COOKING MEXICAN AT HOME LAURA BREHAUT
Chefs share recipes from their own families
Mole madre (mother mole) is among chef Enrique Olvera’s best-known dishes.
In stark contrast to the white plate it’s served on sit two concentric circles — the outer a mahogany mole negro (mole viejo), the inner a brick-coloured mole rojo (mole nuevo) — waiting to be swiped with its sole accompaniment, tortillas.
An experiment in taste and time, it’s a dish at odds with itself: Simultaneously simple — it’s essentially a sauce presented as a main course — and subtly complex.
Since 2013 — for roughly 2,000 days — the flavours of its myriad ingredients have been developing as the staff at Pujol continually feeds it with freshly made mole.
It’s dishes like this — innovative interpretations of regional Mexican cuisines using diverse local products — that have established Olvera as an international culinary leader.
At 24, nearly two decades ago, he opened Pujol in his hometown of Mexico City after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America. Today, he owns 15 restaurants — including Cosme and ATLA in New York City and Criollo in Oaxaca — and holds two spots on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list: Pujol (No. 13) and Cosme (No. 25, helmed by chef Daniela Soto-Innes).
In his second English-language book, Tu Casa Mi Casa (Phaidon, 2019), Olvera explores the foundation of all that he does: Mexican home cooking.
Written with Luis Arellano of Criollo, Gonzalo Goût (Olvera’s partner in Mexico City bar Ticuchi) and Soto-Innes, it shares recipes from all their backgrounds.
“Cooking is never about one person. It’s always about a team or about your family, your background, your community,” says Olvera. “The fact that we co-authored the book between four people has created a book that follows the ideas of how we like to cook, which is together as a team.”
Whereas his first book in English, Mexico from the Inside Out (Phaidon, 2015), primarily presented the meticulous haute cuisine he’s renowned for (including a recipe for mole madre with an ingredient list 50-strong), Olvera says they set out to write a book that would be a fixture on the kitchen counter rather than coffee table.
Tu Casa Mi Casa features a lesson in the basics — masa and corn, salsas, beans and rice — followed by chapters devoted to breakfast (chilaquiles, “a beautiful hangover cure” and corn pancakes to “make with the kids”), weekday meals (Veracruz-style cod, bean soup), food for sharing (pozole, esquites), sweets (Mexican chocolate ice pops, churros) and drinks (aguas frescas, cacao water).
“Mexican cooking is starting to make a move from restaurants towards homes. People are now making fish tacos on a Tuesday,” says Olvera. “Guacamole is no longer Mexican: It’s kind of like pizza; it’s universal. These things that are slowly getting incorporated into households everywhere in the world have allowed us to publish a book where we can share our memories of the way that our mothers cooked for us at home. It’s not meant to be the Mexican bible of cooking; it’s a lot more personal.”
Recipes adapted from Tu Casa Mi Casa: Mexican Recipes for the Home Cook by Enrique Olvera with Luis Arellano, Gonzalo Goût, Daniela Soto-Innes (Phaidon)