The Spice Markets of Oaxaca

The Mercado de Abastos wakes before the sun. By six, the aisles are already loud with the scrape of crates and the slap of tortillas on hot comals. I arrived with a notebook, a borrowed tote bag and a plan to be efficient. The market dismantled the plan within ten minutes.

Oaxaca is called the land of seven moles, and every stall seems to hold a different argument about which is best. Doña Remedios, who has sold from the same corner for thirty-one years, handed me a pinch of black paste on a wooden spoon. It tasted of smoke, dark chocolate and something I could only describe as the inside of a church. She watched my face and nodded, as if I had passed a test I did not know I was taking.

I spent three mornings there. The first was for looking, the second for tasting, and the third, finally, for buying. Chilhuacle negro, pasilla oaxaqueña, canela as soft as bark paper, tablets of chocolate ground with almonds and sugar. Each purchase came with instruction, delivered kindly and without the slightest interest in whether I could follow it.

Photographing a market is harder than it looks. The light is a mess of tarps and bare bulbs, and everyone is working. I learned to stand still for a long while, to buy something first, and to ask with my camera held low. Most people said yes. A few said yes and then ignored me completely, which gave me the best frames of the trip: hands weighing chiles, a boy asleep on sacks of masa, steam rising across a counter.

There is a particular patience in the way vendors sell. Nothing is rushed because nothing is thought of as a transaction only. You are being introduced to an ingredient, and the ingredient has a history, a cousin in the next village and a correct way to be toasted. When I asked Doña Remedios how she knew which mole a customer wanted, she laughed and said she did not know, the customer did, and her job was to wait.

I carried home two kilos of chiles wrapped in newspaper, and my suitcase smelled of them until November. In my Vancouver kitchen the first batch of mole took an entire Sunday and was, honestly, not very good. The second was better. The third made me cry a little, because for a moment it tasted exactly like that corner at six in the morning, with the coffee going cold in my hand.

If you go, go hungry and go early. Bring small bills and a bag you do not mind getting stained. Learn the words for more, less and thank you. And when someone holds out a spoon, take it. That is the whole itinerary, and it is enough to fill a week.

I think often about how little of travel is the famous thing. The cathedral in Oaxaca is lovely, and I have a photograph of it somewhere. But the picture I keep on my desk is of a pair of hands, flour to the wrist, holding out a tortilla still too hot to eat.