Pulpo Enamorado del Pacífico Oaxaqueño

This is a Oaxacan dish, but not the Oaxaca most people picture. Forget the high valleys, the seven moles, the markets of the city center for a moment. This pulpo comes from the other Oaxaca, the Pacific coast: Puerto Ángel, Puerto Escondido, Mazunte, Salina Cruz. The fishing villages where the boats come in at dawn and the catch is on the table by noon.

The technique is simple and the technique is everything. You scare the octopus, asustar el pulpo, by dipping the tentacles three times into boiling salted broth before you lower the whole animal in. The skin sets, the tentacles curl, the meat stays attached to the bone. Then you simmer it gently, never at a hard boil, until a knife slides in without resistance. Skip the scaring and the skin will slide off in shreds. Boil it hard and the meat turns to rubber. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and on the Oaxacan coast, this is how it is done.

The name is what tells you the rest. Enamorado, enamored. The warm octopus is folded into a salsa of chopped tomato, raw white onion, chile serrano, cilantro, lime, and good olive oil, and the two are left to sit together for ten minutes before they are served. The lime opens the meat. The oil carries the chile into every cut. The octopus and the salsa fall in love at the table, not in the kitchen. That is the dish. That is the name.

My mother never made pulpo. She was from Jalisco and the seafood she trusted came from the Pacific, but she did not work with octopus. I learned this one from a woman named Doña Lucina who runs a comedor under a palm roof in Mazunte, where she has been cooking pulpo this way since 1972. She told me three things and I will tell you the same three. Buy the octopus from someone who knows when the boat came in. Do not boil it hard. Eat it warm or at room temperature, never cold from the refrigerator. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and saber pulpo is saber Oaxaca's other coast.