Aguardiente Curado de Huajintepec

This is from the Costa Chica de Guerrero. From Huajintepec, in the municipio de Ometepec, where the pueblos negros, the Afro-Mexican towns strung along the coast, have kept this drink for four hundred years. Not Tex-Mex. Not a craft-bar trick with a clever name. A curado from the communities history tried to erase and the constitution finally recognized.

The spine of it is aguardiente de caña, the cane spirit that comes off the trapiche, the mill that presses and ferments and distills the sugarcane growing right outside town. Not rum. Aguardiente. Cousins, not twins. Into it goes jamaica, dried hibiscus the color of wine, and a cone of piloncillo for the dark sweetness that answers the flower's tartness. Then it sits. Two weeks, three, four. The color bleeds out of the flowers and stains the spirit garnet. That waiting is not a delay. It is the recipe. No me vengas con atajos.

I tasted this for the first time at a fandango in the Costa Chica. The music was chilena, somebody was dancing on the artesa, that carved wooden trough they beat with their heels like a drum, and a señora poured me a curado from a glass jar that had been sitting on her shelf since who knows when. Deep red. Sweet. Strong, with the funk of the cane underneath. Her mother made it the same way, and her mother before that. I wrote down what she told me, the proportions, the weeks of waiting, piloncillo and not sugar. Así se hace y punto.

You can make it with tamarindo when the pods come in, or with durazno when the peaches reach the highland markets in summer. But jamaica you can make any day of the year, and jamaica is the flower that crossed the ocean with the people who made this drink their own. Start there.