanish Inquisition. Within minutes, we had our mole.

Still warm from the fire and creamy from the mill, it defied all description. Martina was right, of course. That bread and tortilla char was just another happy nuance that could not be placed. It was spicy enough to bite back but also richly mild. If any flavor dominated, it was sesame and almonds, bringing to mind happy moments in the best of Sichuan restaurants. If there was chocolate, you could not prove it by me. Still, I could sense it.

The real test came at Martina’s table, when she ladled the thick hot mole over a boiled chicken drumstick and thigh. I had a flash of my early days in the Congo when I first tasted mwamba, chicken in spicy peanut sauce. But this was something else entirely.

That plate of perfect mole linked Montezuma’s empire to a modern-day Mexico with new values that often do not jibe with its old roots. Maybe Spanish nuns did devise this dish long after the Conquista. But as I sat with the Tlacoxolats under the volcano, that seemed like superfluous detail. I felt very near the heart of chocolate.

 

 

In the village of San Pedro Atocpan, a short drive northwest of Mexico City, it is hard to find anything that is not mole. During the 1950s, an enterprising villager from Puebla found a market among Mexico City housewives who had to have mole but were too busy to make it. Atocpan went collectively crazy for the stuff. Today, a generous handful of shops grind it to order by the kilo. Even more restaurants serve it in a variety of forms. Just about everyone in town has family mole secrets locked away in a safe place.

The best time to visit is during October, when Mexicans from everywhere jam into Atocpan for its three-week mole festival. I went in spring, hoping to find the place in a more relaxed state. The mole fairgrounds were deserted, but gardeners kept the grass and trees in perfect shape, awaiting the annual bash. A sign at one end read DON’T THROW GARBAGE HERE——THINK OF YOUR FAMILY’S IMAGE.

I stopped at La Casa de Buen Mole, where Genaro Ortiz and a young helper labored away in spite of the slow season. Ortiz told me that Atocpan has ten thousand residents, and they are all mole millers. I took this as a slight exaggeration, although by the end of the day I began to wonder. As he explained it, it wasn’t one man but rather a movement of settlers from Puebla generations ago who brought fresh blood to Atocpan. Naturally, the newcomers brought their own recipes. Either way, the whole village went nuts for chocolate-flavored fowl.

Ortiz’s customers often want him to go heavy on the almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, and peanuts. Many cooks use prunes, but he doesn’t stock them. It is too much work to remove the pits. For thickener, instead of the bread and tortillas that Martina uses, he crumbles in stale cookies.

I asked Ortiz where I might find a restaurant serving good mole. He gave me that look. I might have asked where to find a lobster on the coast of Maine. I had been told about Don Pedro, but it was closed. Instead, I chose a place called Los Cipreses del Rey David. It had towering King David—type cypresses in a lush garden of bougainvillea, oleanders, and gladioli. Muscular geraniums rose high above their clay pots. Besides, it had a sign announcing “the best mole in the world.”

Inside, I found a spot at a brightly painted table and looked at the menu. I chose flat enchiladas made with blue-corn tortillas and topped with a rich brown mole. Tender boiled pinto beans came on the side. As I ate, Vicente Fernández wailed “Volver, Volver” from the jukebox, an old classic about lost love that goes straight to the nostalgia glands. Cooking noises echoed from the kitchen, wafting on a cloud of pleasant aromas. I got up to investigate.

Valente Espíndole, the owner, was forty-eight and had been cooking at his restaurant for fifteen years. He wore a T-shirt of some experience over a respectable belly. Cast in a film, he might have had a toothpick in his mouth. When I asked who made the best mole in Mexico, he eyed me narrowly. “Pues, yo,” he said. Well, me, of course. I should have remembered the sign out front. I said I meant the question in a more general sense—geographically.

“Puebla is the capital of mole,” he said, “but some of us improve upon the poblanos’ skills.” I asked about Oaxaca, which also claims title to superior moledom. Oaxaqueños boast that they make seven different kinds of mole, although only two of them have chocolate in it.

