Puebla

Talavera tiles, tacos árabes—and mole mania.

by Patricia Sharpe

October 2002

The kitchen of the Ex-Convento de Santa Rosa, where mole poblano was invented.

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LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT Puebla, a city obsessed with a sauce. You think Naples is nuts about tomato sauce? That Paris is passionate about beurre blanc? You haven't seen anything until you've seen how they carry on about mole poblano in Puebla. Ever since the exotic chile-and-chocolate sauce was invented there in the seventeenth century, the city has been the epicenter of mole mania.

This summer a friend and I spent a week in the city and witnessed the phenomenon for ourselves. Every other restaurant had a sign in the window advertising chicken in mole ("mo-lay"). The chef of a popular hotel dining room told us he sells a thousand orders a month. At a neighborhood food market, alongside the freshly plucked chickens and buckets of flowers, I saw stack after stack of small plastic tubs of mole made by the wives and mothers of vendors; brimming bowls were set out so you could stick your finger in and taste. The local yellow pages list seven mole manufacturers, and a mole cookoff is held every June. Everyone has an opinion about whether you should use peanuts or almonds and if it's better to toast or fry the chiles. Quirky family recipes are treasured heirlooms: One woman told me that her mother always included six crumbled-up vanilla cookies; another said her mother insisted on two charred corn tortillas, for a smoky flavor.

What's so great about mole? It's hard to explain because, to Americans, the crucial combination of chiles and chocolate sounds bizarre. Mole is basically an Aztec chile sauce accented with Spanish spices and ground nuts. The name, from the Nahuatl molli, means a "concoction" or "mixture." The Spanish word poblano means "Puebla-style." Generally, when it comes to mole, people either love it or hate it. Me, I loved it the first time I tasted it, more than thirty years ago on a trip to Monterrey. The aromas of coriander and cinnamon and toasted sesame seeds wafted up from the plate. The first mouthful was tropical—plantains, raisins, and almonds—followed by a tingle of warmth from the chiles. Underneath it all was the seductive sweetness of the chocolate. Spicy, sweet, and sultry, mole seemed to me like all of Mexico condensed into one dish. Ever since then I've been on a quest to taste as many versions as I can. In Puebla, I thought, I might even find the perfect mole poblano.

My companion on this journey was my friend and fellow food fanatic Gini Garcia, of San Antonio. This past July the two of us met at the Mexico City airport to complete the final leg of our journey to Puebla, about eighty miles southeast. After a 25-minute plane ride, we took a cab into town and checked into the Holiday Inn, a modern hotel in a historic building with an austere and semicavernous, castlelike lobby.

VIPS, a bustling chain restaurant, bookstore, and drugstore, wasn't the most auspicious place to start sampling mole, but it was just down the street and we were famished. Surprise, surprise: VIPS's mole wasn't bad. The sauce was lighter in color than some, brick-red rather than brown, and very peanutty. We approved. We finished our dinner and took a stroll around the zócalo—the big, immaculately swept town square—to enjoy the scene and the weather, a perfect 70 degrees. Businesspeople with briefcases walked briskly by and young mothers bought balloons for their children. Puebla is a beautiful and dignified city, filled with Spanish Colonial buildings covered in colorful tiles, many arranged to form bold stripes and zigzags. It is also an old city, dating from 1531, and a big one, with some 2.5 million people in the metropolitan area. Above the palms and other tall trees sheltering the zócalo we could see the towers of the nearby cathedral.

The next day we met Mónica Mastretta, a local caterer and cooking teacher who works with tour groups, for lunch at the casual, open-air dining room of the rather grand Hotel Royalty. She said its mole was among the best in the city, and she was right. Dark and chocolaty, it had a strong allspice flavor and a delayed chile kick. The chef, a descendant of the hotel's founder and now a co-owner himself, told us that the original recipe was his grandmother's and the hotel has used it, almost unchanged, for 45 years. Could I have already found my perfect mole? Maybe. It is so popular that the Royalty has a nice sideline selling it in jars to go.

After lunch the irrepressible Mónica took us on a whirlwind culinary tour of downtown Puebla. She was wearing high heels and we were in sandals, but it was all we could do to keep up. We turned down several streets and finally came to a tiny cafe with bright plaid tablecloths. Although we hadn't intended to eat again, we found ourselves sitting down at Pepe Grillo, ordering enchiladas in mole. Rather light in color, a little granular, with lots of sesame flavor, the sauce had an appealing homemade quality. Afterward, Mónica dragged us a few blocks farther to Fonda de Santa Clara, a pleasant if touristy spot that is the city's most famous mole outpost. Gini and I were way too full to sample another drop of mole, but that night we went back for dinner. Santa Clara's mole lost points with us because it was served lukewarm, but otherwise it was good—rich, chocolaty, not too sweet.

We had breakfast the next morning with Ana Elena Martínez, also a caterer and tour guide, who filled us in on more of the city's locally famous foods. Agreeing to meet her later for lunch, Gini and I took off for her first recommendation, Nevados Hermilo, a humble cafe with Formica-topped tables, to try the odd little cocktails called nevados, served on the rocks in small glasses. Our dour waitress wouldn't reveal the recipe, but they seemed to be made with rompope (rum-spiked Mexican eggnog) and various liqueurs and flavorings. "Hey, breakfast of champions," said Gini as we toasted each other with a couple of Pingüinos (kicked up a notch with Kahlúa) at ten in the morning. Feeling no pain, we walked over to the local candy street, Seis Oriente (the section of the street just east of Cinco de Mayo), where we found a dozen or so shops selling gaudy sweets like squishy camotes (made from yams) displayed in cases buzzing with deliriously happy bees. Then we raced six blocks over to La Pequeñita, one of four tidy permanent food stands by a parking garage, to try molotes, freshly deep-fried and irresistible turnovers made of corn tortillas that had been folded over and crimped around various fillings. I avoided the meat fillings but felt that the requesón, a ricotta-type cheese, and slivers of jalapeño were safe.

By now it was time to hook up with Ana Elena again for two lunches. The first was at Mi Ciudad, a rollicking restaurant with terrace seating, fine mole (mild, medium-sweet, strong taste of peanuts and cinnamon), and a whole range of local specialties, including chanclas (stuffed sandwiches that tasted like Mexican sloppy joes). No sooner had we finished than we headed out for lunch number two (you thought it was a breeze being a food writer, didn't you?), at La Tecla, a chichi place with a subdued brown-and-gray color scheme and a modern fusion menu. Its far-out combo of very sweet, caramel-colored mole sauce over fettuccine, liberally sprinkled with Parmesan, was strange but it grew on me. Dinner that night was at La Cueva del Zorro, a fifteen-minute cab ride from downtown, where Gini and I knocked back some tequila and shared a molcajete, a Mexican lava-stone mortar, filled with sizzling strips of arrachera (the local name for fajita meat) plus grilled nopalitos (cactus pads), onion, and chorizo and melted white cheese. It was fantastic.

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