Caldo de Xoconostle Hidalguense

This caldo is from Hidalgo. The state of the Altiplano, of Pachuca and Real del Monte, of mining towns at high altitude where the cold gets into your bones and a thin soup will not save you. The caldo de xoconostle exists because the women of the Valle del Mezquital needed a broth that could feed a working family and pull a sick child back to the table. So they built one out of what the land gave them: chambarete from the rancho, garbanzo from the milpa, and xoconostle from the nopal.

The xoconostle is the ingredient that makes this dish Hidalguense and not anything else. It is the sour prickly pear fruit, smaller and firmer than the sweet tuna you eat with chile and lime in the summer. The flesh is acidic, almost lemony, with a clean bite that cuts through beef fat the way nothing else does. Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, the whole Altiplano cooks with xoconostle, but Hidalgo claims this caldo with a particular pride. If your mercado does not stock it, drive to one that does, or wait until you find it. No me vengas con atajos.

My mother did not make this caldo. She was jalisciense and her caldos came from a different tradition. I learned this one from a senora named Dona Cleotilde who sold barbacoa at the market in Actopan twenty years ago. She wrote out the recipe for me on a piece of butcher paper and underlined the word xoconostle three times. She told me: 'Si le quitas el xoconostle, ya no es caldo hidalguense, es otra cosa.' If you take out the xoconostle, it is not Hidalgo's caldo anymore, it is something else. She was right. Asi se hace y punto.