Pollo en Mole Costeño Afromestizo

This is from the Costa Chica. Not Oaxaca City, not Acapulco, the stretch of Pacific coast that runs from Guerrero into Oaxaca where the towns are Black. Cuajinicuilapa. Pinotepa Nacional. Chacahua. This is the land of la tercera raíz, the third root of Mexico, African, standing alongside the indigenous and the Spanish. For five hundred years the country pretended this coast did not exist. The cooking always knew better.

Mole costeño is lighter than the moles of the central highlands. People say that like it is an insult. It isn't. The defining chile is chile costeño, a thin, bright red coastal chile with a clean heat that does not muddy the sauce the way a heavy ancho and chocolate mole can. You taste the chile. You taste the toasted ajonjolí and almond. You taste the fried plátano macho that thickens it and lays a faint sweetness underneath. Simpler than mole poblano, yes. Shallower, no. Anyone who calls this simple has never made it.

The first time I went to Cuajinicuilapa I went to record the danza, and I left with my notebook full of recipes. The women there fry their mole in manteca, not oil, and they are emphatic about it. On this coast the frying is not a technique borrowed from somewhere else. It is the inheritance of cooks whose grandmothers fried plátano and yuca and cacahuate the way their grandmothers had before them. The plantain, the peanut, the sesame, the coconut. An African-rooted pantry growing in Mexican soil.

Do not skip the frying of the mole. You toast, you soak, you blend, and then you fry the paste in hot lard until it darkens and the fat breaks through. That is the step that turns a sauce into a mole. La tercera raíz no es nota al pie. Es plato principal. Cada estado su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the Costa Chica.