86 SAVEUR.COM
PHILADELPHIA
to PUEBLA
Clockwise from top:
Waiter Benjamin Telléz
sets up for service
at Milli; tomatillos des-
tined for green salsa; a
ceramic pot of mole;
Gabriella Hernández
makes fresh tortillas.poblano (“mole” comes from the Nahuatl word mōlli, or “sauce”)
is significantly spicier and without the customary chocolate.
In a spicy, chile-tomato mich mole, the cooks use dried bandera
fish fillets from the Pacific coast of Chiapas to add brininess and
umami. In the spring, they make tacos from shredded, cooked
maguey (agave) hearts, and turn the f lowers, which only bloom
once in the plant’s 15- to 20-year life span, into a soup, tempering
its bright green bitterness with dollops of crema. The cooks fea-
ture fresh corn elote, walnuts, and capulin cherries in late sum-
mer, and a soup of orange marigold f lowers in the fall.
For the people of Ozolco, food and land are both a comfort and
a means to make a living. On the edge of town, terraced farm
plots lead down into the surrounding valleys, in which newly
built homes with elaborate metal gates are scattered in various
states of completion. Many are empty, waiting for their owners to
return from Philadelphia, where they’re still working to pay for
the construction. Here, farmers practice the traditional milpa
agricultural system, in which maiz, beans, squash, maguey, and
other plants are cultivated together to enhance yields and en-
courage sustainable, nutrient-rich farmland year after year.
Women carry buckets of nixtamalized corn to community moli-
nos, or corn grinders, to make their masa. There’s a tortilleria inWednesdays and Saturdays, and arrives
the next day in Philadelphia. They use it
to send care packages filled with mole,
sweet pan de muerto, walnuts, and pinole,
a type of roasted, sweetened ground corn.
“It was hard to leave Philly. I had spent al-
most half my life there,” says Lino, who
missed his parents and returned home to
help support them. “Sometimes when I’m
here, I dream I’m there.”
Others are returning home now too. In
the last decade, more Mexicans have left
the U.S. than have entered it, and young
people are less inclined to leave Ozolco
today as the journey grows more danger-
ous and expensive. “I think a lot of people
want another option before leaving their
family, their kids,” Leo says. Before Milli,
he and other former migrants started sev-
eral other cooperatives, organizing both
an annual music and pulque festival, and
making ice cream and tostadas. But doing
something new has been hard in a con-
servative town wary of change and new
ideas; there are few supporters besides
one another. “In the pueblo, everyone
doubts what you’re capable of, doubts that
you have ambition to do things, because
you’re young,” Leo says. “They don’t know
that we intend to be successful.”
Gabriella Hernández, Lino’s wife,
hovers over the comal on the edge of
Milli’s dining room. She never left
Ozolco, but both of her brothers live
in Philadelphia. With quiet speed, she
presses freshly ground red, blue, and
yellow masa into spongy disks for tor-
tillas, oblong tlacoyos that get stuffed
with refried ayocote beans, salsa-
smeared sopes, or quesadillas filled with
leafy green quelites and stringy quesillo
cheese. “It’s difficult work,” Lino says.
“Women are taught how to make torti-
llas when they are kids, but not us. They
make tortillas every day in the pueblo.”
Lino learned how to cook many of
Milli’s traditional, seasonal dishes from
his mother. In winter, he prepares a tra-
ditional Nahuatl dish called ayonanactl,
in which chilacayote squash are buried
to ferment for 15 days under the heat of
the sun. He then combines the pulp with
onion, garlic, mint, and guajillo chiles to
make a pre-Hispanic-style tamale with
a surprisingly fishy f lavor. But his time
abroad has also encouraged him to take
more creative approaches to some prepa-
rations. Milli’s version of the popular mole