Manchamanteles Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Manchamanteles is a sweet-and-savory stew built on a thick sauce of dried chiles, rehydrated and ground, then layered with the sweetness of fruit such as pineapple and plantain. Its name means "the thing that stains tablecloths"—a nod to the deep-colored sauce that splashes across white linen at a festive table. It belongs to the convent-cooking tradition of central Mexico, in Puebla and Oaxaca.

The chiles and pineapple that carry the dish, along with the tomato beneath them, are all long-established local foods. Chiles and tomatoes were on everyday tables across pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, and pineapple—though it first arose in South America—was being grown in Mexico around two thousand years ago and was widely available by the time of the conquest. The ingredients that give this stew its sweet-and-savory outline were on hand from the start.

Onto that table, across the Atlantic, came pork and chorizo, plantain, cinnamon and almonds. Into the native base of chiles and fruit, the meats and spices of the Old World were woven. Manchamanteles took shape as one of the composite moles of colonial New Spain, a dish in which the foodstuffs of two worlds melted together in a single pot. Until the Old World's meats and spices reached this land, this sweet-and-savory stew had no way of coming into being.

Out of the same colonial kitchens grew Mole Poblano, built instead around turkey and Old World spices. The two are sisters, sharing the older mole form and the deeper molli layer beneath it, but they are distinct dishes with different lead ingredients. Neither came first; both grew up side by side from common ground.

Manchamanteles carries the kind of charming invention tale that clings to mole dishes. A deaf nun (or one with some other disability) in a convent, the story goes, added ingredients by mistake, the result was an unexpected hit, and the recipe spread from there. But this is drawn from exactly the same mold as the tale of Mole Poblano being improvised at the Santa Rosa convent: a single inventor, a single accident, a convent for a stage. No contemporary record stands behind this made-up tradition, and the food historian Rachel Laudan dismisses this type of origin tale as a later story.

Manchamanteles first appears in writing in a manuscript kept at the Santa Jerónimo convent in Mexico City, the cookbook "Libro de cocina" attributed to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—a copy judged authentic, an eighteenth-century transcription of a seventeenth-century original. Yet the manchamanteles set down there is made of chile, sesame, chicken, banana, sweet potato and apple; the pork and pineapple we now picture are absent. The current sweet-and-savory version was layered on in later times, following the same path by which chocolate was added to Mole Poblano after the fact. First mention is not first making. This dish came not from one hand or one night's accident but took shape gradually, as the ingredients of two worlds mixed over many generations.

One question about its origin remains unsettled. Manchamanteles is counted among Oaxaca's "seven moles," and Oaxacans claim it as their own, while people in Puebla will not concede it. Both states have deep traditions of colonial convent cooking, and the earliest witness—the Sor Juana manuscript—belongs to a convent in Mexico City, which is neither. On the record the regional attribution cannot be settled, and the accounts stand side by side.