Seasoning Pastes, Marinades, and Sauces

The main categories of these preparations are moles, pepianes, adobos, and recados. Don’t expect to learn precise definitions of each—they tend to shade into each other, and terms like recado de adobo don’t help matters. But roughly speaking, recados are ground herb-and-spice mixtures ranging from the incredibly simple (at the ranch we used a mixture of garlic and oregano to rub on meat) to rather elaborate combinations of seasonings much like the garam masalas of India. They are especially important in the cooking of Yucatan. Adobos generally have dried chiles and (sometimes) vinegar in the seasoning mix and are used to marinate meat, fish, or poultry before roasting or grilling. Pepianes and moles are names for certain rich, multiflavored sauces usually thickened with ground seeds or nuts. Pepián, or pipián, is the direct descendant of dishes that the conquerors found Aztec cooks making with pumpkin seeds (nowadays sometimes also with sesame seeds or other nuts; the name is from pepitas, which refers to different kinds of seeds). Moles are of many types. Some lack the usual nuts or seeds, but some kind of ground chile is usually added for flavor and thickening. They are especially but not exclusively associated with the state of Oaxaca, “the land of the seven moles.”