Beq's Travels

Mole is not for everyone. A thick, creamy, rich paste covers the protein that lies beneath in impenetrable sumptuousness. On first bite you brace for the expected sweetness of, could it be chocolate? Do you see a bit of plantain? But it instead assaults your taste buds with an indiscernible number of spices and nuts, while its hotness creeps up towards the roof of your mouth, up your nose, across your tongue and down your throat, sending you reaching for that glass of water which, if you’re lucky, will be plucked away from your quivering hands by someone who knows what they’re doing as they hand you bread or a tortilla with salt to neutralize the burn. Once you've stopped sweating profusely, you turn to your table companion and just have to ask, “What is that?”

What that is, is food as a snapshot of the place you’re at, the people you’re with, and the history behind both.

We can’t speak of mole as a general uniform Mexican dish. Even though today you can buy a ready-made paste of mole and heat it up for a quick enchilada, properly made mole requires time and effort beyond your imagination. It takes a village.

Born from a culture where indigenous precolonial Mexicans gathered in the marketplace to exchange ingredients and prepare meals as a commune, later colonized by Spaniards who kept numerous servants in the kitchen to boast of their wealth and power, mole requires a variety of different tasks assigned to several people to prepare specialized items to be added to the communal pot, from the grinding of the spices to the roasting of the peppers, peeling the nuts, creating the stock, seasoning with herbs, all of it done in a precise order and allowing a stewing of several hours to extract the perfect flavor.

There is no one mole the way there just isn't a single curry. There are as many moles in Mexico as there are kitchens cooking it, and the recipes will vary with the geography and ingredients of each place as much as with the traditions and idiosyncrasies of whoever is preparing it. Even within the same family, you can expect cook-offs to prove which mole is better: dad’s or grandma’s, and it’s a serious competition with two distinctively different styles, flavors, and colors, of mole.

So, next time you order mole, whether it’s black, green, red or any other color, remember you are consuming a historic snapshot of the people and the place which surround it. Go ahead, ask the cook about it, and you will get the story of a lifetime.