Chintextle Oaxaqueño

Chintextle is from the Sierra Mixe and Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. The Mixe people, the Ayuujk, called themselves the people who were never conquered, and their food carries the same stubbornness. Chintextle is the chile paste they made to travel: dense, smoky, salty, shelf-stable, a meal in a spoonful when there was nothing else.

The whole dish hinges on one ingredient: chile pasilla oaxaqueño, also called pasilla mixe. Do not confuse it with the pasilla you find in most US markets. That chile is the dried form of the chilaca, grown in central Mexico, sweet and dark and not smoked. The pasilla oaxaqueño is something else entirely, a chile that grows in the cloud forests of the Sierra Norte and is dried slowly over wood fires until the skin wrinkles and the smoke goes all the way to the seed. If your vendor does not know the difference, find another vendor. Si no conoces el mercado, no conoces la cocina.

The rest of the paste is what the Sierra had on hand: camarón seco traded up from the Pacific coast, garlic, sea salt, and the leaves of the criollo avocado tree, which give chintextle its quiet anise undertone. All of it ground on the metate, all of it bound with manteca de cerdo, all of it stored in a clay pot where it kept for weeks while the trader walked the mountains.

My mother did not make chintextle. She was from Jalisco. I learned it from a senora named Doña Eufrosina at the Sunday tianguis in Tlahuitoltepec, who watched me grind the first batch and shook her head and took the metate away from me. "Más despacio, más fuerte." Slower, harder. She regraded the whole batch. When I tasted it I understood that the metate is not a tool, it is a teacher. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.