Huevos en Salsa de Pulque

This is from Tlaxcala. The pulque belt, that stretch of the central highlands that runs from eastern Estado de Mexico through Tlaxcala into the Llanos de Apan in Hidalgo, where the maguey pulquero grows in rows across the dry fields and the tlachiqueros still scrape the aguamiel out of the heart of the plant at dawn. Pulque is not a flavoring here. It is the kitchen.

The salsa is built on chile pasilla, toasted on the comal until it smells like raisins and tobacco, then soaked, blended with charred jitomate and onion and garlic, and fried in manteca until the fat beads at the edge. The pulque comes in at the end, loosens the salsa, cooks down to leave behind that faint sourness and the body that only fermented agua de maguey can give. The eggs poach right in the cazuela. The yolks stay soft. The whites set into the salsa. The epazote ties it all to the maguey country it came from.

My mother did not cook with pulque. She was from Jalisco, where tequila is the daughter of the agave and pulque was something her own mother dismissed as the drink of campesinos. The first time I ate huevos en salsa de pulque was in a fonda outside Huamantla, where a senora named Rosario poured the pulque straight from a clay jarra into the cazuela and told me her mother had cooked the same dish every Sunday for forty years. I wrote it down in the back of my notebook before I left the table. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.