Pulque Curado de Tuna

This is from the Mixteca, the high country that runs through western Oaxaca and parts of Puebla and Guerrero. Pulque belongs to all of central Mexico, but the Mixteca version of curado de tuna is its own animal: lighter on the tongue, less viscous, more fruit-forward than the dense, almost custard-like curados of Hidalgo and Tlaxcala. The pulquerias in Huajuapan and Tlaxiaco serve it in clay jicaras at midday, when the tunas are coming off the nopales and the heat asks for something cold.

Pulque is alive. It is the fermented sap of the maguey, scraped out of the heart of the plant by a tlachiquero with a long gourd called an acocote, and it does not travel well or keep long. If your pulque is more than three or four days old, it is not pulque anymore, it is vinegar with ambitions. This is the ingredient that decides whether you can make this drink or not. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo, and the work here begins with finding pulque you trust.

The tuna is the easy part. Red and green prickly pears, both, because the red gives you color and sweetness and the green gives you a clean, almost cucumber edge that keeps the curado from going syrupy. Piloncillo, not refined sugar. Lime, not lemon. A pinch of canela because the women in the Mixteca markets put it there and they are not wrong.

My mother did not make this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does not have a pulque culture the way the central states do. I learned this drink in a pulqueria in Tlaxiaco from a senora named Eulalia who poured it from a clay jarro into a hollowed gourd and told me to drink it before the foam settled. She was right. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and saber beber pulque is part of the same lesson.