Mole Manchamanteles con Cerdo y Frutas

Manchamanteles is one of the seven moles of Oaxaca. Some cooks in Puebla will tell you it belongs to them. The argument has been going on for at least a hundred years and I am not going to settle it here. What I will tell you is this: every Oaxacan abuela I have cooked with from the Valles Centrales to the Sierra Norte has a manchamanteles in her repertoire, and the version I am giving you is built from notes I took in the kitchen of a senora named Estela in Teotitlan del Valle who has been making it for sixty years.

The name means tablecloth-stainer. The mole is so deeply colored from ancho and guajillo, so loaded with the juice of pineapple and stewed fruit, that one drop on white linen is permanent. Embrace it. Set the table with a cloth that has already been stained and stop worrying.

This is the mole that breaks the rule about meat and fruit. Pork shoulder, sometimes chicken, simmered with pineapple, pears, apple, and a fried plantain that goes into the chile base for body. The plantain is not a garnish. It is structural. Without it the mole is thin and the sweetness has nowhere to land. The vinegar and piloncillo at the end pull the sweetness into balance. Sweet alone is a compote. Sweet with chile, acid, and lard is manchamanteles.

My mother did not make this mole. It was not in her notebook. I learned it from the women of Oaxaca, on a trip in 2009 that I funded with the sales of my second cookbook. I came home with three notebooks of variations and the conviction that this mole has been overlooked outside Oaxaca because people cannot place it. It is not negro and it is not rojo. It is its own animal. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and within Oaxaca, cada cocinera, su propio manchamanteles.