“If there is no chocolate, it is not mole,” Espíndole said. “To make it right, you must use twenty-seven different ingredients.” That number again. I asked him if he could list the components.

“I can’t tell you,” Espíndole replied. He smiled slyly, eschewing all persuasion. “After all, you norteamericanos keep your secret to making fried chicken.”

 

 

In Oaxaca, there was no missing the chocolate. At the downtown corner of Las Minas and Bartolomé de las Casas, I could follow my nose in any direction to shops that ground cacao to order. In the Mercado Benito Juárez nearby, stalls were stacked high with those cinnamon-scented hockey pucks. A dozen restaurants offered old-style moles. And, in any case, I had come to town with a secret weapon.

Weeks before, I had visited some old pals, Yvette Mimieux and Howard Ruby. Yvette, having retired from films, now roams the world from a home in Bel Air. Her French surname and tinkling all-American voice are misleading. She is half Mexican, and her beloved late mamacita was a killer cook. I started to explain my project, but she stopped me after the first few words. “Of course,” she said. “Estela Luna.”

When Estela first showed up in Los Angeles, she spoke no English. In fact, she had barely finished struggling her way to fluent Spanish. Her home was a Chinantec Indian village high in the mountains northwest of Oaxaca. You can drive there in an afternoon these days, but it used to take four days if you traveled on foot as she did.

By happy coincidence, Estela was on vacation from her job as Yvette’s housekeeper. She was headed for the mountain, and we overlapped in Oaxaca. Estela was with her daughter, Minerva, trendy at twenty-one, a university student with a bent toward foreign affairs. Minerva walked hand in hand with her mother as a dutiful Mexican daughter does.

Estela has that Oaxacan ability to keep one foot in two separate centuries. She is ready for anything a space-age world tosses at her, but her roots go deep into traditions that date back long before Columbus. After Puebla, I was nervous about what I would find in Oaxaca. I should have had faith in its Estela-style character.

“We love our old ways, and we take care of them,” she told me as we threaded our way through the jammed markets. As our theme was chocolate, she carefully pointed out its various manifestations: huge clay jars of ancient potions that blended cacao with cornmeal and pungent local herbs.

“At the same time, we have to live in the world as it is,” Estela continued, while shaking her head vigorously to a woman offering deep-fried grasshoppers spiced with chili, on which she correctly guessed I would pass. “I’ve always told my children, if you want something, you go after it. If you sit and wait for a dream to come true, it never will.”

As if on cue, her twenty-four-year-old son, Carlos, showed up. Handsome and athletic, he spoke in the gentle, almost grave manner of his mother. Like her, he punctuated his tone with flashes of humor. He wanted to enter government, hopeful of finding ways to improve life for poor families. When he said his eventual ambition was to be president of Mexico, I was ready to put money on his chances.

Mexico had to modernize, Carlos said, but not at the expense of giving up what made it Mexico.

“I hate to see us losing our traditions,” he explained. “We’re letting go of things we’ve built up over the centuries. It’s the influence of television, travel, of people who come back from the United States and open pizzerias. Old ways inevitably fly off into oblivion when the world turns too fast.”

Mexico’s problems, he said, come from big talk and unbridled greed. Leaders seldom do what they promise and too often amass riches at the public’s expense.

“Real wealth is helping others,” Carlos said. “I don’t want to get caught up in all this fancy Mexican talk about unrealistic goals. Mostly, I want my neighbors and my friends to do better than I do.”

Glancing at Estela, he added a final thought. “You know, if someone offered me the choice of a million dollars or the best mother in the world, I’d take the money. I already have the best mother.”

Feeling grateful to Yvette and good fortune, I followed the Lunas on our objective of finding good Oaxacan chocolate. We started with a good look around.

