Aporreado Costeño Guerrerense

This is Guerrero. Not the Guerrero of the Acapulco hotels. The Costa Chica, the coast that runs south from Acapulco toward Oaxaca, and the town of Cuajinicuilapa, where the people are Afro-Mexican and the food carries the third root of this country. La tercera raíz no es nota al pie. Es plato principal.

Aporreado is cattle-country food. The Costa Chica raises cows, and what you can't eat fresh you salt and dry into cecina, beef that keeps for weeks in the heat with no refrigerator. To cook it you have to bring it back to life. You toast it on the comal until it's brittle, then you beat it on a stone until it breaks into fibers. That beating is the dish. Aporrear means to club, to pound. The name tells you the work.

The sauce is chile costeño, the thin red chile that grows on this coast and tastes like nowhere else. I build it with guajillo for body and a little pasilla oaxaqueño for smoke, because the Costa Chica doesn't stop at the Guerrero line. It runs into Oaxaca, and the cooking runs with it. Then the whole thing fries in manteca de cerdo, because on this coast the fat is not up for debate. La manteca es el sabor. This is the comida version, the noon meal, no eggs. The eggs go in at breakfast. Know which one you're making.

I learned this in a kitchen in Cuajinicuilapa, from a woman who pounded the cecina on a stone worn smooth by her mother and her mother before her, talking the whole time about the cattle her family used to run. I wrote it down the way she said it. Salt last. Epazote at the end. Don't drown it in water. My own mother was from Jalisco and never cooked this in her life. But she gave me the rule that carried me to that kitchen. Saber cocinar es saber vivir. So I went, and I learned, and now so will you.