Escamoles a la Mantequilla en Tacos

Escamoles belong to the Altiplano. To Hidalgo, to Tlaxcala, to the eastern reach of the Estado de Mexico where the maguey grows in long disciplined rows and the recolectores walk the fields at dawn during the short spring season. This is not a dish from a coast or a jungle. This is a dish of dry highland fields, of agave roots, and of a harvest that goes back centuries before any Spaniard set foot on this continent.

The escamoles are the larvae and pupae of the Liometopum apiculatum ant, which nests in the roots of the maguey and the nopal. They are the color of soft cream and the size of a grain of rice. They taste of butter and toasted corn and something faintly nutty that has no equivalent anywhere else on the planet. They are called caviar mexicano because the comparison earns itself, not because someone borrowed the word for marketing. A kilo costs what a kilo of good beef costs in Mexico City, and that is in season. Out of season, double.

This is the most traditional preparation. Butter, a little lard, onion, garlic, serrano, epazote. Nothing else. The escamoles do not need help. They need a cook who knows when to take the pan off the heat. Cook them three minutes too long and you have ruined a hundred-dollar ingredient. Cook them right and you understand why the Mexica served them to Moctezuma. I have eaten escamoles a dozen ways in the markets of Pachuca and Apizaco, fried with nopal, scrambled with egg, folded into mixiotes, but a la mantequilla is the version that lets you taste what the ant actually gave you.

My mother never cooked escamoles. They were not part of the Jalisco kitchen she brought with her. The first time I tasted them was in a small comedor in Actopan, Hidalgo, in 1998. The senora who served them watched me take the first bite and said, you are eating something nobody on the coast can buy. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and saber comer is part of the same lesson.