Schadenfreude is rather succinctly defined as ‘pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune’. And sadistic pleasure is writ large all over my friend Juan-Carlos’s face as he hears me place my order for a portion of the innocuous sounding ‘tuna salad’. It’s a hot summer’s day and we’re at Mexico City’s Xochimilco Mercado — a suburban food market where you can find some of the country’s most exotic dishes plated out at colourful cantina bars and ubiquitous taquería stalls.
One bite into the salad and I sense something amiss. The expected briny hit of piscine pleasure from the tuna is replaced by a rather sweet, astringent and vegetal taste, the likes of which I’d hitherto never experienced. That’s when I find out to my chagrin that ‘tuna’ is what Mexicans call the prickly pear cactus fruit that finds itself in everything from the aforementioned fruit salad to refreshing summer libations and a whole lot in between. If cleaned improperly, one can expect an itchy tongue — a sensation I am thankfully spared. And so, just like that, my initiation into Mexico’s exotic world of cactus cuisine is complete.
While most of us have encountered the use of cactus — especially the agave variety — as the chief ingredient in one of the world’s favourite tipples aka tequila, and in mezcal, its lesser-known cousin, a tryst with true-blue Mexicano cuisine adds a whole lot more to the pot (pun fully intended). Putting aside all the usual edible Mexican tropes of nachos, burritos and other unauthentic specimens of their ilk, I soon discover a wealth of cactus-centric delicacies.
I am lucky to witness a cactus ‘free-for-all’ at the annual Feria de Nopales (Cactus Fair) in the central Mexican village of Tlaxcalancingo in the state of Puebla. This homage to the nopal cactus, the village’s most important crop, has stalls selling all sorts of cacti-redolent dishes like huaraches (stuffed nopales) and the divine ensalada de nopalitos (nopal salad). But the most popular dish is always the tacos de nopalitos. And as if the cactus-stuffed taco isn’t exotic enough, this scrumptious iteration is made with the rare blue corn and served with roast pork, all anointed with green tomatillo sauce.
In the quaint little pre-Columbian town of Tepoztlán, a mere hour’s drive south of the country’s capital Mexico City, I encounter more edible varieties of cacti. In the mercado that runs parallel to Avenida Revolucion, the town’s main street, I see rows of nopal vendors busy scraping off the pointy spines (called agüates) and dicing the cactus pads, so that shoppers can take them home and cook them up into other regional specialities like the fiendishly good, chipotle sauce-saturated nopales en chipotle adobado (which I tried satisfactorily at the nearby Restaurant Villa Cardel later that day).
Tepoznieves Ice Cream, with its three psychedelically-coloured branches, bizarrely located in a radius of less than 100 feet from each other, is a bona fide Tepoztlán icon. And as a fitting end to my tryst with cactus, it is here that I get my fix of the rather kitschy-n-kooky parlour’s ‘cactus creations’ featuring the likes of nopal sorbet, mezcal gelato and yes, tuna ice cream.
Raul Dias is a Mumbai-based food and travel writer who is an ardent devotee of the peripatetic way of life.
