Agua de Jamaica Oaxaqueña

This is Oaxacan jamaica. Yes, jamaica is drunk across all 32 states. But in Oaxaca it sits on the table at every comedor, every market fonda, every family meal alongside mezcal and tortillas hechas a mano, and the version they make there is not interchangeable with the one you find in Mexico City or Monterrey. The Oaxacan version is steeped with piloncillo, not white sugar. With a stick of canela and a strip of orange peel. The result is darker, rounder, more complicated than the bright simple version you might be used to.

The jamaica itself comes mostly from Guerrero and the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, where it is grown in small plots and dried in the sun on petates. When you walk through the Mercado Benito Juarez or the Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca City, the jamaica vendors have piles of it, deep wine-colored and slightly sticky, smelling like cranberry and rose. That is what you want. Not the dusty bagged kind that has been sitting on a shelf for two years.

My mother kept jamaica on hand year-round. She made it the Jalisciense way, with white sugar, cleaner and brighter. The first time I drank the Oaxacan version, in a comedor in Teotitlan del Valle in my second year of traveling, the senora who served it watched my face when I tasted it and said, only here we use piloncillo. That was the whole lesson. Cada estado, su propia cocina. I went home and rewrote my recipe. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.