Mole Poblano de Guajolote

This is Puebla's dish. Not Mexico's. Puebla's. The mole that gets called Mexico's national dish was born in the convents and home kitchens of the city of Puebla de los Angeles, and the bird it was built for is the guajolote, the native turkey that pre-Columbian cooks were raising long before any Spaniard set foot in the Valle de Puebla. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Puebla.

Mole poblano is three chiles: ancho, mulato, pasilla. Each one does a job. Ancho is the sweetness and the body. Mulato is the depth, with its faint chocolate note that has nothing to do with the chocolate you add later. Pasilla is the dark backbone. Leave one out and the sauce loses a dimension. Add chile chipotle if you want a thread of smoke. Add nothing if you want the classical balance. Either is correct. What is not correct is using one generic dried chile and calling it mole.

The chocolate is not the point of the sauce. I will say this once and then we will move on. Mole is not chocolate sauce. The chocolate rounds the bitterness of the chiles and the spices the way a quiet bass note holds up a song. Two tablets of Ibarra or Mayordomo in a pot that holds thirty-plus other ingredients, fried nuts and seeds, charred tomatoes, day-old bread and tortillas burned dark for that bitter floor, plantain, raisins, canela, clove, allspice. It is architecture on a spoon.

My mother did not make mole poblano. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco has its own birria to argue about. But after she died I found a page in her notebook, the recipe of a friend from Atlixco, with notes in the margin in two different hands: 'fry the seeds well, do not rush' and below it, in pencil, 'remember to char the tortillas almost black, that is the secret.' I have made this mole every December since. It takes two days if you do it right. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.