Lengua en Encacahuatado Jarocho

This is jarocho. It comes from Veracruz, from the Sotavento, the low country along the Gulf where the Papaloapan river runs out to the sea and the towns of Tlacotalpan, Alvarado, and Boca del Río keep their kitchens close to the water. Veracruz was the port where most of the enslaved Africans brought to New Spain first set foot on this land. Their cooking did not disappear. It settled into the Sotavento and it stayed. When you make this dish, you cook from la tercera raíz, the third root of Mexico, the African one. La tercera raíz no es nota al pie. Es plato principal.

Encacahuatado means bathed in peanut, and I want to be clear about what that is. It is ground peanut. Cacahuate that you toast in manteca until it is golden and fragrant, then grind into the sauce with your chiles and your tomato. It is not peanut butter from a jar. No me vengas con atajos. The chiles are guajillo for color and a clean, bright heat, and ancho for body and a little sweetness. Toasted sesame, ajonjolí, goes in with them and again over the top at the end. The peanut, the sesame, the lard: this is the flavor map of the Afro-Mexican Gulf, and every step of it earns its place.

The lengua is beef tongue, and if that word makes you nervous, you were taught to waste good food. A whole tongue, simmered three hours with onion and laurel until a fork slides in clean, gives you meat more tender than almost any cut you can name. You peel it while it is still hot, slice it, and let it drink the encacahuatado until the sauce coats every piece. This is how a home cook feeds a full table from one humble part of the animal. La manteca es el sabor, and nothing here goes to waste.

I learned the frying of this sauce from a woman in Tlacotalpan who cooked it in a clay cazuela black from years of use. She told me the secret is not the blender. The secret is what you do after: you fry the ground sauce in hot lard until it darkens and the fat rises to the top. Skip that and you have peanut soup. Do it right and you have encacahuatado. My mother kept a note in her own hand that said the same thing about mole: fry the paste, always fry the paste. She was from Jalisco, not Veracruz, but a good cook recognizes a good principle wherever it lives. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.