Agua de Saramuyo

Saramuyo is a Yucateco fruit. The rest of Mexico calls it anona blanca or chirimoya, and the rest of the world calls it sugar apple, but in Mérida, in Valladolid, in the small towns of the peninsula, it is saramuyo and that is what you will see written in chalk on the agua fresca jarras at the mercado.

The fruit looks like a green hand grenade and gives under your thumb when it is ripe. Inside, the flesh is cream-white, segmented, soft as custard, with a vanilla-floral perfume that no other fruit quite reaches. It is in season from late summer through early fall, and the rest of the year you do not make this agua. You make agua de chaya, or agua de pitahaya, or agua de lima. Mexican grandmothers cook with what the mercado is selling today, not what looks good on a Pinterest board.

The work of this agua is in the seeding. Every segment of pulp holds a shiny black seed the size of a small bean, and every seed has to come out by hand. Crush one in the blender and the agua turns bitter. There is no recovering from it. The first time I made this, I was nineteen, traveling for the first time outside Ciudad de México, and a señora in the Lucas de Galvez market sat me down at her stall and made me seed three kilos of saramuyo before she would let me write down anything. That was the lesson. The fruit does not respect your hurry. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo.

Serve it cold in tall glasses, plenty of ice, on a hot afternoon in the patio. It is not flashy. It is not loud. It is the quiet, perfumed, vanilla-soft agua of a peninsula that knows what it grows and how to drink it.