Tepache Oaxaqueño de Piña

Tepache is everywhere in Mexico, but the Oaxacan version is the one I learned, sold in clay jarritos out of plastic coolers in the Mercado Benito Juárez and the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, deep amber, fizzy, sweet at the front and dry at the back, with the warmth of canela and clove threaded through it. Every puesto has its own balance. Some lean sweeter. Some let it go an extra day until it bites. None of them throw away pineapple skin.

This is a drink built on what you would have composted. The flesh of the pineapple is for eating. The rind and the core are for tepache. The wild yeasts that live on the skin do the work, eating the piloncillo over two days and turning sugar water into something fizzy and faintly alcoholic, around 1 to 2 percent. Pre-Hispanic Mexico made tepache from corn. The pineapple version came later, after the Spanish brought sugar cane and the Portuguese brought pineapples up from South America, and Oaxaca made it her own with piloncillo and canela and the patience to let the jar sit on the counter for two days without opening it every hour to check.

My mother did not make tepache. She was from Jalisco and she drank tejuino. But the first time I had Oaxacan tepache, it was 2009 in the 20 de Noviembre, served by a señora who poured it from a five-gallon plastic bucket into a clay jarrito with no ceremony at all, and I understood why this drink has survived four hundred years of being called peasant food. It is delicious. It costs nothing. It uses what would have been waste. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.