And pork fat (also known as lard), had to be melted first or it wouldn’t flow over any foods to spread that deep flavor. The native people made mojos with the provident pork fat they did have. This was before jets and internet shopping.
They came from a place where olives did not grow and so olive oil was not capable of being used. You see, the first mojos were made with lard NOT olive oil.
And that is where the ‘electricity’ enters to create mojo! Nothing really wrong with good old vinaigrettes, they’re acoustically sound, but with a mojo you need heat first. Muddy is cooking in acoustic mode in my mind when I think of a making a vinaigrette. But when he got up to Chicago he discovered the electric guitar and became the man who "got his Mojo working!" He was probably wailing like Son House or the infamous Robert Johnson of “Crossroads” fame. He picked on an acoustic guitar in those early days. Imagine Muddy playing the country blues he was performing down South near his hometown of Jug’s Corner, Mississippi around 1941. The chief difference in classic mojo versus a classic vinaigrette is that there is a cooking process with mojo and not with vinaigrettes.Ĭlose your eyes and put on the imaginary headphones for a moment with me. The neighbors will be offering to mow your grass our replenish your beer cooler for an invite. But if you want to do a version that sings, douse a cut up chicken, (skin on for me!) with a good measure of mojo about 6 to 8 hours before you want to hit the grill. I love grilled chicken as do so many others. One of the additional beauties of mojo is that is both wonderful as a finishing sauce - as in the classic of “Yuca con Mojo” - but it is just as useful as a marinade.
The mojo I make most often is done with toasted and ground cumin, freshly squeezed sour oranges (or if in a more northern state where sour oranges are hard to come by, a substitution of half lime juice and half orange juice), olive oil, a touch of chilies, sherry vinegar and of course garlic, salt and pepper. They are garishly-colored, chemical concoctions that are a far cry from a good homemade version, which I will tell you is actually a snap to make and it keeps for weeks in the fridge. A lot of stuff is in those versions that I know many Cuban grandmothers would not use! I don’t know why people buy them. If you do see them in a market, and you are the type to read an ingredient label, you might be alarmed. Living in South Florida has familiarized me with mojo for a long time now. Years ago, I took a rather radical departure from the traditions of mojo and made tropical fruit mojos! If mojo meant a thing that would get something wet, I wanted to demonstrate that food that I’d added spices to, especially fish, would be happy swimming in a puree of mango and another dimensional ingredient or so. The word mojo comes from the word “mojar,” which means, "to wetten” so the usage of mojo can actually be pretty broad in that there are many ways to ‘wetten’ food. Many North Americans would look at the word "mojo" in its printed form and pronounce it “mo-joe." In Spanish of course, it's pronounced "mo-ho" because the letter “j” is pronounced as an "h," as in jalapeño.