Quelites Salteados con Ajo

This is from Oaxaca. Quelites are the wild greens that grow between the rows of corn in the milpa, the small farming plot that has fed Mexican families since before the Spanish arrived. Quintoniles, verdolagas, huauzontles, papaloquelite, chepiche, hierba mora. Different states have different favorites. In Oaxaca, you find a dozen varieties at the Tlacolula market on Sunday morning, sold in fragrant bundles tied with corn husk strips by women who picked them at dawn.

This dish is the most basic preparation and also the truest. Lard, garlic, onion, salt. Nothing more. The quelites carry the flavor. If you smother them in cream or top them with cheese, you are no longer cooking quelites. You are hiding them. The senoras in Tlacolula would tell you the same thing, less politely.

My mother did not cook quelites in Mexico City the way they cook them in Oaxaca. In Colonia Roma the mercados rarely had them, and when they did, she did not know what to do with the unfamiliar varieties. I learned this from a woman named Dona Rufina who sold quintoniles at the Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca City. She wilted them in lard right there at her stall on a small comal, gave me a taste on a tortilla, and said: "Esto es lo que comemos cuando no hay nada, y lo que comemos cuando hay todo." This is what we eat when we have nothing, and what we eat when we have everything. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.