Taco de Barbacoa de Borrego

A cook in Actopan opens a pit at six in the morning on a Sunday by levering a sheet of corrugated metal off the brick mouth and pulling away a layer of dirt that has sealed it since the previous evening. A column of steam comes up that smells of cooked sheep fat, charred maguey, and the faint ferment of pulque from the marinade. Inside, on a wood rack a meter deep, is a whole borrego wrapped in maguey leaves so that the leaves have charred at their edges and the meat below them has gone from raw red to the soft fawn of long collagen breakdown. Underneath the rack a copper or clay catch-pot holds the night's drip with a layer of chickpeas at the bottom.

The animal carries the name and the work. Lamb runs richer and more assertively flavored than the goat and beef versions of the same pit method, and the long overnight cook is the technique the protein demanded into existence rather than the other way around. Sheep meat under-cooked stays tight and chewy and pushes the gaminess hard against the front of the palate; lamb cooked through the full collagen breakdown lets the fat render into the catch-pot and the muscle fibers slip apart with no resistance. The maguey leaves add a faint vegetal and slightly bitter note that the eater can pick out from the back of a bite, the way smoked pork carries a memory of the wood it was over. The chile salsa borracha brought to the table after the meat is sliced does the cutting work.

The build fails at the seal of the pit and at the doneness window. A pit not sealed tightly enough lets too much steam escape and the fat renders dry rather than into the catch-pot, so the meat shreds dry and the consomé never reaches its dark color. A pit packed without the maguey lining loses the herbal note and the meat tastes of plain steamed lamb. A whole sheep pulled at the wrong hour comes out tough at the leg and overcooked at the rib, because the larger cuts need more time at temperature than the smaller ones; the experienced pit cook stages the cuts in the pit accordingly. The corn round is small, doubled, warmed on the comal next to the pit because a single one tears under wet shredded lamb in two bites.

The smell coming off a Saturday pit cook arrives in the village square before the cook has finished pulling the meat, sweet sheep fat carried on the morning damp with a thread of pulque ferment behind it. The first bite hits warm and fat-saturated, the doubled corn soft under the hot pull, the lamb's gaminess balanced by the salsa borracha spooned across the meat. The chickpeas from the catch-pot get scooped into the cup with a piece of toasted bread to sop, and the consomé goes down steaming, salt-deep and slightly sweet. The bite ends fast because the doubled corn is wet enough that the eater is on a clock, and the cook has another taco ready before the first is finished.

The grammar at a Hidalgo barbacoyero is regional and tied to the cut. Maciza calls for lean shoulder, panza for the belly fat, surtida for a mixed pull, completa for everything on a single shoulder including the gelatinous pieces. Pancita, the lamb-tripe and offal stew prepared from the organs in the catch-pot, gets ordered separately at the same counter. The pit's mouth is open to the customers; a regular comes early on Sunday with a steel pot and orders un kilo para llevar for the household lunch the same day. Pulque blanco or curado in a clay jarra is the standing accompaniment, and a Saturday weekend feast with pulque is the standing institution of the Hidalgo Valle del Mezquital.

The closest sibling is barbacoa de res, the beef-cheek and beef-head version that became dominant in the northern states and in Texas, where the pit method survived the migration but the animal changed; the change of animal mutes the gaminess, sweetens the rendered drip, and yields a different dish under the same family name. The Yucatecan cochinita pibil is built on the same earth-oven principle but uses pork marinated in recado rojo rather than chile-rubbed lamb, and the banana-leaf wrap replaces the maguey. The Jalisco birria de chivo shares the chile adobo but is pot-braised rather than pit-cooked, and the goat changes the flavor profile substantially. The lamb pit-cook with the maguey wrap and the pulque-based table salsa is the build specifically associated with Hidalgo.

Origin and history

The earth-oven cook that the name describes predates Spanish arrival in the Americas. Indigenous peoples in the central plateau cooked agave hearts and game in pit ovens for ritual and feast purposes well before the sixteenth century, and the technique survived contact intact because the pit was easier to maintain than the colonial brick oven and produced a meat that no other equipment of the period could reproduce. Spanish colonists brought sheep to New Spain in the sixteenth century and the Hidalgo highland country, with its open dry slopes and abundant maguey, became one of the country's sheep-raising regions; the introduced animal was adapted into the existing pit technology rather than producing a new one.

The written record begins in the early nineteenth century. The 1831 Mexican cookbook El Cocinero Mexicano already documents several variants of barbacoa preparation including a small-animal version and a mountain version, all of them using the horno de tierra the technique still depends on. The Hidalgo lamb version with maguey leaf wrapping and salsa borracha is documented by name in regional cookery writing through the mid-twentieth century; Diana Kennedy's surveys of regional Mexican cuisine from the 1970s onward record it as the standing weekend specialty across the state, with Actopan, Tulancingo, and Atotonilco el Grande as the principal towns.

The institutional fixture is the Feria Nacional de la Barbacoa in Actopan, established by the municipality in 1988 and held annually each July; the ten-day fair draws over a hundred thousand visitors and is the single largest commercial event tied to the dish. UNESCO inscribed traditional Mexican cuisine as Intangible Cultural Heritage in November 2010 with the pit-cooked barbacoa tradition named explicitly among the practices the inscription was made to safeguard. The first edition of the Actopan fair opened in the town's main square in July 1988 with pit-cook demonstrations and a competition among the town's barbacoyeros.