Sopa de Chepil con Chochoyotes

This is from the Valles Centrales of Oaxaca, the central valleys around the city, where the markets sell chepil in loose bundles and every cook knows it by sight and smell. This is not a famous dish. It is not mole negro or tlayudas. It is what an Oaxacan family eats on a Tuesday night when the broth is already on the stove and the chepil is fresh from the mercado.

Chepil is the herb that defines this soup. Not epazote. Not cilantro. Not hierba santa. Chepil. It is a wild leguminous plant with small oval leaves and a flavor that sits somewhere between mineral and green, with a faint bitterness that softens completely in hot broth. Outside of Oaxaca and Chiapas, most people have never heard of it. That is exactly the kind of ingredient that disappears if nobody writes it down.

The chochoyotes are masa dumplings, small balls of masa mixed with lard and salt, pressed with your thumb to make a dimple in the center. The dimple is not decorative. It lets the broth cook the dumpling evenly so the center is not raw while the outside falls apart. Every senora I watched in Oaxaca shaped them without looking, talking to me while her thumbs did the work. That kind of muscle memory comes from making them hundreds of times. Yours will be rougher the first time. That is fine. They cook the same.

My mother did not make this soup. She was jalisciense and her soups were different. I learned it from a woman named Dona Esperanza at the Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca de Juarez, who sold me the chepil and then told me exactly how to cook it when she saw I did not know. Preguntale a las senoras del mercado. They will teach you more than any book, including mine.