The Oaxacan Omelet That Brings the Whole Town Together

Iarrived in San Juan Yolotepec, a minuscule village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, on a bright June morning at about 8 a.m.—confusingly the same time it had been when I’d left the closest major city, Huajuapan de León, an hour earlier. While the rest of the country had skipped forward an hour at the beginning of spring, Yolotepec, perched on a scrubby hill near pretty much nothing, had remained stubbornly in the past. Neftalí Gonzalez, the dentist who’d driven me up here, to the village of his birth, explained: "Nature doesn’t use Daylight Saving, so why should we?" That morning, there was barely any “we” in sight. A man on the main square announced via loudspeaker that a truckload of hot, crispy pork cracklins was for sale, describing them in language that bordered on the licentious. On the other side of the church, a small crowd had gathered at the Confradia, a covered concrete plinth that serves as a sort of community auditorium, to prepare mole powders for the following weekend’s festivities in honor of Yolo’s patron saint. Maybe two dozen people had gathered—an unusual amount of activity for a village that, like so many in Mexico, has lost the majority of its population to immigration.At the edge of the Confradia, two women tended a pair of comals (big, clay roasting pans heated over coals) toasting animal crackers, to be ground along with bittersweet pasilla chiles, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper to make a mole amargo, or bitter mole. (When I asked what they used before animal crackers, one of them said, "Who knows? Even these are scarce now!" as though animal crackers were an endangered species). Another dozen people sat with kerchiefs tied around their mouths and noses, stripping seeds from bushels of dried costeño chiles. They chatted delicately, like actors marking their roles in rehearsal, which I understood as soon as I walked over and took a deep breath of the capsaicin-laced air. I heaved a hideous throaty cough. Everyone laughed, which, of course, started a whole chorus of agonized hacking that scattered the crowd to the edges of the Confradia where the air was clean.When you have that many people gathered in a town to spend a day working, you have to feed them, so a pair of ladies—who like Neftalí and many of the others at the Confradia, had come up for the weekend from Huajuapan–took over the communal kitchens to prepare communal meals in big clay pots. The breakfast that morning was huevo con mole.It’s a simple dish: Several round omelets, each maybe half an inch thick, are cut into wedges and bathed in a soupy sauce the color of fresh blood, made from a hand-ground mixture of dried guajillo and puya chiles, the former for color, the latter for heat. Together, they’re fragrant and floral, sweet and sour, like tamarind or dried hibiscus flowers. The ladies in the kitchen, Doña Inocencia and Doña Alba, ladled the omelet and its sauce into a shallow ceramic bowl and served it with a pair of warm tortillas, offering it up happily despite the fact that I’d contributed precisely nothing out there in the Confradia. Taking all that coughing into account, you could argue I’d even derailed the day’s efforts. Fortunately, we had an extra hour to work with. There are benefits, as it turns out, to lagging behind.Huevo Con Mole