Salsa Verde Oaxaqueña con Hoja Santa

This is a Oaxacan salsa. The hoja santa makes it Oaxacan. Without it, you have a perfectly good salsa verde from somewhere else: Mexico City, Puebla, the Bajio. With it, you have the green salsa that lives on the table at a comedor in Etla, beside a stack of memelas and a plate of grilled robalo from the coast. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Oaxaca.

Hoja santa is the leaf the rest of the world does not understand. The Mixtecos and the Zapotecos have cooked with it for centuries. It tastes like sassafras, anise, and black pepper folded into one big heart-shaped leaf, and it grows wild across the Sierra Norte and the Valles Centrales. The senoras at Mercado de la Merced in Oaxaca de Juárez sell it in fat green stacks for a few pesos. If you cannot find it fresh, do not make this salsa today. Make a different salsa. Mexican grandmothers cook with what the mercado is selling, not what they wish they had.

The technique is the molcajete. No me vengas con atajos, the blender is not the same tool. The volcanic stone bruises the herbs and crushes the chile and the tomate verde against itself, and the salsa that comes out the other end is textured, fragrant, and alive. A blender shears everything into pulp and gives you a smooth green liquid that tastes thinner than it should. If you do not own a molcajete and you cook Mexican food, you are working with one hand tied behind your back.

My mother did not make this salsa. She was from Jalisco and her salsa verde was a different animal: tomatillos and serrano and cilantro, no hoja santa, fried in lard until it darkened. I learned this Oaxacan version from a woman named Doña Rosa at a comedor in Tlacolula, who watched me grind it the first time and told me, plainly, that I was going too fast. She was right. The molcajete teaches patience. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.