Gusanos de Maguey Fritos con Guacamole

This dish belongs to the altiplano. To Hidalgo, to Tlaxcala, to the eastern edge of the Estado de México, the pulque belt that runs across the dry highlands where the maguey has been cultivated since before the conquest. The chinicuil is the larva of a moth that feeds on the root of the maguey, and the campesinos who harvest pulque know exactly when to dig them out and how to clean them. Outside this region, most Mexicans have never tasted one. That is a tragedy this recipe is meant to correct.

Chinicuiles are seasonal. They appear with the rains, from May through September, depending on the altitude. In the mercados of Pachuca and Tlaxcala, you will see them sold by the gram, in small clay cazuelitas, alongside escamoles and gusanos de maguey blancos. The white ones are milder. The red chinicuiles, the ones in this recipe, are the prized ones, with a deeper, smokier flavor that comes from feeding on the maguey root rather than the leaves. If the temporada is wrong, do not substitute. Eat them when the campo is selling them. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one obeys a calendar that has nothing to do with what is convenient.

The preparation is direct. You do not need to do much to a chinicuil. Toast it on a hot comal with lard until it crisps, season with salt and lime, eat it folded into a warm tortilla with guacamole machacado in a molcajete. The flavor is its own argument: earthy, nutty, with a small bitter edge that the lime resolves and the avocado softens. This is pre-Columbian food. Older than Spain. Older than wheat. If it feels foreign to you, that is because the colonizers spent five centuries teaching us to be ashamed of it. No me vengas con atajos, and do not come to me asking if you can use shrimp instead. This is what the dish is.

My mother never cooked chinicuiles. She was from Jalisco and the maguey there is a different beast, the one that becomes tequila. The first time I ate them was at a roadside stand outside Apan in 1998, served exactly the way I have written here. The woman who sold them to me, doña Cleotilde, was eighty-one and had been gathering chinicuiles from her family's maguey since she was seven years old. Saber cocinar es saber vivir. Sometimes it is also saber recoger.