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? Flavor is the most fleeting of sensory perceptions. To taste food, we must consume it, literally, use it up and destroy, leaving only a memory. Yet culinary memories are intensely powerful, as Marcel Proust famously showed by conjuring his childhood in rural France from the smell of a Madeleine tea cookie.

 

Both popular culture and modern scholarship has become fascinated with the physical taste of food. In seeking to preserve taste, Slow Food has created an “Ark of Taste” to protect our culinary heritage by ensuring that traditional agricultural products and dishes continue to be produced and eaten. While vitally important to our future, this project must confront the historical inevitability of change, as plants, dishes, and human societies evolve. This project seeks to foreground the historical dimension and demonstrate how one traditional dish, Mexican mole, has changed over time.

 

Food scientists and social scientists often use focus groups and tasting experiments to understand the cultural construction of taste. Historians are at a disadvantage in studying taste because our subjects have disappeared. Although we cannot interrogate them directly, we can look for the documentary traces they leave behind. This website seeks to provide an archive of mole, collecting in one place the diverse recipes and descriptions of the dish, while also providing links to scholarship on mole.

 

I have started this archive with documents accumulated through a career studying the history of mole and Mexican food more generally. But despite more than twenty years of research, I have only scratched the surface of this baroque dish. To expand the scope of this archive, I hope that visitors will contribute their own recipes, documents, and recollections of mole. If successful, this website will provide a prototype for even more ambitious archives that may one day reconstruct the histories of such global dishes as curry or pasta.

 

The goal is not to assume a “traditional” mole (or curry or pasta), but rather to use crowd-sourced data and network analysis to construct genealogies or family trees of dishes that will reveal their evolution over time. It relies on the theory of the “flavor principle,” defined by Elisabeth and Paul Rozin as basic combinations of ingredients used repeatedly in local cuisines, for example, the tomato, onion, and green chiles that are commonly found in dishes cooked “a la mexicana.” Working from a psychological perspective, the Rozins suggested that familiar tastes have facilitated the historical introduction of exotic crops. But these flavors are themselves historical products of cross-cultural exchange; after all, cooks combined European onions to the indigenous tomato and green chiles. Flavor principles can be examined as collective “sites of memory,” passed from one generation to the next through everyday acts of maternal feeding, thereby archiving processes of social change that are at once global and local.

 

The software used to map these connections is the open-access Google Fusion Tables. It takes particular recipes as blue nodes connected by vectors to ingredients, which are indicated by yellow nodes. Even with the small sample currently available, this project has revealed a number of interesting conclusions. In both eighteenth and nineteenth century versions (twentieth century recipes will be added later), European spices are at the center of the dish. This is in part a product of the data, since chiles are divided according to variety, including ancho, pasilla, mulato, and chilcostle. (Future versions will hopefully overcome this problem by color coding types of ingredients to reveal patterns more clearly.) Nevertheless, sesame seeds seem to be the most commonly used ingredients, meaning that the traditional garnish is actually a defining characteristic of the dish. By contrast, chocolate is almost invisible, appearing in only a few recipes of the past. This early analysis data seems to support historiographical arguments that mole was originally seen as a Hispanic creole dish and only came to be embraced as a symbol of a mestizo (racially mixed) national identity in the twentieth century.

 

Further analysis, along with new recipes and archival records, will appear regularly. I also hope to publish a Spanish translation of the archive shortly. I hope you will take a moment to make your own contributions to this archive.

 

Bibliography

Coe, Sophie D. America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

 

Corcuera, Sonia. Entre gula y templanza: Un aspecto de la historia mexicana. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1981.

 

Flores y Escalante, Jesús. Brevísima historia de la cocina mexicana. Mexico City: Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Fonográficos, 1994.

 

Friedlander, Judith. Being Indian in Hueyapan: A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975.

 

Heliodoro Valle, Rafael. “Anales del mole de guajolote.” In La cultura popular vista por las élites (Antología de artículos publicados entre 1920 y 1952), edited by Irene Vázquez Valle. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989.

 

Juárez, José Luis. La lenta emergencia de la comida mexicana, ambigüedades criollas 1750-1800. Mexico City: Porrúa, 2000.

 

Lombardo de Miramón, Concepción. Memorias. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1980.

 

Loreto López, Rosalva. “Prácticas alimenticias en los conventos de mujeres en la Puebla del siglo XVIII.” In Conquista y comida: Consecuencias del encuentro de dos mundos, edited by Janet Long. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996.

 

Novo, Salvador. Cocina mexicana: Historia gastronómica de la Ciudad de México. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1993.

 

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

 

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.