Budín de Elote y Rajas Norteño

This is a northern dish. Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, the whole Noroeste corridor where the cattle ranches and the wheat fields and the dairy traditions of the Mennonite colonies live side by side. The queso Chihuahua in the recipe is not a substitution for something else. It is the cheese. It melts the way no other Mexican cheese melts, smooth and stretchy and golden, and it was developed by Mennonite dairy farmers in the Cuauhtemoc valley starting in the 1920s. Without it, you are making a different dish.

The corn matters. Northern Mexico grows sweet field corn through the late summer and early fall, and that is when this budin appears on family tables. Out of season, frozen corn from a good brand is honest enough. What is not honest is using the small, starchy supermarket cob in February and pretending the season agrees. If the corn is not sweet right now, wait or use frozen. Mexican grandmothers cook with what the mercado is selling today.

The rajas are poblano, charred until the skin lifts, peeled, and cut into generous strips. Not strips so thin they disappear. This is northern cooking and northern cooking is generous. The manteca de cerdo in the batter is what gives the budin its richness and the slight crisp it develops at the edges of the cazuela. La manteca es el sabor. Do not substitute butter. Butter browns differently, tastes wrong here, and does not belong.

My mother wrote a version of this in her notebook from a trip to Ciudad Juarez in 1984. The note in the margin said: 'mas rajas, no menos.' More rajas, never less. She was right.