Mole poblano

A sauce from a convent legend

Mole poblano is the best-known mole of Puebla, a sauce of dried chiles, nuts, seeds, spices and often chocolate, roasted, ground and simmered until it is thick and dark. The most common story credits nuns of a Puebla convent, who are said to have combined what they had when an archbishop or viceroy visited. Wikipedia reports the best-known version, a convent of Santa Clara in Puebla, and notes variants that change the saint, the visitor and the cook.

Historians are cautious. A UNAM journal article by Paco Ignacio Taibo I says the origin is uncertain, and that the legend is the most practical starting point. Wikipedia gives the same caution, that there is not enough evidence for a definitive answer. Puebla and Oaxaca both claim mole as their origin.

Chiles before chocolate

The name mole comes from Nahuatl mōlli, meaning sauce or something ground, and Nahuatl speakers had chīlmōlli, a chile sauce. Chiles in sauces predate the Spanish. The elaborate modern mole does not: Wikipedia cites Coe and Coe (1996) for the view that few if any prehispanic Mesoamerican sauces contained chocolate, and cites Atlas Obscura for the view that chocolate was most likely a later addition.

The sauce as it is known today therefore reflects colonial kitchens, where chocolate, nuts, seeds and spices came together with native chiles. Wikipedia notes that Bernardino de Sahagún described mollis for fish, game and vegetables, and does not say whether those early sauces had chocolate.

Why there are so many ingredients

Mole poblano averages about twenty ingredients, and the number varies between sources and cooks. Dried chiles give colour and bitterness, sesame and nuts give body and fat, the spices give warmth, and chocolate rounds the bitterness. Wikipedia names ancho, pasilla, mulato and chipotle as the classic chiles, and lists black pepper, achiote, cumin, clove, anise, tomato, tomatillo, garlic, sesame, dried fruit and hoja santa among the wider set. Oaxacan moles can exceed thirty ingredients.

Chocolate, where it is used, goes in at the end of cooking. The sources read do not state a fixed ratio of chile to chocolate, so none is given here.

Making the paste and the sauce

The ingredients are roasted and ground to a fine powder or paste. Wikipedia says this takes at least a day by hand, and that families shared the work before electric mills became common. The powder or paste is then mixed with water or broth and simmered until it is pungent and very thick, usually in a clay cazuela, and stirred almost constantly so it does not burn. Mole negro is a variant in which several ingredients are charred and more chocolate is added, which gives the sauce its black colour.

The article gives storage times: prepared sauce about three days in the refrigerator and freezes well; the paste about six months refrigerated and about a year frozen.

Open questions

The origin of mole poblano, the date of its first recipe and the regional variants of the paste are not settled by the sources read. Some listing pages contain errors, so they were not used for factual claims. A documented formulation and its ingredient functions would need a dedicated source before any single recipe is presented as authoritative.