Pan de Cazuela de Tlacolula

This bread belongs to Tlacolula de Matamoros, in the Valles Centrales of Oaxaca, where the Sunday tianguis has run continuously since long before the Spanish drew the road that connects it to the capital. Walk the bread aisle of that market on a Sunday morning and you will see them stacked: small bowl-shaped breads with deep golden tops, each one baked into its own cazuela of barro rojo from Atzompa, sold beside the pan de yema and the hojaldras and the marquesote. This is not Mexico City pan dulce. This is Oaxacan bread, and the cazuela is not a serving dish. The cazuela is the mold.

The dough takes manteca de cerdo and six egg yolks, anise and ajonjolí and the zest of an orange. The clay does the rest. Unglazed barro pulls moisture from the bottom of the dough as it bakes, giving the underside a toasted crackle that no metal pan can produce. The hollow at the top, formed by your own thumbs as you press the dough into the cazuela, is what makes this bread a vessel. After it cools, the panadera fills the well with crema agria and mermelada de tejocote, or whatever fruit the season has put on her table. In late summer it is tuna roja from the nopal. In autumn it is membrillo. In winter it is a thick guayaba paste. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and inside Oaxaca, cada valle su propio pan.

My mother never baked this. She was from Jalisco and her notebook holds no Oaxacan recipes. I learned it from Doña Reyna at Mercado Alarii in Zaachila, who let me sit on a stool beside her artesa for three Sunday mornings while she pressed the dough into her cazuelas with the heels of her hands and corrected me every time I tried to thin the walls. The walls are the bread, she told me. Make them thin and you have made a galleta. Make them thick and you have made pan de cazuela. Saber cocinar es saber vivir. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo.