Verdita Oaxaqueña

Verdita is from Oaxaca. It does not exist apart from mezcal. You do not drink verdita on its own at brunch the way Americans drink green juice. You drink it in a small clay copita next to a small clay copita of mezcal espadín, sip for sip, the cold green clearing the smoke of the warm spirit so the next sip lands clean.

The sauce, and that is what it is, a blended sauce more than a juice, lives on pineapple, cilantro, hierbabuena, and chile serrano. Hierbabuena, not peppermint. The two are not the same and Oaxaca knows it. Pineapple from the lowlands gives the sweetness and the body. The chile is small but present. You should feel it at the back of your throat after the second sip, not on the first. If it bites on the first sip, you used too much chile and the verdita will fight the mezcal instead of partnering with it.

I learned to make this in Tlacolula, sitting at a long wooden table at a mezcaleria where the woman who ran the place blended verdita in batches for the whole afternoon and refused to write the proportions down. She told me to taste it until I knew what it should taste like. Then she said the same thing my mother used to say: saber cocinar es saber vivir. Every cook in Oaxaca makes their verdita slightly differently and every one of them will tell you theirs is correct. They are all correct. The frame is fixed, the ratios are personal.