Clemole Morelense

Clemole is from Morelos. The central highlands, the warm valleys around Cuautla and Yautepec and Tepoztlan where the chayote grows on the fence and the calabacita ripens on the vine and a cook puts both into a pot of toasted chile and calls it lunch. This is not a fancy mole. This is a guisado, the everyday cooking that feeds a family on a Tuesday.

The name comes from the Nahuatl. Tle-molli, fire-sauce, the same root that gives us mole. But where the moles of Puebla and Oaxaca are baroque compositions with thirty ingredients and two days of work, clemole is direct: guajillo, pasilla, ancho, tomato, a few spices, a toasted tortilla and a spoon of masa to give it body. The broth is thin. You ladle it into a clay cuenco and the vegetables sit in it like islands. The pork pulls apart with a spoon.

What makes it morelense, not just any chile stew, is the vegetable trinity: chayote, ejote, calabacita. All three grow in the state, all three are at their best from the local mercados, and all three are added to the pot in the correct order so each one is tender but not collapsed. The epazote at the end is non-negotiable. It belongs to this cuisine and there is no substitute.

My mother did not make clemole. She was from Jalisco and her chile stews were different. I learned this one in the mercado of Cuautla, from a señora named Doña Hermelinda who cooked it for the vendors every Wednesday in a clay cazuela the size of a wash basin. She told me: the broth should be thin, the chile should be deep, the vegetables should taste like vegetables. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Morelos. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.