Mole poblano Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Mole poblano is a festive dish of Puebla, a city in central Mexico. Turkey is served under a generous helping of thick sauce (mole) ground together from chiles and spices. The dish is thought to have taken shape in the Spanish colonial period, in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The turkey at its center is a fowl long established in Mesoamerica, and chiles and cacao, too, were local crops on the table from early times. The technique of soaking dried chiles in water and grinding them on a grinding stone (metate) into a thick sauce also belonged to Indigenous kitchens. The records left by the Spanish friar Sahagún in the 16th century describe Indigenous people eating sauces of ground chiles and seeds. In Nahuatl, the Indigenous language, such sauces were called mōlli.

After the Spanish conquest in 1521, Old World spices and nuts such as cinnamon, pepper, cloves, cumin, sesame, and almonds reached the region by way of Spain. With them came a way of cooking that thickened and flavored sauces by grinding in bread or nuts. During the colonial period, the technique of grinding chiles into a sauce and the technique of thickening with spices, bread, and nuts came together in a single pot. Rehydrating and grinding the chiles and then simmering for hours made this a laborious dish, and the convent kitchens and festive tables of Puebla were among the places where its flavor was nurtured.

Which of the two techniques formed the foundation, however, is a matter on which views differ. In a 2007 essay, the food historian Rachel Laudan points out that thickening and flavoring with bread, nuts, and spices was widespread in the medieval Islamic world and in Europe. She takes this to be mole's principal technique, and the rehydrating and grinding of dried chiles to be a secondary element added in Mexico; in her view, mole quite likely has Mediterranean origins. In Mexico, on the other hand, there is a view that an Indigenous dish reached its finished form in the colonial period. A book published by a university press in Puebla in 2017 puts that idea in its very title: El mole poblano, platillo prehispánico logra su inmortalidad en el siglo XVII ("Mole poblano: a pre-Hispanic dish achieves immortality in the 17th century").

Puebla has a famous story about how this dish was born. A nun of the Santa Rosa convent, thrown into a panic by the sudden visit of an archbishop (a viceroy, in some tellings), ground together whatever was in the kitchen and improvised a sauce. Sometimes the tale even comes with a name and a date: Sor Andrea made it around 1680.

But the story has no support in the historical record. The food historian Laudan has pointed out that the convent tradition has no documentary basis. The culinary-history materials published by the library of the University of Texas at San Antonio likewise note that mole poblano's documentary trail before the 19th century is very thin. An anecdote this detailed, complete with the nun's name and the year of the visit, is a tradition invented and polished in later times.

The documents that do survive tell a different story. Sahagún's 16th-century records tell of Indigenous people eating sauces of ground chiles and seeds. Sauces containing cinnamon and cloves appear in writing much later. The clemole in the Recetario Novohispano, a manuscript recipe collection of 1791, combines chiles with sesame, coriander, cumin, garlic, cloves, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger. Among printed cookbooks, El Cocinero Mexicano and Novísimo Arte de Cocina, both from 1831, include mole poblano. The year a dish first appears in writing is not the year it was born, but it does mean that sauces of this kind were in kitchens by the end of the 18th century at the latest.

The mole poblano of 1831 contains no chocolate. Today's mole poblano is known for the chocolate melted into it, but chocolate was added at a still later date.

In place of a nun's improvisation in a single night, what comes into view is a much longer stretch of time. Mole poblano took shape as the Indigenous technique of grinding chiles into a sauce and the technique of thickening with Old World spices, bread, and nuts were combined across the colonial period. As to which of the two was the foundation, Laudan's view, which sees the Mediterranean technique as primary, still stands alongside the Mexican view that an Indigenous dish reached its finished form in the colonial period.