Nenguanitos en Miel de Piloncillo

These are from Oaxaca. From the Valles Centrales specifically, where the women set up wide flat baskets outside the churches on Sunday mornings and sell nenguanitos to the families coming out of mass. You will not find them in Mexico City unless an oaxaquena has set up a stand. They are local, stubbornly so, and they belong to the dulceria tradition that runs through Oaxacan cooking from the convents of the colonial period to the home kitchens of San Agustin Yatareni today.

The biscuit itself is wheat, not corn. Oaxaca has a serious wheat tradition, brought by the Spanish and embedded in the convent kitchens, and the dulces de trigo, pan de yema, marquesote, nenguanitos, are part of that lineage. The dough is rich with manteca and a touch of anise, fried until the surface crackles, then dropped warm into a dark piloncillo syrup spiced with canela, clove, and orange peel. Three or four pressed together while the syrup is still warm. That cluster is the dish. A single nenguanito is a snack. A cluster is nenguanitos.

A senora at Jardin Socrates taught me how to glaze them properly one Sunday morning in 2011. She had been making them for thirty-two years. She told me: do not let the syrup get too thick before you dip them, and do not be shy when you press them together. The cluster has to look like it grew that way. I have made them dozens of times since and I still hear her voice when I press the warm biscuits into the spoon. Cada estado, su propia cocina. This one belongs to Oaxaca.