Mexican Mole Has Many Flavors, Many Mothers
As with so many iconic dishes associated with a country's culinary heritage, Mexican mole has a creation tale.
The story goes that in the late 17th century, the Dominican sisters of the Convent of Santa Rosa in the city of Puebla heard that the archbishop was to pay a visit and had to scramble to put a meal together. The sisters gathered the ingredients they had — dried chili peppers, chocolate, old bread, nuts and more — and cooked them together with wild turkey. The meal reportedly pleased the archbishop, and mole became one symbol of Mexican cuisine (up there with the taco).
But as Maricel Presilla writes in her newest book, Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, the back story of mole is not so simple. The famed holy mole comes from "a long line of parents, such as the pre-Columbian chile-thickened sauces ... and thickened chocolate drinks. Look even closer at the nuns' kitchen and you'll start to see the whole clan of ancestors — using nuts as a thickener, for example, which was a keynote of Spanish medieval cooking."