Travel Tales

Holy Mole (Poblano)!

Sunday is a bad day to be single in México. Apart from attending church, Sunday is more specifically the day for spending time with your sweetheart. There’s not a free park bench to be found in the zocalo. Pairs are dressed in their Sunday best, hands entwined, heads resting on shoulders. The balloon hawkers are followed by floating clouds of heart-shaped foil which read ‘Te amo’. There’s even a mariachi trio for hire and as I walk past in search of lunch, the guitarist puffs out his chest, silver buttons gleaming, and strums some opening chords.
The old town is a maze of terracotta, mint green and cobalt blue walls with wrought iron balconies and thousands and thousands of ceramic painted tiles. I’ve come to the city of angels, Puebla, with 1, 000 pesos in my pocket – 1,000 Philippino pesos (note to self: do not change money during stopover when half asleep) and not one of those notes is going to get me very far with the abuelita (grandma) behind the counter in the taquería. In order to avoid Montezuma’s Revenge, I’ve been told that when choosing a restaurant in México, the more wrinkled the abuelita, the better the food!
This particular abuelita has her grey hair tied back in a bun and an apron powdered with white. She wedges me between a young guy whose earphones hiss with techno anthems and a family whose small sons are filled with beans, I strongly suspect Mexican jumping beans.
Wrinkled hands knotted with arthritis, put down a plate of chicken swimming in thick brown sauce – mole poblano. México’s national dish was created by nuns living in Puebla hundreds of years ago and the people here are fiercely proud of this heritage. This is my first meal alone in México and after watching the other patrons I follow their lead, taking several lime wedges from the communal bowl and squeezing liberally over the rich sauce. It tastes sweet and sour – a heady mix of chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, chillies, nuts, tomato or maybe tomatillo? It’s rich and runny and warms your lips to a tingle.
The plastic taquería table top is bright orange, there’s a psychedelic picture of Mexico’s patron saint Guadalupe adorning one of the walls and the television in the corner is blaring with the melodrama of a telenovela. Despite this, eating that plate of mole poblano feels like one of the most spiritual rituals I’ve ever experienced, almost holy, and as I mop up my mole with a paper thin flour tortilla the cathedral bells start to ring, signalling the conclusion of Mass.