The Cooking Class

The kitchen at the back of the old bookshop on Magazine Street was not very big, but on Saturday afternoons it was the warmest place in New Orleans. Eight home cooks stood around a long wooden table covered in bowls of dried chilies, nuts, seeds, chocolate and spices, waiting for Chef Ramon Villalobos to begin.

Ramon had grown up in Oaxaca, in the south of Mexico, and had been cooking in New Orleans for twelve years. He ran a small restaurant near the river, and once a month he taught a class. Today's was the most popular of the year: mole negro, the dark, rich sauce that his grandmother had made for every wedding, birthday and funeral in the family.

"First, a warning," he said, smiling. "Mole is not a recipe. It is a project. My grandmother started on Thursday for a party on Sunday. We have four hours, so we are going to cheat a little. Don't tell her."

The students introduced themselves while they worked. There was Dolores, a retired schoolteacher who made the best gumbo on her street and wanted to learn something new; Marcus, a firefighter who cooked for his whole station; a young couple, Jen and Sam, who had just bought their first house and wanted to impress their parents; and a very serious man called Mr. Thibodeaux, who wrote down everything Ramon said in a small black notebook, including the jokes.

They began by removing the seeds from the chilies and toasting them in a hot, dry pan. "Not too long," Ramon warned. "Ten seconds too long and they are bitter, and then the whole mole is bitter, and then your mother-in-law is bitter." Jen and Sam exchanged a nervous look. Then came the onions and garlic, roasted until they were black at the edges, and the nuts and seeds, toasted one kind at a time because each one burns at a different moment.

While they were grinding everything in a heavy stone bowl that Ramon had brought from Oaxaca, Dolores asked him how he had learned to speak English. He laughed. "Badly, at first. In my first week in this city, I went to a doctor because I had a terrible cold. I wanted to say «estoy constipado», which in Spanish just means you have a blocked nose. So I said, very confidently, that I was constipated." The whole class burst out laughing. "The doctor gave me some very strange medicine," Ramon added.

That opened the floodgates. Marcus told them about his Puerto Rican grandmother, who for years had told the neighbors that her grandson was very "sensible" when she meant sensitive. Dolores remembered a Spanish exchange student who had once announced to her whole class that he was pregnant, when all he meant was that he was embarrassed. "English and Spanish are like cousins," Ramon said. "They look alike, but you cannot always trust them."

By the third hour, the kitchen smelled extraordinary. The ground paste went into a deep pot with tomatoes, stock and a little sugar, and finally Ramon broke a dark, crumbly block of Mexican chocolate into it. "Now we stir," he said, "and we wait, and we talk. This is the real recipe." So they stirred and talked. Mr. Thibodeaux, who had not said a word all afternoon, suddenly put down his notebook and told them that his wife had been the cook in their house for forty years. She had died the previous winter. "I'm learning," he said simply. "I'm actually not bad at it."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Dolores put her hand on his arm and asked for his address, because she was going to bring him some gumbo on Monday, and he was going to tell her honestly whether it was better than his wife's.

At six o'clock, they sat down together at the long table with plates of chicken covered in thick, dark mole, warm tortillas and rice. It was sweet and smoky and spicy all at once, and it tasted, Marcus said, like a story with a lot of chapters. Ramon looked pleased. "My grandmother would say it needs another day," he admitted. "But she would eat two plates."

Before they left, Mr. Thibodeaux showed Ramon his notebook. On the last page, under the recipe, he had written a list of names and phone numbers: everyone in the class. "In case I need help with the chilies," he said. Ramon suspected that the chilies had nothing to do with it.