Observations from a Pulque Pilgrimage
Observations from a Pulque Pilgrimage
Pulque in D.F.
It’s just after 1 pm when I leave my apartment in the Mexico City Historic Center and walk a couple of blocks to Pulqueria La Antigua Roma (Ancient Rome). It’s an old school, no-nonsense place with plastic chairs in a square room with just four small tables. The floor is still wet, having been recently mopped; saloon-style doors swing lightly. Today’s selection of curados (flavored pulques) is fresa (strawberry), avena (oatmeal) and apio (celery).
For many, the flavor of natural pulque (the fermented sap of the maguey plant) is just too overbearing. It is certainly an acquired taste. I opt for avena and sit down to my corner table. Shortly after, a young couple enters to get some take-out, and a large, empty cola bottle is produced. While it’s being filled with strawberry pulque, the guy makes use of the urinal tucked away in one corner of the small room but in full view, a relic of the days when pulquerías were strictly male only.
I strike up a conversation with the attendant, a diminutive gent in his seventies, who tells me that the pulque arrives fresh daily (pulque doesn’t keep) from the nearby state of Tlaxcala. This very pulquería, I am informed, has been here for over 100 years, back to the days of the Mexican revolution. It shows.
Being oatmeal flavored and being pulque—thick, viscous like snot, or the phlegm of an ancient Aztec ruler—the experience is not dissimilar to porridge, gloppy and sweet with a sprinkling of cinnamon on top. A retro jukebox with a leopard skin finish blares for one song before dying to silence. I fire it up again and return to my seat, raise my glass, and lean back to enjoy. An altar to the virgin of Guadelupe adorns one wall; its flowers are tended by the old man.
From La Antigua Roma, it’s only a couple of minutes walk to Plaza Garibaldi, Mexico City’s famous home of mariachis where people are serenaded at all hours of the day and night to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, life itself. La Hermosa Hortensia (The Beautiful Hydrangea), founded in 1936, is situated on one corner of the square. It’s also a small space but far more elaborately adorned, with paintings of the agua miel (honey water) being extracted from the maguey plant, pulque being transported in barrels behind burdened burros, newspaper clippings of mariachis, and photos of patrons from long ago.
This time I sip on a durazno (peach) pulque while three gents at a nearby table extol the virtues of the pre-Hispanic tipple: it’s so healthy! I look out onto the square to see a lone mariachi striding by, holding his violin in a wooden case. The flavor is delicious, this time not dissimilar to the sweet syrup that accompanies canned peaches, but thicker. Another customer enquires about the effect that his glass of pulque will have on him. “No pasa nada!” is the immediate reply. “It’s just like a refresco, some people drink three to four liters.”
I head off to calle Regina and climb the stairs to the ardently leftist enclave that is La Burra Blanca (The White Donkey). Murals of revolutionary heroes Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata eyeball me as I raise the frothy nectar of the gods to my lips. Here it is a manzana (apple) pulque that trickles down my throat.
I finish my mug and with a slight fuzz overtaking me, I lean back in my chair, close my eyes and try to imagine the lives of the ancient Mexican indigenes, their culture, their rituals. A kaleidoscope of Mexican images flash through my mind, regurgitations of what I see all across this incredible city; cacti, stencils of colorful skulls, mangy stray dogs, pyramids, roaming vendors everywhere, quesadilla griddles tended by ancient señoras, slanted colonial buildings, organ grinders.
A man selling three-peso cigarettes snaps me back to the current reality. I order a refill, take another gulp, and look around at my fellow imbibers with a smile on my face. In no other country on earth can I do this. Pulque: it’s pre-Hispanic Mexico in a glass.