Every burner of Denisse Lina Chavez’s stove was covered with clay pots: low, wide cazuelas filled with simmering albóndigas (meatballs), costillos (pork ribs) and tomato rice, and a tall, urnlike olla with upstanding handles and a dark mass of beans.
Chavez, 47, is preparing to open a restaurant next month, but this elaborate meal was just family dinner. “Típico,” she said. None of it would be possible without her molcajete, a mortar carved from porous volcanic rock that, over time, soaks up the flavors of ingredients crushed inside and returns a trace of them to each new dish.
“It’s like water,” Chavez said. “It has to be in the kitchen always.”
She lives in the South Bronx, around the corner from both the bodega she has run for 11 years and the tiny adjacent storefront that her first restaurant, the beloved but short-lived Carnitas El Atoradero, once occupied. She closed it in March after her landlord raised the rent.
Now she’s considering a move to be closer to her forthcoming restaurant, El Atoradero Brooklyn, in Prospect Heights. (This time around, she has professional restaurateurs as partners.)
Growing up in a village under the volcano in Puebla, Mexico, the seventh of 11 children, she did not plan to be a chef. Her chores included fetching alfalfa for cows and gathering herbs her mother sold at market. She resisted. “I was always fighting,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is not my life.' “
At 16, she left for New York City. Only years later did she return to ask her mother and grandmother to teach her how to use the molcajete and cook true Mexican food.
In one fluid motion, she slipped a tomato into the basalt bowl, smashed it with a swirl of the temolote (pestle) and tipped the slurry into a pot. Of the molcajete’s weight, she said with a shrug, “You get used to it.”
Her Bronx restaurant seated 12; in Brooklyn, there will be room for 45. This is fine. Her grandmother used to cater parties, sometimes feeding a thousand guests.
She ruled the kitchen until she was 97, leaning on a cane and calling out instructions. (She died 10 years ago, at 115.) She never let Chavez write down recipes, in case someone stole them. “But sometimes I forget,” Chavez said.
The molcajete, painted with a pig’s snout, red-dot eyes and black flaps of ears, comes from Puebla, as do her giant bags of bay leaves and avocado criollo leaves shipped from her sister’s farm.
Before her mother died four years ago, she gave Chavez a temolote that had belonged to her grandmother. A century of knocking against stone has left it half its original size, rugged and lopsided, with the imprint of her grandmother’s hand.
It helped make her grandmother’s mole poblano the best in town.
“Her mole was better than mine,” Chavez said. “She’s not alive for me to ask what’s missing.”
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