from the New York Times ╱ 11 September 2013

Spinning around

Some maintain that “árabes” specify lamb, “al pastor” being the term of art for pork-on-a-spit. Evidently árabes are also associated with a particular pita-esque flatbread. In Northern Mexico, they are called “trompos,” or, for a variation in a flour tortilla, “gringas” (for the freckles on the tortilla).

Puebla gets credit for the invention of mole sauce — that would be mole poblano. The city hosted a mole festival in May 2012 that drew star chefs from north of the border, and in both humble and fancy restaurants, mole regularly appears on meats, over enchiladas and under fried eggs for breakfast. Another delicacy that spread from Puebla outward is pipián sauce, made with pumpkin seeds, and a dish that happens to be my favorite, partly because it’s such an ingenious mixture of savory and sweet and partly because it’s available only at certain times of the year when the ingredients are fresh. That is chiles en nogada, a green chili stuffed with a concoction of meat and dried fruits, topped with a walnut cream sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds.

But by and large, I prefer the city’s street food, which is not necessarily less elaborate to prepare than the moles and pipiáns but certainly faster to cook — and eat. Hugely popular family restaurants like Las Ranas and La Oriental specialize in what’s essentially a street classic: tacos árabes, made with pork shaved off a rotating hunk of meat and allegedly brought to the country (hence its name) by the wave of Lebanese immigrants who arrived in the 1930s and recreated, on this continent, this Latin-accented version of shawarma.

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