Until 1976, Oaxaca was headed the way of Puebla; old buildings were razed in the small historic center. Only poverty deterred developers from erecting some monstrosity in the heart of town. Then city fathers, dogged by alarmed local residents, passed strict codes to protect the singular style of the town’s colonial architecture. Fuming, honking traffic still chokes narrow downtown streets by the old markets. But Oaxaca has been saved.

Oaxacans and foreigners who love the place have made it better than ever. Today, you can visit an Internet café to probe far reaches of the twenty-first century. Then a Zapotec woman seated outside on the cobblestones will sell you a cup of nicuatole, the same foaming corn elixir her ancestors drank long before Columbus learned to sail.

Low-rise colonial buildings in green-hued stone, with iron grillwork and vibrantly painted shutters, line the recobbled old streets. Markets overflow with luscious fruits and fiery chilies. Churches recall the pious grandeur of Spain’s early missionaries. And at the center, the leafy zocalo thrums with life, a swirl of music and color scented with roasting fiesta food.

Heavy carved doors lead to hotel courtyards ablaze in tropical bloom. Water murmurs in tiled fountains. From one cantina, a Mexican voice from the past wailed about dying for love to the backdrop of tortured guitars. From another, a young woman jazz singer from Los Angeles belted out a more upbeat message.

Funky old shops displayed mounds of hand-hewn hardware or bundles of herbs meant to ward off any malady short of massive heart failure. Others offered high-tech and high-fashion goods in a laid-back manner that suggested they had been in business for two hundred years.

Coming back after so long, I found the party in full swing, with happy new notes to the old beat. The seventy-piece Oaxaca state orchestra, still up on the wrought-iron bandstand where it has played for 134 years, blasted brassy Rossini across the zocalo. I sat next to a dour Mixtecan Indian in homespun and a straw cowboy hat. His substantial wife, wrapped in a woven huipil of many colors, smiled indulgently at passing tourists who wore considerably less.

And, smack in the center of it all, those spiced chocolate smells wafted from the corner of Mina and Casas.

 

 

At Chocolate Guelaguetza, I found León Pedro Cortés Zacarias grinding chocolate exactly as he had for most of four decades. At sixty-eight, he was theoretically retired. But he was reluctant to give up the heady aroma of warm fresh chocolate oozing from the old metal mills. Cortés had a bristly gray mustache and wrinkles around his eyes that suggested years of good humor.

“No, this is how we’ve always done it,” he replied when I asked if the process had changed over the decades. He seemed amused by the question. “If people like it this way, why do anything different?” Except for electricity, which powered the rubber belt that turned old stones inside in the mill, not much had changed since his ancestors made chocolate for the Mixtecan contemporaries of Montezuma.

Seven mills stood in a row like old-style job printing presses. They would probably do fine with corn, for which they were designed, but cacao came out as coarse as the granular sugar that went in with it.

The process is simple. A miller dumps everything into a metal hopper at the top of the ungainly apparatus. After a brief bit of noise, dark brown chocolate softened with its own cocoa butter oozes out the bottom onto a short semicircular chute and slides into a tin pan. That’s it.

Most customers tell the miller how much sugar and cinnamon to put into the mix. Some people also ask for vanilla. The standard order is two and a half kilos of sugar for a kilo of cacao beans. Those who prefer their chocolate “semi-bitter” cut the sugar down to two kilos.

As Cortés explained the proportions, I thought briefly of the French chocolate purists who insist that 5 percent sugar is heading too far into sweetness. I asked for only a kilo and a half of sugar with my kilo of cacao. It still came out cloyingly sweet, coarse enough to sand a plank.

People usually pay a handful of pesos per kilo and walk away with brown sludge in a transparent plastic bag. For deluxe service, they can wait half an hour for their chocolate to be molded into those pucks I saw in Puebla. Hardly anyone eats the chocolate. Instead, it is dissolved, spun rapidly with water or milk in a clay pitcher, a jarro chocolatero.

