I went to Colonia Americana with a plan: find a café for lunch, sit down, and figure out my walking strategy for the neighborhood. Then I saw the seasonal menu.
Along with a couple of drink specials was chiles en nogada. I knew a little about the dish because a friend in the U.S. is serving it at a special Mexican Independence Day dinner at her restaurant. I had never tried it, and I didn’t really know why it was associated with Independence Day.
The Spanish description on the menu included one word that immediately caught my attention: dulce. Sweet. That gave me pause because I have never been a big fan of combining sweet and savory foods. I translated the rest of the description and discovered that I was considering a poblano chile stuffed with meat and fruit, topped with a slightly sweet walnut sauce.
Fruit with ground meat? Sweet walnut sauce over a chile relleno? I wasn’t convinced.
Then I looked at the photograph. The creamy white sauce was covered with bright red pomegranate seeds and a little green parsley. I love pomegranate, and its acidity seemed as though it might provide some balance. The whole thing looked festive, so I decided I was going to try it.
The first look wasn’t encouraging
When my plate arrived, the chile was almost impossible to see. It was completely smothered in a white sauce, with pomegranate seeds scattered over the top and a sprig of parsley adding some green. Because there was so much sauce, I tasted that first.
It was sweet—not spoonful-of-sugar sweet, but unmistakably sweet. I could taste the walnuts, although I couldn’t tell whether they had been raw or toasted. My immediate reaction was that I wanted something more savory. This wasn’t starting particularly well.
Once I got through the sauce and into the chile, things changed. The poblano and the meat filling were savory and well seasoned. My second and third bites started to make more sense. There actually was a balance here, as long as I didn’t eat too much of the sauce. I started pushing some of the nogada aside.
Where was the fruit?
What surprised me most was the filling. I knew there was supposed to be fruit mixed with the meat, but I wasn’t tasting anything particularly sweet. I was probably three-quarters of the way through the chile before curiosity got the better of me. What fruit was actually in there?
I looked up a recipe and then started paying closer attention to what I was eating. I found pieces of apple and apricot in my filling, along with pine nuts. The ground meat could have been pork, beef, or a combination; I couldn’t tell. Whatever it was, I liked it.
If you cook fruit with meat, onion, garlic, and seasoning, it doesn’t necessarily taste like fruit anymore. That was the part of the dish I had been most suspicious about when I ordered it, yet it wasn’t the problem at all. I liked the filling. I liked the poblano. I liked the walnuts, pine nuts, and pomegranate.
The problem, for me, was the nogada—and the abundance of it.
Why this dish appears in September
After lunch, I wanted to understand more about what I had just eaten. Chiles en nogada are associated with Puebla and Mexican Independence. The best-known story says that Augustinian nuns at Puebla’s Convent of Santa Mónica prepared the dish for Agustín de Iturbide in 1821, using the colors of the newly independent nation.
Whether that exact origin story is history or legend is less certain. Versions of stuffed chiles with fruit, nuts, spices, and rich sauces existed before 1821. The symbolism, however, is easy to see: green poblano and parsley, white walnut sauce, and red pomegranate—the colors of the Mexican flag.
There is also a practical reason the dish appears during this season. Traditional ingredients, including fresh walnuts and pomegranates, are available during the late summer and early fall. Suddenly, the seasonal menu at the café made considerably more sense.
I finished the chile. Not the sauce.
I ate the entire stuffed chile, but I left probably 30 percent of the nogada on the plate. I don’t think I would order chiles en nogada again. There was nothing wrong with the way the restaurant prepared the dish. This particular combination of sweet and savory simply isn’t how my palate works. I mean, it has taken me years even to get accustomed to fruit in my salads.
As a chef, though, I am curious enough that I would make chiles en nogada myself. I wouldn’t change the filling. I would keep the fruit, the meat, the nuts, the poblano, and definitely the pomegranate. I would make the nogada less sweet—possibly leaving out the added sugar altogether—and use much less of the sauce. Maybe I would put a pool underneath the chile and a good drizzle over the top, enough to bring the components together without completely hiding the relleno.
Would that still satisfy someone who grew up eating traditional chiles en nogada? Maybe not. I might make my version for a few American friends and me, but I probably wouldn’t serve it to Mexican friends. They might think I’d ruined chiles en nogada, and I wouldn’t want them to feel that way.
I’m still glad I ordered it. Discovering a place through its food doesn’t mean I have to love everything I taste. Sometimes the discovery is understanding why a dish matters, figuring out what I appreciate about it, and accepting that I probably won’t order it a second time.
Leave a Reply