Guerrero Chicken Chilate Stew (Chilate de Pollo)

Guerrero's Costa Chica, especially Cuajinicuilapa, is where this chilate belongs. Not the cold cacao, rice, and cinnamon drink that shares the name in Guerrero. This is the savory chicken stew, red with guajillo and chile costeño, thickened with masa, carrying yuca, plátano macho, epazote, hoja santa, and chochoyotes in the same bowl.

Cuajinicuilapa sits in the Afro-Mexican corridor that runs through Costa Chica Guerrero and Costa Chica Oaxaca, with Chacahua and Pinotepa on the Oaxacan side, and with a different Atlantic branch in Veracruz Sotavento, Tlacotalpan and Los Tuxtlas. I name them because cooks have been erased from their own food too many times. The women who perfected these pots knew what the land and the water gave them: plantain, yuca, herbs, chile, corn masa, and the patient simmer that turns a bird into dinner for a whole table.

The technique is not complicated, but it is exact. Toast the chiles, soak them in hot water, blend them smooth, then fry the paste in manteca de cerdo before it touches the broth. The fat blooms the chile. The masa gives body. The epazote and hoja santa make the broth smell like Guerrero, not like a generic red soup. No canned broth, no powdered chile, no wheat flour. No me vengas con atajos.

Serve it in black-and-tan clay from Cuajinicuilapa or Pinotepa if you have it, over a petate with tortillas close by and a jícara at the table. Cada estado, su propia cocina. This is a 32-state cuisine, and the Afro-Mexican tercera raíz belongs in the record, not in the footnotes.