INdulge: It's almost Cinco de Mayo. Signature Pueblan dish is best thing I ate in Indy this week
Monday marks Cinco de Mayo, the beloved annual celebration of... something related to Mexico.
At least, that's how most United States adults explain the holiday, with 41% of them asserting that Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, according to a 2020 survey. Notably, it is not — instead marking a famous battle in which Mexican forces fended off a French incursion.
Celebrated each year by millions of Americans of different ethnic backgrounds for largely tequila-related reasons, Cinco de Mayo has long spurred discussions around cultural appropriation and hyper-commercialization. For this week's INdulge, I sought a dish that strikes a bit closer to the heart of the holiday with:
The best thing I ate in Indy this week
Despite its ubiquity in the United States, Cinco de Mayo doesn't get much fanfare in Mexico. One exception is in the city of Puebla, the site of the May 5, 1862 Battle of Puebla — roughly 50 years after Mexico declared independence from Spain — that Cinco de Mayo (theoretically) commemorates. And when it comes to Pueblan food, no dish carries more cachet than mole poblano, which I ate at Bugambilias Mexican Cuisine in Castleton.
Mole (moh -lay) poblano is a reddish-brown sauce ('mole' is derived from an Aztec word for 'mix' or 'sauce') of roughly 20 different ingredients, typically including dried chilies, tomatoes and more acidic tomatillos, seeds, nuts, raisins and chocolate. That beast of a grocery list coalesces in a smooth, profoundly flavorful sauce that cloaks two weighty pieces of fall-apart dark-meat chicken at Bugambilias ($19).
Most Americans are, I think, at least vaguely familiar with mole. I first became aware of it through my junior high Spanish textbook, where mole was just another vocab word to memorize alongside such foundational terms as buenos días, ¿cómo está? and, for reasons known only to God and the folks at McGraw Hill, hacer windsurf.
Some historians trace mole back to the pre-Hispanic Aztecs. One popular legend, meanwhile, tells of a Pueblan nun at the Convent of Santa Clara who, upon hearing the archbishop was on his way, threw together a sauce using the ingredients she had on hand, delighting the clergyman.
Until you've tasted mole poblano — and even after, frankly — it's difficult to fully appreciate its depth. Bugambilias' iteration has the sweetness and tongue-prickling heat of a spicy barbecue sauce, with the thick, fibrous texture of a North Indian curry. The chocolate and nuts add an extra dimension of flavor — what I would classify as 'oomph' — but you likely couldn't pick out those exact ingredients if you didn't know to expect them.
Of course, most Americans don't associate Cinco de Mayo with mole poblano, but rather alcohol. Cinco de Mayo has become a de facto drinking holiday in the United States, which many scholars attribute to American brewing titans Anheuser-Busch and Miller aggressively marketing their products to Spanish-speaking audiences and sponsoring Cinco de Mayo celebrations across the nation in the 1980s.
As you might expect, today's half-price margaritas are a far cry from early Cinco de Mayo celebrations. Then-Mexican President Benito Juárez declared May 5 a holiday mere days after the Battle of Puebla, in which a severely outmanned but well-fortified force of Mexican soldiers outlasted the first in a series of sieges by the French.
Word of Mexico's short-lived but inspirational victory at Puebla soon reached denizens of the small Central California town of Columbia, many of whom were born in Mexico and became American citizens in 1848 when the Mexican-American War ended and the United States gained seven states including California.
Columbia held the first recorded American celebration of Cinco de Mayo in 1863, spirited by the news of Mexico's unlikely success against the French. Those festivities spawned what has morphed into the heavily scrutinized, queso-doused and tequila-drunk occasion we know today.
Still, food has a way of preserving culture and, in the case of Bugambilias' mole poblano, doing so deliciously. If you're looking for a little Pueblan tradition this year, you might just find it by getting lost in the sauce.
What: Mole poblano, $19
In case that's not your thing: Bugambilias specializes in Pueblan cuisine, with dishes like tender steamed beef mixiote ($19), tacos árabes (meat seasoned similar to Middle Eastern shawarma, $5 each), and cemitas ($13 to $16), sandwiches on sesame seed-dotted rolls heaving with various toppings. You'll also find a slew of dishes more popular in the States like carne asada ($19) and taquitos ($13.50).
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