Chilate Costeño Afromestizo

This is from the Costa Chica, the stretch of coast where Guerrero meets Oaxaca, and it belongs to the Afro-Mexican towns strung along it: Cuajinicuilapa, Ometepec, Ayutla, San Marcos. Chilate is theirs. Not Mexico's idea of a chocolate drink. Theirs.

First, what it is not. Chilate is not champurrado. Champurrado is warm and thick, built on masa, drunk from a clay jarro when the cold comes. Chilate is the opposite. It is served ice-cold, it has no masa, and it is toasted cacao, soaked rice, and canela ground together and beaten into a foam thick enough to hold a spoon. Anyone who tells you the two are the same has never sat under a palapa in Cuajinicuilapa with a jícara of chilate sweating in their hand.

The foam is the whole point. On the Costa Chica the women pour the chilate from a height, jícara into jícara, over and over, until a pale cap builds and holds. The cacao and the rice do that together. Take out the rice and you lose the foam. No me vengas con atajos. This drink is ground on the metate, and I will defend that stone until I die. I will also tell you the truth about a blender further down, because I am practical.

I wrote this recipe down in Cuajinicuilapa, sitting with a woman who has made chilate for the church festivals her whole life. She grinds her cacao on the metate her grandmother ground on. She handed it to me ice-cold in a jícara with a plate of buñuelos, the way it has been served at celebrations on this coast for four hundred years. Saber cocinar es saber vivir. On the Costa Chica, knowing how to raise that foam is knowing something the rest of the country never bothered to learn.