I Gorged on Mole, Cuitlacoche, and Dulces Tipicos

Sadly, I just returned from my last trip to the city center/ Zocalo, weekend Market, and Puebla's famous candy street. I'm returning to the United States tomorrow.

Jonathan and I started out the day by having a huge lunch at la Fonda de Santa Clara, a very old, traditional Mexican restaurant that panders to tourists. It is not hoaky or cheesy, like most Mexican restaurants in the United States, it is simply all things traditionally Pueblan.
The menu contains everything necessary to taste while in Puebla, like a one stop "eat your way through Puebla" deal. There is also a list of seasonal specialties, this month's specialty is an Aztec dish of century worms (that's how it was translated into English) cooked in a chile sauce served with beans and guacamole. Jonathan said it was a delicacy so I was very excited to order it. Unfortunalty, they didn't have it. (How do you not have the monthly special?!?) So I settled for Puebla's most famous dish: Mole. Half way trough my plate, I swapped with Jonathan for his adobo pork and cuitlacoche.



Mole: Chicken smothered in a complex sauce containing chocolate and nearly 100 other ingredients, sprinkled with sesame seeds and a side of rice.





It was difficult to see, but there was chicken under that sauce.



Adobo pork with Cuitlacoche and a side of guacamole. 



Close up of Cuitlacoche: a special type of mold that infects corn as it grows. Mexicans love it, they grow certain types that are particularly prone to molding. I was very excited to eat it and it had a sweet/ bitter taste that reminded me of bitter greens. The strip of white is cheese.

  I also had Rompope, a thick egg drink laced with alcohol: egg nog. It was egg nog without the nutmeg. It is sipped as a cordial all year long.

 I also ordered something that ended in "atole," which is usually a drink made with water and corn and then flavored with other ingredients. This one had squash blossom and chile. I was very interested to see and taste this atole, however it came in a soup bowl with half an ear of white corn. It was good, but not exactly the thurst quencher I thought it was.

 After Jonathan and I both sat back and sighed at the same time, I knew our traditional Pueblan meal was over.

We walked a few blocks to candy street for dessert. Candy street, or 6 Oriente, it's city street name, is lined with candy shops. Signs for dulces tipicos redunantly hang over each shop. Some of them were started by nuns over a hundred years ago. Many of the candies were also created by the nuns in Puebla.

Standing in the middle of Candy Street.

This woman was delivering marzipan roosters to one of the shops. Brightly colored marzipan animals are a common confection all over Mexico, but in Puebla, I only saw roosters.

Aside from the cartoonish aspects, they look like a group of real chickens looking every which way, don't they?

They were so adorable! I had to have one... or three...

Tortitas de Santa Clara: my favorite treat.

stacks of cookies and confections inside a shop

Sugar skulls! These are usually only seen around Day of the Dead in November, but I'm glad this shop sells them out of season.

These are little "cakes" of compressed, finely ground peanut. They look solid, but once you bite into them, they dissentigrate. Maybe that is part of the fun; they are really good though.

These are brightly colored wafer cookies. They also come shaped and decorated to look like all the popular cartoon characters.

My Sweet Mexico has recipes for many, almost all of these confections. On the advice of Chef and author of the book, Fany Gerson, I stopped at a tiny bar I had walked by many times on my trips to the weekend markets: La Pasita. There, they serve a drink by the same name that is thier specialty. It is a raisin liquer served in a shot glass with a cube of salty cheese and a raisin on a tooth pick.

First, you bite the cheese and drink the sweet liquer.

Today was as good an ending to my stay in Puebla as I could have wished for. I lunched on traditonal cusine and gorged myself on sugar candies until my teeth hurt.