Chiles en Nogada

This is Puebla's dish. Not Mexico's. Puebla's. Every August, when the nuez de Castilla comes down from the orchards of San Juan Calpan and the pomegranates ripen in the fields outside the city, the cooks of Puebla begin making chiles en nogada and they do not stop until the end of September. After that, the dish disappears for another year. The ingredients dictate the calendar, not the cook.

The nogada must be made with fresh walnuts, nueces de Castilla, peeled by hand one at a time so the bitter brown skin does not stain the sauce. It takes an hour. If that sounds like too much work, this is not your dish yet. Come back next August when you are ready. The picadillo is where the cook shows what she knows: pork and beef, yes, but also pear, peach, plantain, apple, almonds, pine nuts, raisins, acitron. Sweet and savory in the same bite, the baroque imagination of colonial Puebla on a plate.

My mother never made this dish. She was from Jalisco and she would not have pretended Puebla was hers. But the first time I made chiles en nogada was in a kitchen in Cholula, under the eye of Doña Carmen, who was eighty-three years old and had been making the dish since she was twelve. She watched me peel the walnuts and she said nothing. When I poured the sauce over the chile and added the pomegranate, she nodded once and said, "Ya sabe." That was the whole compliment. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo, and chiles en nogada is the proof.