Alegrías de Amaranto

This is a Oaxacan dulce. The version sold by women in front of the Templo de Santo Domingo and at the entrance of the Mercado Benito Juarez, wrapped in cellophane twisted at the ends, eaten standing up while the city moves around you. Alegrias travel across central Mexico, Tulyehualco in the Xochimilco area is famous for them, but the grain itself, amaranto, has its deepest roots in Oaxaca's pre-Columbian kitchen and the surrounding Mesoamerican highlands.

Amaranto is the sacred grain. The Mexica and the Zapotec used it in religious offerings centuries before the Spanish arrived, mixed with honey and sometimes with blood, pressed into figures of their gods. The conquistadores understood exactly what they were looking at and tried to ban the crop. They almost succeeded. Amaranto survived because rural cooks kept growing it in small plots and kept making the sweet. What you are making today is a 500-year act of cultural stubbornness pressed into a square.

The technique is simple and unforgiving. You pop the amaranto on a dry comal in tiny batches. Too much in the pan and it burns. You cook the piloncillo to soft ball stage. One degree too hot and the alegria is a brick. You press the warm mixture into a pan with the heel of your greased palm, hard, the way the senora at the Jardin Socrates pressed hers when she taught me, and you wait. No me vengas con atajos. There is nothing to shortcut here. The whole recipe is five ingredients and three decisions, and each decision is the recipe.

My mother had alegrias in her notebook with a single line beneath the recipe: 'la abuela las hacia para los Dias de Muertos.' Grandmother made them for the Days of the Dead. That is where they belong, on the ofrenda next to the pan de muerto and the calaveras de azucar, but they belong on a Tuesday afternoon too, with a glass of cold milk or a cup of cafe de olla. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.