Buñuelos Oaxaqueños con Miel de Piloncillo

This is an Oaxacan dish. Specifically a Christmas Eve dish, eaten on the cobblestones around the Zócalo and Jardín Sócrates after midnight Mass, when the puestos light up with vendors stretching dough thin over their knees and ladling hot piloncillo syrup over discs the size of a dinner plate.

There are buñuelos in many Mexican states. Aguascalientes makes them. Michoacan makes a different kind. The buñuelo oaxaqueño is its own animal: thin as parchment, the size of a wheel, served flat in a clay dish and drowned in miel de piloncillo. Not powdered sugar, not honey, not piloncillo dry on top. Miel. Warm syrup with canela, anise, orange peel, and sometimes guava simmered into it. The buñuelo soaks at the edges and stays brittle in the center. That contrast is the whole point.

The other thing that defines this version is what happens after you eat. In the Centro Histórico of Oaxaca de Juárez, you smash the empty clay plate on the cobblestones. Old plates from Atzompa are sold cheap for exactly this purpose during Navidad. The act is meant to break with the troubles of the year that is ending. I have done it. I have watched abuelas do it. The cobblestones around the cathedral on Christmas Eve are covered in red shards by morning.

My mother did not make Oaxacan buñuelos. She made buñuelos jalisciences, smaller and dusted with cinnamon sugar. The first time I had the Oaxacan version was on a December trip in 1998, sitting on a bench in Jardín Sócrates with a senora named Doña Lupe who ran a stall and let me write down what she did. She used anisado in the dough and guava in the syrup. The notebook entry from that night is one of my favorites. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.