Local bakeries offer samples of egg bread and the bulk chocolate mills like Majordomo make hundreds of cups of hot chocolate on the night before Dia de Muertos.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, while hot chocolate was spread and praised throughout the world, the indigenous people of Oaxaca continued to prepare it in their unique ways. For instance, in the second half of the sixteenth century, in Altatlauca and Malinaltepec, the cacao beans were ground with a maize dough, or masa, and drunk from tecomates (a type of gourd), whereas in La Chinantla, the ground gourd of the matey fruit was added to the masa.
Even today, in many indigenous communities of Oaxaca, drinking chocolate signifies the honoring of life, being at one with family, neighbors, the community, and, above all, with God, the patron saints of the church, and the dead.*
Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere) by Diana Kennedy
Chocolate Mayordomo
Specific recipes for bulk chocolate used in moles are handled by the businesses in town that can produce the quantities needed for extended family gatherings during Dia de Muertos. Oaxaca is famous for its seven moles. Variations in the amount of almonds, spices and chapulines (grasshoppers) used in chocolate recipes are specific to family traditions.
*The roasted beans, now a rich brown, are shelled and moved to the grinder—and here the final miracle happens, for what comes out of the grinder is not a powder, but a warm liquid, for the friction liquifies the cocoa butter, producing a rich chocolate liquor.
Attractive though it looks and smells, this liquor is scarcely drinkable, being intensely bitter. The Maya made a somewhat different version—their choco haa (bitter water) was a thick, cold, bitter liquid, for sugar was unknown to them—fortified with spices, cornmeal and sometimes chili. The Aztec, who called it cacahuatl, considered it to be the most nourishing and fortifying of drinks, one reserved for nobles and kings. They saw it as a food for the gods, and believed that the cocoa tree originally grew only in Paradise, but was stolen and brought to mankind by their god Quetzalcoatl, who descended from heaven on a beam of the morning star, carrying a cacao tree.*
*Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks
Chocolate is the prime ingredient in Mole Negro Oaxaqueña Other ingredients include: various chiles, sesame seeds, peanuts, almonds, walnuts, pecans, raisins and plantains.
Every year families in Oaxaca get together before Dia de Muertos to make the most celebrated dish of all—Mole Negro Oaxaqueña. A dish of mole is placed on the family altar to entice the departed loved ones to come back and join in the celebration. Days before the actual event, women’s hands are busy cleaning chiles, cracking nuts, peeling cacao beans, and gathering herbs to make up the twenty-odd ingredients used in this fascinating concoction. For big fiestas, you need enough mole to serve the whole village, so the process can take days.*
*Seasons of My Heart, A Culinary Journey Through Oaxaca, Mexico by Susan Trilling
Image source: Instituto Cultural Oaxaca
