May: Fire, Feast and Flower — A Chef’s Journey Through Mexico’s Most Symbolic Month

may, 2025

By Chef Fernando Stovell

MAY IS NOT A QUIET MONTH IN MEXICO. IT ARRIVES LIKE A SLOW-BURNING EMBER—GENTLE AT FIRST, AND SUDDENLY ALIVE, FULL OF LIGHT, COLOUR, AND RHYTHM.

For a chef, May is not merely a seasonal shift—it is a cultural crescendo, a moment where history, family, and fire converge in the kitchen and spill out into the streets.

As both a cook and a storyteller, I find May to be one of the most sensorially complex and spiritually profound months in the Mexican calendar. It is a time of celebration, remembrance, matriarchs, and of the land itself, awakening from its dry slumber with offerings both tender and wild.

3rd May
Día de la Santa Cruz: The Sacred Geometry of Fire

In many parts of Mexico, especially among builders and artisans, May begins with Día de la Santa Cruz—a celebration that honours not only the Christian cross, but also the structure and soul of creation itself.

For those of us who cook with wood and stone, who understand the sacred geometry of a firepit or traditional oven, this day carries deep meaning.

It is common to see crosses adorned with flowers atop buildings under construction, and families gathered to prepare humble meals in honour of the builders’ patron saint. Tamales steamed in banana leaves, charcoal-seared nopales, beans slowly cooked over embers—flavours of simplicity, built upon the foundation of fire. In my own kitchen, I honour this day with a dish that is both humble and reverent:

Hoja santa-wrapped maize parcels, cooked in orchard wood ashes, served over a black bean and avocado leaf purée.

It’s a dish that tastes of the earth, the flame, and the hands that shape both.

5th May
Puebla and the Language of Resistance

Cinco de Mayo is too often reduced to a caricature abroad—margaritas and sombreros stripped of meaning. But in Puebla, it is a day of solemn pride and culinary identity.

It commemorates the unlikely victory of the Mexican army against French forces in 1862, a reminder that flavour, like history, resists erasure. Puebla gave us mole poblano, arguably one of the most intellectually complex sauces in the world. A tapestry of chilli, spices, nuts, fruit, and bitter cacao—mole is a metaphor for Mexican identity: layered, bold, unapologetically baroque.

At this time of year, I revisit mole not as a sauce, but as a landscape—reduced, refined, lightly smoked over mesquite and served with wild quail or charred young vegetables, letting the sauce speak as the central voice.

10th May
Día de las Madres: A Nation Pauses

No celebration in Mexico is as sacred as Mother’s Day. It is not merely a cultural custom—it is an emotional landmark.

Restaurants fill with multi-generational families, florists work around the clock, and kitchens hum with ancestral memory.

In my own life, although my grandmother was Austrian and my mother British, our home was scented with the unmistakable soul of Mexico. My mother—curious, passionate, and respectfully devoted—learned to cook extraordinary Mexican dishes thanks to the patience and warmth of my Mexican aunties, who shared with her their recipes, techniques, and love for the land. Through them, she inherited flavours that now live on through me.
For this day, I prepare dishes that honour mothers as creators, nurturers, and quiet warriors. One that feels just right:

A broth made from corn husks and smoked flor de calabaza, poured over roasted white beans and quelites—a dish as soft and deep as a lullaby.

The Ingredient Spectrum of May

May is the month when Mexico stretches wide. Markets overflow with new greens — quelites, huauzontle, purslane, epazote — each one a gift from the waking earth. Young fruits appear: capulines, wild plums, early criollo mangoes. It is a time of edible flowers: izote, calabaza, and even hibiscus begin to arrive. Everything is fleeting and fragrant.

It is also a month of balance—between bitter and floral, smoky and raw, remembered and reinvented.

• Charred asparagus: served with a chilled emulsion of mango and hoja santa.
• Smoked requesón with grilled flor de izote: finished with fermented chayote and plum vinegar.
• Stone fruit ashes used to perfume a dessert of wild guava ice and roasted sapote .

Each dish is memory and experiment—a way to thank the land while speaking its evolving language.