Indigenous molli (chilmolli chili sauce, before Old World spices) Period COrigin theory BVerified

Molli, or chilmolli, was a thick chili-based sauce made in Mexico before the Spanish came. Think of it as a much older layer beneath today's mole, the elaborate turkey sauce worked through with many spices.

The ingredients behind this sauce were all long-established local crops. Chilies, squash seeds, tomatillos, tomatoes, turkey, cacao: every one of them was native to the Americas and long grown there. The cinnamon, pepper, almonds, sesame, and wheat bread that would later color mole are all still absent from this older layer. This was a taste built entirely from native produce, the flavor of the land itself.

The heart of the method was to grind chilies and seeds on stone until they thickened into a rich sauce. On the metate, a flat grinding stone, and in the molcajete, a stone mortar, cooks ground away. This handwork was rooted here long before the conquest. Sauces of this kind were prepared for Aztec festivals and rites, and in the palace kitchen. The word molli had also found its way into the sayings people used: among the Nahuatl proverbs written down by the Spanish friar Sahagun is the line "They make mole of all the horned toads I catch."

What is at stake in this dish is not exposing an invented tale. It is keeping two things apart without mixing them: that the sauce certainly existed, and that it carries through to the present.

That an old chili sauce existed is barely in doubt. Sahagun, the Spanish friar who compiled his vast ethnography, the Florentine Codex, in the years just after the conquest, recorded a range of dishes called molli (sauce) and chilmolli (chili sauce) in Nahuatl, naming them individually. He set down enough that we know their contents, such as one combining amaranth, yellow chili, tomato, and squash seeds. Later Nahuatl dictionaries examine these as sixteenth-century vocabulary, and food historians likewise hold that thick chili sauces made entirely from native ingredients were present in the pre-Hispanic period. Primary record, linguistic study, and culinary history all bring the same picture into focus.

The question lies beyond that. Does this old sauce run unbroken to the complex mole of today, the kind that dissolves cinnamon, pepper, almonds, sesame, and even wheat bread, as in mole poblano? Or was it remade in Puebla between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, taking in the goods that had crossed from the Old World, and keeping only the name of the older sauce? This is not clear. Some scholars read it as a dish reconstructed as mestizo food, and the surviving record has not yet settled the answer.

So to call the old layer simply the same thing as today's mole overreaches. That it existed is firm in the record, but the bridge to the present is not yet in view. This two-part frame is the accurate shape of mole's prehistory.