The Fruit of the Nopal

Sierra Taramuhara, Chihuahua, Mexico- After a while solo on the ranch, my supplies were quite low, forcing me to be creative about my cuisine (how many combination can you make with beans, rice, and oats?). One way I got creative was to mount up on my horse and roam the hills harvesting tuna, the fruit of the nopal cactus.

Beans, beans, they´re good for your heart...

The nopal grows in the most arid, sun-baked hillsides of the Sierra.  The leaves of the cactus are round and thin, like green flapjacks glued together and turned on end, but you would not want to take a bite out of these.  The two-inch thorns grow on every possible surface of the leaf.  They can pierce through leather and have cruel barbs that break off in your skin when you to remove the spines.  A hard land calls for tough defenses.

The tunas are magenta lobes, oblong with a smooth curve like sandstone river rocks that have been worn into shape by the steady pressures of their environment.  They protrude from the thin edge of the the leaves at random points so that they seems to be foreign growths instead of the fruit of the plant.  The fruit itself has its defenses-- minuscule spines that grow from almost invisible nodes on the skin.  To eat it, one must carefully peel this outer layer so that the spines will not stick in the lips and tongue ( I learned this the hard way. I was told that the only cures for a mouthful of spines were to lick a woman's hair or the mane of a horse. I definitely would have preferred the first cure, but there was a shortage of women around the ranch...).  Inside the fruit is smooth and fiber-less, and like the sleek side of a brook trout.  The black bee-bee seeds (which work wonders on someone with an all-starch diet) are packed between the viscera and juice.

This luscious fruit that tastes of melon and honey, is brighter than blood, and slick like the skin of a child still wet from a bath, is a mystery to me.  How can something so vibrant, so liquid, so symmetrical be at home here in the ragged and thorn-filled sweep of the parched steeps around it.  How can something so wholesome, positively pulsing with nutrients, a free gift of nourishment to man or beast, be the product of a land soaked in the blood of it´s inhabitants, a land where nothing comes free of struggle?  The sun keeps rising in the morning, flooding the sky with deep pink.  The cruel cactus takes this light, and inexplicably, from between the vicious barbs, presents us the tuna.