Bu'pu del Istmo de Tehuantepec

Bu'pu is from Oaxaca. Specifically from the Istmo de Tehuantepec, the narrow waist of southern Mexico where Zapotec women run the markets, the kitchens, and the ceremonial life of every town from Juchitan to Tehuantepec to Salina Cruz. This is not a drink you will find in Mexico City cafes. It is a drink that belongs to weddings, to patron saint days, to the velas, to the moments when the community gathers and the women bring out the jicaras.

The word bu'pu means foam in Zapotec, and the foam is the entire point. You toast cacao on a comal until the shells crack. You peel each bean by hand. You toast the dried petals of cacalosuchitl, the white plumeria flower the Zapotec call guie' chaachi, until they release their perfume. You grind everything on a metate with soaked rice, canela, and sugar. Then, and this is what people get wrong, you beat it with cold water. Not hot. Cold. Bu'pu is served cool, foamed by hand with a molinillo until a thick crown of foam rises above the rim of the jicara. The drink underneath is almost an afterthought. The foam is the drink.

I spent two weeks in Juchitan during the velas of May, when the cacalosuchitl is in bloom and the trees in every patio are heavy with white flowers. The senoras let me sit with them while they prepared bu'pu for a wedding. They did not give me a recipe. They handed me a molinillo and told me to beat until my arm ached. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the Istmo's cocina belongs to the women who keep it alive.