Celebrate Mexico’s True National Holiday with the Mysteries of Mole

In the United States, Cinco de Mayo is an excuse for
margarita-fueled partying. But in Mexico, that date—the anniversary
of a military triumph over Napoleon on May 5, 1862—is marked by a
parade and not much else. The real celebrations happen on September
16, which is Mexican Independence Day. At Gastropod, we’re always
down to party, so here’s to Mexico’s true national holiday—and its
true national dish: mole! But what is mole? Listen in this episode
as we trace mole’s complicated evolution from medieval Moors to the
invention of the blender, and from something that had been
considered peasant food to a special occasion showstopper. Rachel
Laudan is a food historian and author of Cuisine and Empire:
Cooking in World History—but, when she started researching mole,
the first document she uncovered was hardly deep in the archives.
When she first visited Mexico in the 1990s, Laudan went to a
restaurant famous for its mole. “And, of course, they had the
statutory place mat with the story of mole poblano being invented
in a convent in the eighteenth century,” she told us. According to
the origin story on the place mat, some nuns, in a panic because an
archbishop was visiting and they had nothing to serve him, threw a
bunch of spices in a pot and somehow came up with the perfect rich,
chocolate-brown sauce. “That, to me, just sounds like propaganda,”
said Fernando Lopez, one of three siblings whose father founded
Guelaguetza, an Angeleno restaurant that is a temple to Oaxacan
mole. He believes mole is far too complex to have been created
overnight. Plus, mole comes in many varieties and colors.
Guelaguetza serves six kinds of mole—mole negro, mole rojo, mole
coloradito, mole amarillo, mole verde, and mole estofado—but Sandra
Aguilar-Rodriguez, associate professor of Latin American history at
Moravian College in Pennsylvania, told us that she could name ten
versions off the top of her head, and that each town in the south
of Mexico will have its own variation on the classic recipes. So
where does this delicious and extremely labor-intensive sauce come
from? This episode, with the help of chef Iliana de la Vega, Rachel
Laudan, Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez, and the Lopez siblings, we trace
the varied elements that make up mole: the indigenous tradition of
hand-ground sauces, the Old World ingredients and Baroque
aesthetic, the surprising Islamic influence, and, yes, the nuns.
And we tell the story of how mole was elevated from its humble,
southern origins to become a sophisticated sauce that doubles as
Mexico’s national dish. Plus, we’ve got the expert verdict on
jarred mole pastes, for those of you who can’t face spending two to
three days roasting and grinding nuts, chiles, and spices. Learn
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