Encacahuatado de Cerdo

Encacahuatado is from Hidalgo and Tlaxcala. The maguey country. The states people skip on their way somewhere else, and that is their loss, because the cooking there carries some of the most honest mole work in the country. This is not the baroque mole of Puebla. This is the weekday mole, the one a mother makes after the market on Tuesday, the one that feeds a family on a budget and never announces itself as fancy.

The sauce is built on cacahuates, peanuts, toasted with their skins on a dry comal until the kitchen smells like the brazier outside a mercado. Peanuts are pre-Columbian, native to the Americas, and Mexico has been cooking with them for centuries. The mistake outsiders make is treating this like a Thai peanut sauce. It is not. There is no soy, no ginger, no sweetness. There is chile guajillo for color and a clean fruit-and-tannin heat, chile ancho for sweetness and depth, canela and clove for a quiet warmth in the back of the mouth, and the char of comal-blackened tomato and onion holding the whole thing together. The skins on the peanuts matter. They give the sauce its earth color and a bitter edge that keeps the richness in check.

My mother did not cook this dish. It is not jalisciense. I learned it from a senora named Doña Tomasa in Tulancingo, Hidalgo, who fed me a bowl of it from a clay cazuela on a Tuesday in 2014 and watched me eat the whole thing without saying a word. When I asked her for the recipe she handed me a peeled garlic clove and pointed at her comal. That was the lesson. You stand at the comal. You toast. You char. You blend, you strain, you fry the sauce in lard until it darkens. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the maguey country. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.