Oaxaca has at least 150 small mills to choose from, but none is like Chocolate Mayordomo. Like all the others, it started as a shop-front family operation. But it expanded rapidly into a local empire that ships its products north across the border and beyond. It is the obsession of Francisco Flores Concha, a silver-tongued swashbuckler straight out of an old Pancho Villa movie.

We found Flores’s secretary in a cubbyhole office, which rented its computers to passersby in search of Internet access. In the time it took the secretary to track down her boss, Minerva checked her e-mail and launched her mother into the brave new world of the Web.

The secretary fixed a 3:30 p.m. meeting for the next day. That left Estela and me time for a quick two-hour lunch beforehand. We showed up at the main shop as instructed, but no one knew where Flores was. He would turn up eventually, we were assured. An hour later, the manager bundled us into a taxi. Flores and his wife were awaiting us for lunch at a restaurant across town.

If these scrambled plans bothered Flores, he did not let on. This was Mexico. We settled in for a second meal that turned into a four-hour, mezcal-lubricated discourse on the glories of Oaxacan chocolate.

My notes grew steadily less legible as the meal went on, but most of what I remember was flamboyant flimflam. Mexico’s army is great, Flores explained, because it has so many Oaxacan soldiers whose diet is corn and chocolate. Mexican cacao is superior to any other because of its pure origins. Chocolate cures cancer. Europeans, and most especially the French, are mad for his Mayordomo chocolate.

“Oaxaca is really the center of chocolate in Mexico, and our moles are much richer than the ones in Puebla,” he said. “What kills us is the distance. Puebla is closer to Mexico City, so it got all the attention.”

Warming to the subject, Flores offered a popular verse, playing on the way Mexican chocolate is ground on a metate and stirred with a stick spun between open hands:

So holy is chocolate,
That you make it on your knees;
You mix it with palms together
And you drink it looking at heaven.

Flores had worked for a small chocolate maker until 1990. Going off on his own, he opened Mayordomo as a small shop, like all the others, and then built it into an empire. He has ten outlets in Oaxaca and elsewhere in Mexico, with others in Los Angeles and Chicago. His factory at the edge of town turns out six tons of chocolate a day, working two twelve-hour shifts. At each store, employees in brown baseball caps and yellow shirts scurry around to serve the Mexican regulars and enthusiastic tourists who throng the counter.

At his favorite hangout, the store on the corner of Mina and Casas, I watched Flores enthrall a crowd of first-graders on a school outing. Each left with a chocolate-smeared smile. Unlike Oaxaca’s other no-frills chocolate mills, the place is decorated with cacao pods hanging in nets and a mural in vivid colors showing Indians harvesting a stylized tree with a symbolic snake coiled at its roots.

Mostly, I wanted to see the factory, and this would not be easy. No way, Americans who did business with Flores had warned me. I’d have a better chance penetrating Mexico’s intelligence headquarters.

Flores never said no. It just did not happen. But one night I caught him in an ebullient mood. It was the company’s anniversary, and he had brought cake—chocolate, in fact—for the staff at Mina and Casas. At one point, he threw an arm around me and announced, “This man has come all the way from France just to see Mayordomo.” Soon after, he introduced me to an aide, who told me to come to the shop the next morning at 8:30.

When I appeared on time, my friends of the prior evening shrugged noncommittally. The appointed guide had come and gone some time ago. Maybe he would be back. Then again, maybe not. Flores showed up at 11 a.m. and found me still there, my usual sunny smile fast fading to a glower. Fifteen minutes later, I was at the gates.

If the Mayordomo factory held some secret mystery, I didn’t find it. Luis Hera, the manager, met me with some wariness. But soon his good humor and professional pride kicked in. We followed his beans, in bags from Tabasco and Chiapas, along conveyor belts to the roaster and then into huge grinders. Essentially, it was a king-size version of all those little mills in downtown Oaxaca.

