Atápakua de Cerdo y Hierbabuena (K'uiripita Puesïri)

Michoacán, in the Meseta P'urhépecha and the towns around Lake Pátzcuaro, is where atápakua lives. Not as a soup, not as a mole, not as a sauce you pour politely over something else. Atápakua is sauce and stew in the same cazuela, thickened with masa de maíz until it coats the spoon and holds the pork in place.

The chile here is guajillo, sometimes with a little ancho when the cook wants a deeper red. The thickener is fresh masa, not flour, not cornstarch, not a blender trick. The hierbabuena goes in at the end, because if you boil it until it turns tired and gray, you wasted the herb. No me vengas con atajos. The masa is the backbone of this dish.

I learned to respect atápakua from cocineras tradicionales in Michoacán, the women whose work carried the living evidence behind the UNESCO 2010 inscription of traditional Mexican cuisine. They do not cook from slogans. They cook from memory, from the milpa, from the cazuela, from the market, from what their mothers corrected in them. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the P'urhépecha table.