Chilate de la Costa Chica

Chilate is from the Costa Chica. That strip of Pacific coast that runs from Oaxaca into Guerrero, where the Afro-Mexican communities of Pinotepa Nacional, Cuajinicuilapa, and Jamiltepec have lived and cooked for four centuries. This drink does not belong to the rest of Mexico. It belongs to them.

The word chilate comes from the Nahuatl chilatl, meaning chile water, but the version made on the Costa Chica is something else entirely: cold, dark, frothy, sweet with piloncillo, built on toasted cacao and rice and Mexican cinnamon. No chile. The name traveled and the recipe changed. What stayed is the technique of pouring the drink from a great height to froth it, and the jicara, the dried gourd cup that has held this drink at celebrations, funerals, and ordinary afternoons since long before there was a Mexico.

The cacao matters. You want whole beans, not powder, and you toast them yourself on a comal until the shells crackle off. The rice matters too. It has to be toasted, dry, until it smells nutty. Skip either of those steps and you have a sad brown drink that tastes of nothing in particular. Do them right and you have chilate, the cold cacao drink of the Afro-Mexican coast, the one that gets carried in tin buckets through the markets of Pinotepa Nacional on hot afternoons.

My mother never made this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does not know chilate. I learned it on the Costa Chica from a woman named dona Esperanza who runs a stall in the Pinotepa market and who frothed it from so high above her head that I thought she would spill it on the ground. She did not spill a drop. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and dona Esperanza knows both.