Thanks to the generous support of the Centre for Regional and Local History at the University of Leicester, I was able to convene a small research workshop of people interested in regional/local identities in drinking cultures in December 2023. The programme was rich in variety, with papers on contemporary east London, northwest England, and Oaxaca, Mexico, alongside historical analyses of interwar Glasgow, Georgian Wales, 19th and 20th century Ireland and Mexico, and New York since the 1960s. Thematically, papers examined pubs as part of urban regeneration, private clubs as political spaces, branding and marketing of products like Guinness and mezcal, the role of female innkeepers, consumption practices of ethnic minorities, and the relationship between alcohol, food and identity.

That last theme was me, with a presentation on pulque and the culinary identity of central Mexico as a region. Usually, when I tell people I work on history of alcohol in Mexico, tequila is the first drink that comes to mind. This is testament to how tequila is now widely thought of as Mexico’s “national” drink, and plenty of guidebooks, cookbooks, history books, and drinks companies will tell you so. However, it wasn’t ever thus, and tequila’s reputation as Mexico’s “national” drink only became cemented in the mid-to-late 20^th century. I wrote about how that came to be, via discussion of the concept of authenticity and the way time contributes to its construction, in an article called “Mexico’s National Drinks: Pulque, Tequila and the Temporalities of Authenticity”, which has a published version in the Food & History journal and an open access version.

My presentation at the workshop concentrated less on pulque’s historical role as a national symbol and more on its place in regional cooking and identity. For those not familiar, pulque is a fermented alcoholic drink produced mainly in the central Mexican region from enormous varieties of the agave, or maguey, plant. People have been making it there for at least 2,000 years and it generally doesn’t travel well beyond the central Mexican region because it continues fermenting quite quickly and can spoil. Nor have there been particularly successful attempts to preserve it for transport. There are some canned varieties but I shan’t mention them, as I’ve been taught “if you can’t say anything nice…”

The enormous agave varieties, from which pulque is made, grow best in the high plains of Mexico, Puebla, Hidalgo and Tlaxcala, and it became a familiar refrain in food writing from the early 19th century onwards to herald the Plains of Apam – los llanos de Apan – as producing the very best pulque – “los pulques mas finos de los llanos de Apan”. This regional boast featured also in famous fiction of the 19th century, such as Manuel Payno’s Los bandidos de Rio Frio (1888-91) and in the decor of bars selling pulque, as a local and immediate form of marketing and cultural celebration.

To produce pulque, sweet sap, known as aguamiel or neutli is extracted from the heart of the plant and fermented naturally. This has remained a largely manual process across history, although the scale of pulque production expanded enormously between the 16^th and 20^th centuries, before slowly contracting across the 20^th century. After collecting aguamiel from several agaves, it is taken to ferment at the tinacal (a cool and dry room), where multiple tanks containing aguamiel or pulque at different stages of fermentation are topped up with fresh aguamiel periodically.  Although the fermentation process can take from 7 to 14 days, the high content of sugars in the aguamiel begins fermenting from the very same day it is collected. Some roots or barks can be mixed with the new aguamiel to speed up fermentation. Each producer tends to have their own different method of managing this process which is passed down through families or learned through experience.

Elements of pulque’s place in culinary tradition were codified in nineteenth-century recipe books, and continued to be articulated in food writing well into the twentieth century. These included pulque’s use as a cooking liquor for meat, as the base of a famous sauce (salsa borracha, or drunken sauce), and as the ideal accompaniment for certain regional dishes (especially barbacoa, or maguey-roasted meat). In some cases, this use of pulque was identified as a “Mexican-style” flourish, even in books addressing a very wealthy elite audience, such as El cocinero mexicano (1831), probably the first published Mexican cookbook. Its recipe for Mexican-style ham instructs the cook to “follow the same procedure as for recipe 30 [Spanish-style ham], but instead of cooking the ham for the second time in wine and vinegar, use pulque.”

Thanks to my lovely friend and colleague Rocio, I know that pulque remains very widely used in bakery and confectionary in parts of central Mexico, especially Puebla, as it was in the descriptions of its use in Mexico’s earliest published cookbooks. For example, in the city of Puebla it is still very common to come across meringues that are made with pulque: it works as a preservative and emulsifier to keep the meringues fresh.

Consuming the drink in the form of curados – flavoured with various fruits, nuts and aromatics – has also been popular and widespread since at least the 16th century. Adding fruits and other flavourings became very common in 17^th/18^th century pulqueries – probably largely as a means for retailers to make the most of pulque that was losing its freshness . Over time, this became the most popular way to consume pulque in urban centres, and recipes were included in early recipe books. For example the 1845 Diccionario de cocina included recipes for curados of guava, egg, pineapple, prickly pear, almond, orange, orange blossom and peanut flavoured pulques. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, La cocinera poblana (1890) declared that there “are so many ways of curing pulque and they are so well known” that it was unnecessary to reproduce them for its readers.

So rooted in central Mexico has pulque been that, in the days before our family trip to the state of Quintana Roo – on Mexico’s Caribbean coast – when my husband asked if he would be able to try pulque there, I said “no chance.” Due to the fact the enormous agave varieties you need to make it don’t grow there, and it’s difficult to transport it so far without spoiling, I was sad to disappoint his hopes, but had no choice. Well, you can imagine my surprise when, on day 2 of our holiday, we arrived at a pulqueria in the town of Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo…

To be continued…