Nicuátole de Maíz Criollo

Nicuátole is from Oaxaca. Specifically from the Valles Centrales, where it has been made since long before the Spanish arrived with their milk and their cinnamon. The original was corn, water, and wild fruit. The colonial version added what the convents brought. Both versions still exist. This is the second one, the one you find on wooden trays at the dulcerías of Jardín Sócrates and along the edges of the zócalo, cut into squares the color of cream with a stripe of magenta on top.

This is not flan. I will say it once and then I will not say it again. Flan sets from eggs. Nicuátole sets from the corn itself, from the starches in maíz criollo released by hours of soaking and patient cooking. The texture is denser, more serious, more rooted. A flan trembles. A nicuátole holds its shape on the leaf and waits for you. That difference is the whole point.

The pink on top is tuna, the fruit of the prickly pear, deepened with grana cochinilla, the dried insect that colored the robes of European royalty for three centuries. Oaxaca was the world's largest producer of cochineal in the colonial era. The dye built fortunes. Today it colors a square of corn pudding sold for ten pesos at a market stall, and that is, in its own way, a small revenge.

My mother did not make nicuátole. She was from Jalisco. I learned this one from a senora named Doña Carmen at a stall in San Agustín Yatareni who let me sit on a low wooden stool for three afternoons and watch her stir the pot. She told me when the atole speaks, it is done. I have been listening for that sound ever since. Cada estado, su propia cocina.