Frijoles con Chepil

This is Oaxaca. Specifically the Valles Centrales and the Sierra Sur, where chepil grows wild along the edges of the milpas and women gather it in the rainy season the way other people gather mushrooms. Chepil, Crotalaria longirostrata, is a small-leafed legume herb with a flavor that is hard to describe to anyone who has not eaten it. Salty without salt. Faintly grassy. A little like raw green beans, a little like fresh peas, a little like nothing else.

Frijoles con chepil is the dish that Oaxaca eats when it wants to eat itself. The beans are frijol negro, slow-simmered in a clay olla with onion, garlic, and lard, no soaking, no shortcuts, until the broth turns nearly black and tastes like the bean itself. Then the chepil goes in at the end and changes everything. The pot smells like the milpa after a rain.

My mother did not cook this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does not have chepil. I learned this dish from a senora named dona Florencia in Zaachila, in the market on a Thursday, who let me sit on a plastic stool while she stemmed the leaves and explained why you never put chepil in until the very end. Boil it long and the flavor flattens. She said it like she was warning me about something more important than beans. No me vengas con atajos. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Oaxaca.