The line between legend and actual history is often blurred by time, particularly when it comes to the origins of beloved foods. Such is the case of Oaxaca’s most popular cheese, quesillo, a type of string cheese that’s a member of the pasta filata (“spun paste” in Italian) family, similar to mozzarella. The most widespread origin story is that in 1885, Leobarda Castellanos, a 14-year-old girl in charge of preparing the cheese at her family’s business, got distracted and let the milk coagulate past the exact point for making cheese. To avoid being punished, she tipped hot water over the milk, accidentally creating a gummy product that unexpectedly became very popular among the clients of the Castellanos family in the Oaxacan village of Reyes Etla, the official birthplace of quesillo.

On my way out of Oaxaca center and on to the city of Santa Catarina Minas, a good friend suggested I make a pit stop to visit “Frida.” Me: “Wait! Frida? Frida Kahlo the Mexican art icon? But she died in 1954!” Him: “You'd better go and try her chile encuerado.” So here I am, having stopped in Ocotlán, only 32 kilometers south of Oaxaca city, to sample Frida’s “naked” chiles. I find my way to Mercado Morelos in Ocotlán’s main square, and immediately head for the many eateries in the medium-sized market’s food aisle. A sign is painted with flowers, roots, hummingbirds, butterflies and other insects – with these tell-tale motifs of the tormented artist, there can be no mistaking La Cocina de Frida.

Back in our college days, in the mid 2000s in Mexico City, we spent hours talking with our fellow students about the foods we missed the most from home. When we, the “Oaxacan delegation,” brought up piedrazos, everyone in the room laughed. They could not fathom something with such a name – piedrazo literally means to be hit with a hard stone in Spanish – as being edible. We had no idea that our beloved snack, a true classic in Oaxaca, was totally unfamiliar to the rest of our friends. A piedrazo is a piece of very, very hard crunchy bread (hence the name) with pickled carrot, onions and potatoes, dunked in a fruit- and chile-based vinegar and dusted with chile powder and – if you’re feeling fancy – quesillo (fresh Oaxacan cheese).

“When you like what you do, and you're young, nothing is impossible,” says Doña Juanita Hernandez, one of a handful of female master distillers in Oaxaca, the heart of Mexico’s small-scale mezcal industry. She sits, tiny and relaxed on a wooden bench as we sip mezcal in her distillery, El Rey Zapoteco, in the Oaxacan town of Santiago Matatlan. Doña Juanita herself was just a young girl when she started filling and labeling the bottles at her uncle’s distillery. He was the first person to bottle in the town, which has a long-held tradition of mezcal production. “[His brand was] Mezcal Matatlan,” she remembers. “He bought a bottling machine – a tiny one for four bottles at a time, and he had me fill the bottles and put on the labels.”

Gathered in the parks of Oaxaca during the early 2000s, groups of high school friends, including our dear Roberto, would herald in the end of another school year and the start of a summer of easy living with refreshing nieves in hand. A cup of icy, colorful nieve marked the beginning of carefree afternoons and liberation from homework. Lined up in their wooden containers, the diverse and bright array of fruit nieves resembled the exuberance of the summer unfolding around us: the rich green of the trees, the gentle yellow of the afternoon sun and petricor – a beautiful Spanish word describing the subtle and comforting smell of moist earth after rain.