In the mountains south of Mexico City, in a city the color of terracotta and rain, the most important person in any kitchen is usually seventy-eight years old and makes only one dish. She has been making it since she was twelve. She will not write the recipe down. If you ask her to, she will laugh, kindly, and offer you more coffee.
I spent two weeks in Oaxaca last spring not eating at the famous restaurants but visiting the mercados and the courtyards behind them. The famous places are fine. They are also, in a way that surprises no one who lives here, beside the point. The real food of Oaxaca happens in the comedores—the tiny lunch counters tucked into market stalls—and in the home kitchens of the women who taught the famous chefs everything they know.
Flavor here is measured in decades. A mole that hasn’t been simmered for at least forty years—as a recipe, I mean, in the hands of the family—is still considered young.
Doña Aurora’s comedor, on the second floor of Mercado 20 de Noviembre, has six stools and a single burner. She makes one thing: mole negro. It is the color of obsidian and tastes like the entire history of Mesoamerica has been reduced, patiently, for an afternoon. Thirty-one ingredients, she will tell you, and a fire she has not let go out in ten years. I watched her spoon it over a piece of chicken and slide the plate across the counter with the absent care of someone who has done this exact motion a quarter of a million times.
What strikes me, in my sixties, is how much this kind of cooking values what I now have in abundance: time. Younger travelers rush through Oaxaca looking for the hot new restaurant. They will find it. They will also miss the fact that the woman who taught the hot new chef is sitting in a market stall two blocks away, charging the equivalent of four dollars for the same dish done better.
A week into my stay, I started taking a daily cooking class with a cooperative of women in a village in the Central Valleys. We made tlayudas on a comal the size of a car tire. We ground cacao on a metate that had been in the family for three generations. The youngest woman in the class was forty-three. She apologized to me for being a slow learner. Her mother, who was teaching, shook her head. “She’s not slow,” she said, in Spanish. “She’s just still a child. She’ll get there.”
I went home with a comal, three kinds of chile, and a changed sense of what it means to eat well. In Oaxaca, you are not tasting ingredients. You are tasting time.