Caguamanta de Mantarraya Sonorense

Caguamanta is Sonoran. Specifically of the Sea of Cortez coast, of Bahia de Kino, Guaymas, Empalme, and the fishing villages where the boats come in at dawn and the women on shore know how to turn what is landed into a stew that feeds a family for two days.

The name tells you the history. Caguama is sea turtle. Mantarraya is manta ray. The original dish was made with caguama, sea turtle, and when sea turtle was rightly banned in the 1990s the cooks of the coast did what cooks have always done: they kept the dish and changed the protein. The manta ray was already in the boats. The fishermen dried it on lines in the sun, and the dried fillet, salty and stiff and almost the color of paper, became the new caguamanta. The name stayed. The technique stayed. The soul of the dish stayed. That is how a cuisine survives.

This is a stew with a Mediterranean accent, and that is not a coincidence. Sonora was settled by Spanish and Sephardic merchants whose pantries left olive oil, green olives, and capers in the Sonoran kitchen. Combined with the wild chiltepin from the Sierra Madre Occidental and the dried shrimp powder of the coast, you get something that exists nowhere else. It is not Mediterranean and it is not generic Mexican. It is sonorense, and the people of the coast know it the moment they smell it.

There is a small ceremony to caguamanta that I want you to honor. Before the stew goes in the bowl, you ladle the pure broth into a small enameled tin cup. That cup is bichi. You drink it warm with a squeeze of lime and a few crushed chiltepines, and only after that comes the stew. My notebook from a trip to Guaymas in 2014 has a sketch of the cup that the senora at the marisqueria served me, with an arrow pointing at it and the word bichi underlined twice. She told me the broth tells you whether the stew will be any good. If the broth is right, the rest follows. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.