Sauces and Sauce Enrichments

The family of Veracruzan sauces is really several families—plus several important sauce enrichments and one unclassifiable adoptee. One tribe is composed of relish-like table sauces, prepared with great skill from carefully chosen and very fresh ingredients and paired with many kinds of dishes. Table sauces can be either raw or cooked. Those of Veracruz are more varied and imaginative than those of any other region I know. At the same time, most are extremely simple, letting one or two basic ingredients do the talking. You can hardly imagine how much magic there is in a mixture of jalapeño chiles and lime juice (chile pastor) or a coarse puree of sweet, intense currant tomatoes with garlic and tiny hot chiles (tachogobi). I kept finding new sauces that I was tempted to serve with everything— only there were so many more. My absolute favorite is the Ori- zaba-style version of salsa macha, an inspired mixture of small hot chiles, garlic, and olive oil with peanuts.