Almejas Tatemadas de Loreto

This is from Baja California Sur. Specifically from Loreto, the old mission town on the Sea of Cortez, where the pescadores have cooked clams in the sand of their own beaches longer than there has been a Mexico to put on a map. Tatemar means to roast over open fire until the surface chars and the smoke gets into the meat. Almejas tatemadas are clams cooked the way the coast cooks them, planted in the sand, buried in burning brush, pulled out twenty minutes later with their broth still sealed inside the shell.

The romerillo is the recipe. It is a desert shrub that grows wild in the sierras behind Loreto, dry and resinous, and it burns hot and fast with a smoke that smells like the chaparral after rain. You cannot make this dish with charcoal or oak or any commercial wood and call it the same thing. The romerillo is what makes it tatemada and not just grilled clams. If you are far from Baja, dried mesquite twigs with fresh rosemary tucked in will get you close. Close is not the same. I will tell you that plainly.

The chocolata clam is the other half of the answer. Brown-shelled, sweet-meated, the size of a man's palm, harvested by free divers in the Bahia de Loreto. The flesh is darker and richer than any clam you find on the Atlantic coast, and the broth that pools inside the shell when it opens over the fire is the most concentrated taste of the Sea of Cortez you can put on a plate. My notebook has a page on this dish written from a conversation with Don Refugio, a pescador in Loreto who let me sit on his beach while he cooked for his sons. He told me: the sand cooks the clam, the brush flavors the clam, the butter is just for the table. Asi se hace y punto.