It is an integral part of Mexico`s culinary heritage, this stuff called mole. ”You taste that sauce,” says Chicago restaurateur Rick Bayless, ”and you`re tasting Mexican history.” It is ”the most Mexican of all dishes,”
says cookbook author Patricia Quintana.
A marriage of chilies, spices and nuts that packs a flavorful wallop, mole is a complex sauce that traces its roots to pre-Hispanic Mexico yet finds a comfortable place at the most sophisticated of contemporary dinner tables.
– At Topolobampo and Frontera Grill, Rick and Deann Bayless` acclaimed restaurants, mole might be a rich, herb-perfumed green sauce served as a backdrop for grilled pink salmon.
– At the Mexico City table of cookbook author Alicia DeAngeli, a delicately flavored white mole might join poached chicken breasts on a silver platter.
– In the kitchen of cookbook author Diana Kennedy`s Zitacuaro home, the version she stirs up for dinner might be a hearty rich red mole, typical of the Mexican state of Michoacan.
– And in the southeastern state of Oaxaca, many cooks` repertoires include variations on the region`s seven moles, from black and green to yellow and red.
Despite mole`s multiple incarnations, this is a sauce with an image problem.
Mole (pronounced MO-lay) is too often dismissed as that ”sort of sweet chocolate sauce people eat on chicken in Mexico.”
How wrong that description is.
Of the hundreds of varieties of mole cooked in Mexico, only a small number call for chocolate, and then only a minuscule amount that serves not to sweeten, but to smooth the marriage of chilies and spice.
Still, mole`s image has been tarnished by too many bad combination-plate memories north of the border and by too many harsh bottled versions of the sauce.
Mole deserves a second look.
First, mole is brought to you by the folks who introduced salsa to U.S. tables, the Mexican cooks who know their sauces.
Second, even the cooking pros who today embrace mole did not necessarily relish their first encounter.
”It was not an epiphany,” says Bayless of his first plate of mole, consumed at the age of 16 in a small town near Hidalgo.
Kennedy agrees, ”I don`t remember when the first time was, but I didn`t like it.”
Yet each of these non-natives gave the sauce a second chance and have become ardent supporters.
”Those who have never tasted it think it`s some kind of chocolate sauce for chicken, a weird hot fudge,” Bayless says. ”In Mexican cooking, where sauces are complex, moles are even more elaborate. Salsa is simple. Mole is complex.”
”The misconception is that it`s just one sauce; there are 300 to 400 kinds of mole,” says Quintana, the Mexico City-based author of several books, including ”Feasts of Life.” ”Moles can have one chili or five chilies.”
Kennedy, who is currently teaching Mexican cooking on cable television, recently judged a mole competition in Puebla with 15 contenders.
Mole was being stirred by the cooks of ancient Mexico long before Hernando Cortez stopped in to visit Emperor Montezuma in the 1500s, as noted by Bernardino de Sahagun, a priest and Cortez chronicler. Actually ”mole sauce” is redundant. Mole comes from the Aztec/Nahuatl word molli, which means sauce or mixture. Hence, guacamole is an ”avocado sauce.”
”The first pre-Hispanic sauces were ground in a molcajete,” says DeAngeli of the moles prepared in the stone mortar and pestle.
”The original moles were not fried as they often are today. Instead, the ingredients were toasted and ground.”
In Mexico today, mole generally refers to a type of chili-based sauce that combines ground nuts (peanuts or almonds, for example) with seeds (such as sesame or pumpkin), chilies and a few spices. Many of these ingredients are toasted or roasted to deepen the flavor. A mole may be red, black, green, brown, yellow, white or even pink, with the color of the chilies usually determining the sauce`s color.
By grinding the seeds and nuts, their oil creates a pastelike mixture, in the way peanuts become peanut butter. The addition of chilies and spices
(cinnamon, anise, cloves, for example) and sometimes herbs and vegetables
(garlic, onion) further embellishes a mole.
This pastelike mixture serves as the basis for the sauce, with the mixture cooked gently, sometimes in a bit of vegetable oil, before broth is added to give the sauce the velvety texture of thick cream.
So important is this nut-spice paste, that it is sort of the Knorr mix of the Mexican kitchen. Visit most any market, in any city or pueblo, and you can watch mole merchants grind the standard nut-spice mixtures of the region into a paste, adding their own seasoning touches the way one who blends coffee might mix different beans. The nut-spice mixture is then piled into mountains at their stalls so a merchant can scoop up this mole starter kit for customers. Or, one may find huge clay pots, the size of baby bathtubs, filled with simmering prepared moles for those who wish to purchase a finished sauce. Because of the nuts` starch and fat, a mole begins almost like the flour- butter roux used to make white sauces in French kitchens. Yet the mole is different from a white sauce.
As Bayless notes in his book, ”Authentic Mexican”: ”Mexican sauces are not the napping variety-as would be a light butter sauce or hollandaise. . . . Rather, the sauces are the dish-the bulk, the vegetables, the flavorings, the nutrition.”
And because of mole`s richness and flavor intensity, a little goes a long way.
”To be good, no one flavor should predominate,” says Kennedy, adding that chocolate is a relative newcomer to the list of mole ingredients.
She also says of mole, ”Today it has become a dish of too many ingredients. And where this sweet tooth came in, goodness knows.”
A finished mole, Quintana says, ”should have the thickness of a medium white sauce or a reduced tomato sauce. It should be well balanced and well cooked and simmered so that the herbs and spices meld.”
How popular is mole in Mexico? Popular enough to warrant an annual festival in San Pedro Atocpan, a town just outside Mexico City. And mole cooking contests are regular events. Mole is embraced in Mexico as the dish for every celebration, from baptisms to weddings to holiday fiestas.
Why, according to Quintana, the preparation of the sauce is overseen by St. Pascual Bailon, the patron saint of cooking.
When Mexicans dream of moles they don`t envision those combination plates on which a mole, rice, beans and guacamole all run together under a mountain of heavy sour cream.
Instead, the moles of Mexico show up as green mole with frog legs, duck mole sweetened with prunes or tortillas spread with mole then rolled up for enchiladas. Moles are served with vegetables or are used as a poaching liquid for eggs.
Quintana works moles into souffles, sometimes with crab or corn. She may produce a lasagne of sorts, layering shredded chicken and mole with tortillas, lightly fried and drained, and some cheese.
Says Bayless: ”When you taste really well-prepared Mexican food, there is a refinement, balance and beauty you only find in a sophisticated cuisine. After the conquest much of the native population died, but still the soul is in the food. Now, 500 years later, it`s ready to take its place among the cuisines of the world.”