Hera’s plant was clean and efficient. He led me upstairs to his stocks of mole makings—bundled chilies, sacks of nuts and seeds, and all the rest. The final product, packed in glass jars, was surprisingly good for factory-made mole.

On the way out, I found a surprise. Tucked among the grinders and ovens, a conching machine paddled molten chocolate slowly back and forth. The process takes days. It breaks down particles and releases harsh flavor elements, producing a smooth texture for fine confection. I had been told no one in Mexico conched chocolate.

“This is our special stuff,” Hera said, happy that I had noticed it. “We make it with vanilla.” He handed me the finished product, a flat yellow box wrapped in cellophane. It read, “Mayordomo Chocolate, the sweet gold of Oaxaca.”

Later, I tasted it. The chocolate was smoother than the rest. If it would not sand a plank, however, it would certainly buff a fingernail. Because of all the granulated sugar, it crumbled when I bit into it. Conched or not, this chocolate was for whipping into a frothy drink. And that was oddly comforting. In a place that revered its old ways, not much had changed over five centuries. Even if Montezuma might have preferred hot pepper to all that sweetness, he would have felt right at home.

 

 

Chocolate runs so deep into the roots of Mexico that its role today seems impossible to define. For help, I turned to Laura Esquivel, whose book Like Water for Chocolate captured the elusive Mexican spirit. The novel is not really about chocolate. It is the story of a young woman, the daughter designated to care for her parents and siblings while her sisters find husbands to marry. At her stove, simmering under surface cheer, she plots revenge built on her culinary craft.

When I finally reached the author by telephone, after tracking her without success across two countries, I asked why she had chosen her title.

“It’s a very old expression, I think from colonial times, for when someone is so angry that they are about to boil over but are still contained,” she said. “This is how you heat water for chocolate. It bubbles at the edges.”

That summed up Mexico neatly enough. As a final step, I decided to find a modern yet traditional kitchen to see how the old chocolate roots were weathering the twenty-first century. This, of course, was another challenge. I was after precise recipes. And when it comes to preparing complex dishes by the numbers, about the last person to talk to about Mexican cooking is a Mexican cook. But then I found Iliana de la Vega.

Iliana owns El Naranjo restaurant in the heart of Oaxaca. The name means “orange tree,” and, with potted citruses in a glassed-in courtyard, tables are set in a pleasant orangerie. The draw is not decor, however, but Iliana’s style of cooking.

“I am very Mexican, and I love my country,” she said. “I’m not about to do anything radical, like putting red wine in mole. But I want to do my own thing, which is not everything exactly as my mother did. People here are afraid of evolution. You can improve recipes as long as you are respectful of the basics. If you talk to me about authenticity, I don’t know what you mean. If you say tradition, then I’m with you.”

When she makes chiles rellenos, for instance, Iliana sneaks in hints of sweetness and fire, experimenting with different flavors she finds in the markets. Some diehard Oaxacans cry heresy. But it is wise to reserve a table early in high season.

Iliana bans lard from her kitchen, preferring instead to use a neutral vegetable oil. Even an admirer such as Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef whom many Americans regard as the arbiter of gringo-friendly Mexican cooking, fights her on this point. But there is something comforting here. Wherever you stand on the question, lard or no lard is not a bad controversy in a world that faces larger issues.

One morning I joined Iliana’s cooking class; it was mole coloradito day. Smoky Oaxacan-style pasilla chilies set the tone. But, just as in Puebla, one ingredient quickly followed another and lost itself in a complex and balanced blend. At the end, a dash of chocolate brought it all alive, adding a touch of sweetness and a sharp whiff of honest Mexican roots.

Back in France, I tried to duplicate the blend and gave up with a frustration I found oddly reassuring. Some things aren’t meant to be duplicated or transplanted. I had the recipe down pat. But the trick was in fine touches, such as wild avocado leaves that grow in the Oaxaca valley. That, and a thousand years of practice.