It turns out Rick Bayless isn’t singularly responsible for my impression that a perfect mole should make everyone cry. It was the film version of Like Water for Chocolate. Apparently it made a lot of sense to me that you would [contains spoiler] wind up eating matches and bursting into flames because the guy who loved but would never run off with you has died in your bed after years of being married to your flatulent sister. I cried and cried when I first watched it in 1992, and I cried and cried when I re-watched it recently, probably only because I was overtired from being out extremely late the night before. Why does everyone else go to bed before I do?

Years later, I watched Rick Bayless make a mole on Top Chef Masters that made the judges cry, or maybe he was the only one crying? It’s possible he too was crying from being overtired–he had spent a very long day trying to recreate a 70-ingredient mole without a recipe under the stress of competitive TV cooking. But I’d like to imagine it otherwise. I would like to imagine it was the closest he could have come in a reality television setting to Tita’s mole in Like Water for Chocolate, which was prepared not only bra-less, but with so much passion that it sent an entire wedding party into fits of tears—or diarrhea, or lovemaking, or, shoot—it’s been a couple of weeks now and details of the plot are getting a little hazy. I haven’t been cooking very much this summer but maybe I will pull it together and prepare a bra-less mole of my own. I think Laura Esquivel’s book contains some recipes, and if I tried to track that down, I could probably even figure out in advance which effect I might expect in order to tip off any dinner guests with sensitive stomachs or emotions. But wouldn’t that ruin it? Blessed are the match eaters. I think that’s right, but I’m only half Catholic.