What You Didn't Know About Chiles en Nogada

Purists of Mexican cuisine, take a breath before reading the following entry. Lovers of truth, hold on tight because we will talk about one of the milestones of Mexican cuisine: chile en nogada, or rather, “chiles en nogada” –in plural, as we say, even if we only eat one. Mexicans love this dish. Detractors are looked upon with dismay. Chile en nogada represents us and carries the colors of Mexico, for as José Luis Juárez López said, “we eat homeland, history, ancestral antiquity.” Each of its parts is opulent. When served, some are presented with bows and arranged on Talavera platters that speak of the ritual that is eating them. And as if that weren’t enough, each chile is about the size of a little baby Jesus and almost like that or like a flag, they are revered at national celebrations. However, for foreign lovers of our cuisine, the recipe might be unknown. Its ingredients travel little and poorly due to their endemic nature and seasonality. Pomegranate, which splashes red-pink on the whiteness of the nogada, blooms from July to September. The rest of the ingredients could well be obtained the rest of the year, although it’s better not to prepare them. According to some purists, chiles en nogada are consumed during this season and each ingredient must come from Calpan, Puebla. A few weeks ago, I spoke with Alberto Peralta de Legarreta, a doctor in Mexican history and ethnohistory, about the myths that have arisen around chile en nogada. What first jumped into the ring was the recipe. According to him, “chiles en nogada are an elite dish, a festive one. They are celebratory,” and the recipe was written by well-off people because “only the rich had the time to cook.” Furthermore, the first chiles were eaten as dessert and only over time did they become a main dish.Peralta states that the earliest records of the dish do not refer to a chile en nogada per se, but rather to a chile stuffed with picadillo; the nogada, for its part, was made for another type of recipe: “The nogada recipe included vinegar and accompanied a fish. It doesn’t resemble what we know today.”There is no verifiable evidence that the Augustinian nuns of the Santa Mónica convent created the recipe. There is also no evidence of the supposed contest to honor the Trigarante Army or that they were created for Agustín de Iturbide in 1821, when independence was consummated before the Treaty of Córdoba. “The first confirmed source in which the recipe appears was in a cookbook from 1917, and it wasn’t until 1930 that it appeared in the cookbooks of the newspapers of the time,” says Peralta.Another shocking fact is that in the oldest recorded recipes, the pomegranate was optional. By the 19th century, chile en nogada was an exclusively seasonal dish –from August to September– because there were no refrigerators and all the ingredients had to be consumed fresh.Additionally, Dr. Peralta states that chile en nogada is not a baroque dish as is often said. The word “baroque” in this case refers more to an adjective than to the cultural period or style that ran from the 16th to the 18th century. “It is said to be a baroque dish because of the sensory and sensual nature of its composition. It is a recipe made to please the senses: it tastes good, smells good, sounds good –because of the crunchiness of the chile–.”Since there was no concrete genesis, there are several recipes and not just one. Records speak of a poblano chile (a variety of capsicum annuum) stuffed with a pork picadillo. The picadillo, previously called jigote, was not ground but finely chopped and was accompanied by raisins, pine nuts, pieces of walnuts, almonds, and some fruits like panochera apple, pear lechera, and criollo peach. Alberto claims that in 19th-century recipes the word “acitrón” appears, but for the researcher, it does not refer to an acitrón made from biznaga, but rather a type of citrus that we no longer use. “It’s like a large lemon. They called it citrus, and it has a somewhat alkaline flavor, like lime. That acitrón was then candied with sugar and indeed resembled our crystallized fruits.” Finally, Peralta de Legarreta asserts that along with other tricolor recipes –just like the Mexican flag– they were created or recreated starting in 1917, leading him to conclude that it could well be “a triumph of Mexican ideology.” An edible flag that exalts our sovereignty, fostering cultural pride and nationalism through delights like pico de gallo, enchiladas, and divorced eggs or guacamole with onion and tomato. Thank you green, white, and red because your colors have also made us shout at the table: Long live Mexico!