Aguardiente Curado de Damiana de Tlaxiaco

This is from Tlaxiaco. The Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, eight hours by road from the capital, sitting in the cold mountains where the women still wrap themselves in wool rebozos and where the Sunday tianguis spreads across half the town. The damiana grows wild on the dry hillsides above the valley. People here have been steeping it in cane aguardiente for as long as anyone remembers.

A curado is not a cocktail. There is no shaker, no ice, no mixology. A curado is a household preparation, a bottle that lives in a cupboard for two months while the alcohol pulls the oils out of the leaves and the piloncillo waits its turn. Every Mixteca household I have visited has its own version. Some add anise. Some add a few hojas de naranjo. Some add a piece of cocoa. The constants are the aguardiente, the damiana, and the patience. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo, and that goes for what you drink as much as what you eat.

The damiana matters. It is sold across Mexico as an aphrodisiac, packaged as a tea in Baja, bottled into commercial liqueurs in Guadalajara, but the leaves that grow in the Mixteca have a sharper, more resinous quality that the commercial stuff does not match. If you can find Oaxacan damiana from an herbolaria, use it. If not, the Baja kind will work, but you are making a cousin of this drink, not the drink itself. A substitution is a compromise, not an upgrade.

My mother did not make curados. She was from Jalisco and the Jalisciense way is tequila, served direct, with sangrita on the side. But I learned this preparation from a senora named Dona Rufina in a small kitchen on the edge of Tlaxiaco, who poured me a copita at eleven in the morning and told me that a proper curado is what gets a Mixteco family through a wedding, a funeral, and a long winter. Saber cocinar es saber vivir. That includes knowing what to pour at the end of the night.