It was back in the day before cell phones and email when you could just chuck all responsibility, stuff your meager possessions in a backpack, and head out to see the world.
The part of the world I had opted for on one particular adventure was Mexico and Central America — a three-month jaunt to see what was up south of the border, by train, bus and thumb. And one of my most life-changing discoveries came when I arrived in Oaxaca, checked into a cheap room over a cantina, and headed out to sample the local cuisine.
It was that night, in Oaxaca, in a home-cooking cafe with oil cloth on the tables, that I began a lifelong obsession with mole. I had never tasted mole before. I couldn’t imagine a sauce made of chocolate and chiles, along with 30-some additional ingredients. I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. But with that first bite of pechuga de pollo in black Oaxacan mole sauce, I was a true believer — a convert who had seen the light.
According to a separate menu at the unexpectedly large, multi-space, freeway-adjacent Chiguacle Sabor Ancestral de Mexico — part of the Chiguacle Group of restaurants that stretch from Downtown LA to Sun Valley — mole “was created in Puebla by nuns wanting to impress a visiting bishop at their convent.”
Wikipedia further tells us they were at the Convent of Santa Clara. And that they made the sauce out of what little they had — along with chocolate and chile peppers, nuts, spices and day-old bread. They used it to make an old turkey palatable. And they called the sauce “mole” — which back in the day referred to a “mix.” (And not a small burrowing critter.)
There are shops all over Oaxaca selling mole in a rainbow of colors and flavors. And probably the best assortment of moles I’ve found here in Los Angeles is at Chiguacle (which means “aged pepper” in Nahuatl), where there are eight flavors — including the black Oaxaca I fell in love with so many years ago, the pumpkin seed based pipian…
Read the full article here
