Barbacoa de Borrego con Consomé Hidalguense

This is Hidalgo. Not the generic shredded beef the Tex-Mex chains call barbacoa, not pulled pork from a slow cooker, not anything you put on a sandwich. Real barbacoa is lamb, wrapped in penca de maguey, and slow-cooked over hours in a pit dug into the ground. In Actopan, in Tulancingo, in the small towns around Pachuca, men start the pits before sunrise on Saturday so the families can eat Sunday at ten in the morning, with the lamb falling apart and the consomé waiting in clay jarros.

The penca de maguey is not optional. It is the recipe. The agave leaf wraps the meat, traps the steam, and gives the lamb the herbal, faintly mineral note that no other wrapper produces. Banana leaf is a substitution for cooks who live far from a mercado that carries maguey. It will get you 70 percent of the way there. The remaining 30 percent is the soul of the dish and the reason cooks in Hidalgo keep digging pits.

The second secret of barbacoa hidalguense is the consomé. Below the meat, in the bottom of the pit or the pot, sits a vessel of water with garbanzo, rice, epazote, and a handful of aromatics. As the lamb cooks, every drop of rendered fat and chile adobo drips down through the maguey into that pot. What comes out four hours later is the most concentrated lamb broth you will ever taste, garnet-colored, salty, perfumed with epazote and pasilla. You eat the lamb in a taco. You drink the consomé from a clay jarro alongside. Two dishes, one cooking.

I spent a week in Actopan one summer, watching the barbacoyeros work. The pit cooking is theater and tradition, and you cannot reproduce it on a stovetop. What you can reproduce is the principle: lamb, maguey, steam, drip, consomé. My mother never made barbacoa, she was from Jalisco and Jalisco does birria. But the page in her notebook for Hidalgo barbacoa is one she copied during a visit to a comadre in Tulancingo in 1979. The adobo here is hers. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.