Many of you like to nibble some chicken snacks along with your drink, don't you? What if your drink itself has chicken in it? Interested? Hear it out before you dismiss this as a pipe dream or a joke.
Welcome to Oaxaca and its neighbouring states in Mexico. A plea for a drink would take you to the signature drinks of the country - either tequila or mezcal - both made from agave fruit. While tequila is made from distilling the blue agave, mezcal is flexible and can involve a variety of agave into the making of the drink. But we are here for chicken, right? The name of the password is mezcal de pechuga. Yeah, it is mezcal with a twist.
The process of making tequila and mezcal are almost the same. The first step is to cut and remove the heart of the agave plant, then roast it in an earthen pit after crushing it into pieces, and finally ferment it in open vats. Usually, the liquid is distilled twice in stills. Here, Mezcal (forget tequila, please) is ready, but one significant step short of the drink we are here for — mezcal de pechuga.
Pechuga means breast, chicken breast. So how do you travel from mezcal to pechuga. Chop chicken into pieces and throw them into the drink straight? No, that's sacrilege!
Mezcal, once it is made, is distilled a third time with local fruits and vegetables. This time the froth would be staring through the boil at a fat chicken suspended over the cauldron. As the rising vapour slowly cooks the meat, rich juice of fat would be dripping down into the mezcal as a sign of gratitude, adding a rich texture to the seething liquid.
Don't worry. The final drink would not taste anything like chicken broth or chicken curry. The meat is meant to impart only a rich savoury undertone to the drink, strong enough to balance the sweetness of the fruits that went into it.
Mezcal de Penchuga is ready!
Although tequila and mezcal have been nourishing those thirsty souls in and around Mexico for the last 500 years, there's no visible lineage for pechuga. Perhaps it came as a novelty in the early part of 20th century. Many others believe that like mezcal, pechuga also evolved as a rustic drink, hidden, handcrafted in villages, the formula being passed down through many generations. To think pechuga, which demands fruits, vegetables and meat, as an everyday affair for the villagers of Mexico can only be a stretch of imagination. They generally make it on important occasions like festivals, weddings and funerals. However, nowadays you can buy a bottle from a store or a restaurant.
One things leads to another, and the pechuga experiment just hasn't stopped with chicken. Today if you visit Mexico, you will get pechuga made from ham, deer, rabbit and a wide variety of other animals. Do they make any difference in taste? Hardly. But, well, the difference is all there in the head of the one who sips pechuga with the animal in his mind.
So how should one drink pechuga? First rule. No fancy glassware. No ice to numb the chicken. No soft drinks to kill the fruits and vegetables. No other mix save plain water. Only if you keep everything else silent you can pick the faint and distant note of the ingredients, including that rich mouthfeel that the chicken imparted.
Stigibeu! (Cheers to the life force around you).
(Manu Remakant is a freelance writer who also runs a video blog - A Cup of Kavitha - introducing world poetry to Malayalees. Views expressed here are personal)
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