Chilorio para Untar de Mocorito

Chilorio is from Mocorito, Sinaloa. Not from anywhere else. Mocorito is a small pueblo magico in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, and chilorio is what they invented there in the 18th century when there was no refrigeration and a slaughtered pig had to last a family for weeks. The lard preserved the meat. The vinegar held off spoilage. The chile pasilla gave it a flavor worth waiting for. Three hundred years later, the recipe has not had to change.

The chile here is pasilla. Not ancho doing the heavy lifting, not guajillo. Pasilla is the chile that gives chilorio its color and its character: dark, slightly bitter, with the smell of raisins and dried tobacco. The ancho is there for body and a little sweetness, nothing more. If your market sells you a chile labeled pasilla that looks like a wide reddish ancho, you are in California and what you have is actually chile negro mislabeled. The Mexican pasilla is long, thin, wrinkled, and almost black. Get the right one or wait until you can.

This is a conserva, which means it was built to be made ahead. The pork is slow-cooked in its own lard until it surrenders, then shredded and fried into a chile paste sharp with vinegar until the whole thing tightens into something you can spread thick on a tostada. The senoras of Mocorito have been making it this way since their great-great-grandmothers were teaching their daughters. My mother had a jar of chilorio in the refrigerator most of the time, sent up from a friend in Los Mochis, and we ate it on flour tortillas for breakfast. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and saber conservar is the older sister of that same lesson.