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The Archive of Taste: Mole Poblano

A Culinaria Research Centre Project

This website is dedicated to Mole Poblano, which has been called Mexico’s national dish, a complex sauce of chile peppers, spices, turkey, and chocolate. As a documentary repository for mole, it seeks to answer the question, can we taste the past?

Recipes

Genealogy

Mole de guajolote

For a large turkey, use two [ham] shanks [codillos] and a real of pork loin. [Take] two reales of chile pasilla and one real of ancho, de-vein and toast on a comal until well browned but without burning. Put a real of tomatillas on to boil. Half [a real] of clove, half of cinnamon, a few grains of fine pepper, a little toasted coriander, the amount of toasted chile seeds that can be taken with three fingers of a hand, and half of sesame seed, also toasted. Grind together the spices and the chile, sprinkling with water until it is ground, and then remove [from the metate] and put in its place tomatoes and grind the seeds well. Season this mole putting a large cazuela greased with pork fat on the fire, then when it’s hot, add the [divided] turkey in regular pieces [presas] and the shank and loin. After [browning], add the chile and soaking water to fry with the meat until it begins to splatter, then add the ground tomatoes and also the soaking water, and add to the meat enough water so that it remains covered and salt. Allow to simmer until the meat softens and thickens the broth. Serve with sesame seeds on top.

The following chart was constructed using network analysis to attempt to model the family tree of mole recipes (blue nodes) and their ingredients (yellow nodes) from eighteenth-century cookbooks. The larger the node, the more occurrences in cookbooks. 

Documents

In addition to cookbooks, we can trace the evolution of Mole Poblano through other historical documents and texts. Here is a selection of the documents that I have seen while doing research over the years.

 

Paris

March 30, 1845

Today we are going to eat mole de guajolote and tamales at the O’Brien home.

Letter from Fernando Mangino to José María Calderón y Tapia

 

Source:

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Fondos Particulares, Colección José María Iglesias, José María Calderón y Tapia papers, Caja 5, Exp. 9, Foja 16, Mangino to Calderón, March 30, 1845. I thank Víctor Macías-González for this citation.

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