Enmoladas Oaxaqueñas con Mole Negro

This is Oaxaca's breakfast. Not the hotel buffet eggs with bottled salsa. The real one, the one that happens when yesterday's mole negro is sitting in a clay olla on the back of the stove and someone heats tortillas, tears some chicken, and folds the whole thing together before the chocolate de agua is ready.

Enmoladas are not enchiladas with a different name. Enchiladas are dipped in chile sauce. Enmoladas are dipped in mole. In Oaxaca, that means mole negro: chilhuacle negro, pasilla oaxaqueño, mulato, chocolate de metate, charred tortilla, plantain, bread, and enough spices to fill a stall at the Central de Abastos. You don't make mole negro for enmoladas. You make enmoladas because you have mole negro left from yesterday. The mole comes first. It always comes first.

I collected this version from a señora in Etla, in the Valles Centrales, who served me enmoladas at nine in the morning on a green-glazed Atzompa plate with a fried egg on top and a jícara of chocolate de agua frothed with a molinillo on the side. She told me the mole was from two days before. It was better for the wait. She passed each tortilla through asiento before dipping it in the mole, and the flavor of that dark rendered fat underneath the sauce was something I had never tasted in any other state. My mother's notebook had a page on enmoladas, but hers were from Jalisco, made with a simpler mole. When I tasted the Oaxacan version in that kitchen in Etla, I understood why this state claims mole the way Jalisco claims pozole. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

The egg on top is not optional. This is a breakfast dish, and in Oaxaca the fried egg sits right on the mole, the yolk running into the sauce when you cut into it, making the plate richer and messier and better. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.