Calabaza en Tacha

This is Oaxaca. Late October, the markets of the Centro Histórico and the streets around Jardín Sócrates pile high with calabaza de Castilla, the heavy orange-skinned pumpkin that becomes calabaza en tacha for Dia de Muertos. Other states make versions, Michoacan, Puebla, the Bajio, but Oaxaca claims this one because Oaxaca claims the ofrenda, and no Oaxacan ofrenda is complete without a wedge of calabaza glistening dark in its piloncillo bath, set on the altar for the dead to eat first.

The name tells you everything. Tacha was the copper pot at the old sugar haciendas where cane juice was reduced to thick dark syrup before it was poured into molds and set as piloncillo. Cooking the calabaza in that syrup, en tacha, was how rural Mexico used the last reduction of the season. The dish is a child of the sugarcane economy and the pre-Columbian squash. Two ingredients, two histories, one pot.

The technique is unforgiving in only one way: the calabaza must be calabaza de Castilla. Not butternut. Not American sugar pumpkin. The dense, slightly fibrous flesh of the Castilla holds its shape through two hours of simmering and absorbs the syrup without falling apart. If your mercado does not carry it during October and November, kabocha is the closest substitute. Anything softer turns to baby food.

My mother was from Jalisco and made calabaza en tacha differently, with less canela and no star anise. The notebook page is brown at the edges from being on the stove for forty years. The Oaxacan version I learned later, from a senora named Doña Lucha who sold dulces from a tray under the laurel trees in the zocalo. She told me: the calabaza is for the dead, but the syrup is for the living. You drink the leftover tacha with cold milk for breakfast. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.