Barbacoa de Texcoco

Barbacoa is from many places, but the barbacoa, the one that anchors Sunday breakfast across the Valle de Mexico, comes from Texcoco in the Estado de Mexico. Drive an hour east of Ciudad de Mexico on a Sunday morning and you will see the smoke rising from the roadside pits before you see the towns. The barbacoyeros open their pits at dawn. By eight in the morning the lines are forming. By noon the lamb is gone.

The technique is pre-Columbian. A pit dug into the earth, lined with hot stones, the lamb wrapped in maguey pencas, sealed with more pencas and a layer of dirt on top, left to cook for eight to twelve hours. The maguey is not a wrapper of convenience. The roasted agave leaf gives the meat the flavor that separates barbacoa from any other slow-cooked lamb on earth. And the consome below the meat, the broth thickened with garbanzos and rice and infused with the falling juices, is not a side dish. It is half the meal. If you serve the lamb without the consome you have not served barbacoa.

My mother was from Jalisco and we ate birria, not barbacoa, in our house. I learned this dish from Dona Catalina in Texcoco in 2008, a woman who had been running her family's pit for forty years and whose husband still dug the hole every Saturday afternoon. She let me sit through one full cycle, from the firing of the stones at five in the afternoon to the opening of the pit at six the next morning. She told me the secret is patience and the seal. Saber cocinar es saber vivir. This oven version is not the pit, but if you respect the maguey, the seal, and the overnight cook, you will taste what Dona Catalina taught me.