Burrito de Machaca y Huevo Sonorense

This burrito is from Sonora. Not from a Tex-Mex chain, not from a California taqueria, not from anyone south of Sinaloa. From the cattle country between Hermosillo and the border, where the sun-dried beef and the wheat tortilla have anchored breakfast for two centuries.

Three things make this dish what it is, and if you change any one of them you have made something else. The machaca: real Sonoran machaca is beef pounded thin, salted, dried in the desert sun, then shredded by hand. It is not jerky. It is a preservation art that the rancheras of Sonora perfected before refrigerators existed because the desert demanded it. The sobaquera: a flour tortilla stretched so thin a cook can drape it over her forearm, the sobaco, and you can almost read through it. In the noroeste, wheat is the grain. The Yaqui and the Mayo were growing it before the missionaries arrived. The frijoles maneados: pinto beans cooked, mashed, then beaten in lard with a little cheese until they go silky. They are the binder. Without them the burrito will not hold together.

My mother did not cook Sonoran. She was from Jalisco. But I spent six weeks in Hermosillo and the Sierra Madre Occidental for the second cookbook, and I watched a senora named Doña Carmela in her kitchen outside Ures press sobaqueras the size of dinner plates against her forearm while her comal heated. She handed me one with machaca and egg folded inside and told me, eat it now, while it is hot, and walk while you eat it. That is how this burrito is supposed to live. Cada estado, su propia cocina.