Champurrado de Coco Costeño

This is from the Costa Chica, the band of Pacific coast that runs from below Acapulco through Guerrero and into Oaxaca. This is Afro-Mexican country. Cuajinicuilapa, Ometepec, San Marcos, towns where the people descend from Africans enslaved and brought to this coast in the colonial period, and where the kitchen still carries that history in every pot.

Champurrado is a chocolate atole: corn masa and cacao cooked until it is thick enough to coat a spoon. Central Mexico builds it on water or milk. The Costa Chica builds it on coconut. The palms grow right down to the sand here, so the cooks reach for what the coast gives them. Coconut milk instead of dairy. That one change is the whole dish, and it tastes like nowhere else in the country.

The masa goes into cool water and through a strainer before it ever meets heat. Lumps are the mark of a careless cook, and once they cook in there is no whisking them out. You raise the foam with a molinillo, the carved wooden whip you spin between your palms, not because it is charming but because it froths the chocolate and keeps the masa moving so it does not scorch on the bottom. No me vengas con atajos. A blender does not do what a molinillo does.

Know what this is and what it is not. This is champurrado: warm, thick, masa and cacao. It is not chilate, the cold cacao-and-rice drink this same coast grinds on the metate and serves with buñuelos at its festivals. Two drinks, one region, nothing alike. I learned this version from a woman in Cuajinicuilapa who grated the coconut by hand over a clay bowl and laughed when I asked whether canned would do. Cada estado, su propia cocina.