Mole Prieto Tlaxcalteca

Mole prieto belongs to Tlaxcala. Not to Puebla, which sits across the valley and gets all the credit for moles, and not to Oaxaca, which has its own seven. Tlaxcala is the smallest state in the republic and its mole is one of the oldest and most overlooked dishes in the country. That is the injustice this recipe corrects.

The color is the first thing. Prieto means dark, almost black, and the color comes from two places: the burned tortillas you char on the comal until they smoke, and the deep toast of pasilla and mulato chiles. The body is the second thing. Where the moles of Puebla and Oaxaca lean on nuts, seeds, chocolate, and bread for thickness, mole prieto is thickened with fresh corn masa. That masa is what makes this a Tlaxcalteca dish. It is a dish from a state where corn has been cultivated for more than nine thousand years and where the masa is never far from the table.

This is the mole of Carnaval. Of mayordomias, the rotating sponsorships that hold a village fiesta together. Of weddings and baptisms and the long Sundays when an entire extended family gathers in one kitchen. It is cooked in clay cazuelas over wood fires in the small towns of the Sierra Norte de Tlaxcala, and the women who guard the recipe do not write it down. They cook it for their daughters and their daughters cook it for their daughters. That is how it survives.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not cook mole prieto. I learned it from a senora named Don~a Esperanza in the town of San Bernardino Contla, who let me sit in her kitchen for three days during Carnaval one February and write down what she did. She measured nothing. She tasted constantly. When I asked her why she burned the tortillas instead of just toasting them dark, she looked at me like I was slow. "Porque asi se hace y punto." That is in the notebook now, in her words. Cada estado, su propia cocina.