Buñuelos de Yuca Yucatecos

These buñuelos are from Yucatán. Not from the Bajio, not from Mexico City, not the flat sugared discs you find on Christmas Eve in Guanajuato. These are something else. They are little hollow orbs of yuca dough, fried in manteca until the shell crackles under a spoon, then split open and bathed inside and out with miel de abeja, the dark, floral honey of the Yucatecan stingless bee.

The yuca matters. The peninsula has its own pantry: yuca, achiote, sour orange, recado, miel melipona. The Maya cultivated yuca and kept beehives long before the conquest, and these buñuelos are what happens when a Maya pantry meets a Spanish fry-pan. Wheat flour appears, but only barely, only enough to bind. The body of the buñuelo is yuca. The soul of it is the honey.

In the pueblos around Mérida and Valladolid, these are made for the novenas of finados, the nine nights of prayer that lead into Hanal Pixan, the Maya feast for the dead at the end of October. The neighborhood women gather in one kitchen, peel yuca by the kilo, fry in shifts, and send platters of buñuelos out to the altars and to the families who sat the rosary. My notebook from the trip I took to Mani in 2014 has a page in the handwriting of a señora named Doña Felipa, who told me: 'El buñuelo se baña por dentro porque el alma del muerto come por dentro.' The buñuelo is bathed inside because the soul of the dead eats from the inside. I have never forgotten that.

If you cannot find miel melipona, use a good dark wildflower honey. It is a compromise and you should know it. The melipona honey is more acidic, more floral, almost wine-like, and it is what makes a Yucatecan buñuelo taste Yucatecan. Cada estado, su propia cocina.