Cajeta de Leche Quemada Sonorense

Cajeta is from the north. Most cookbooks tell you it is from Celaya in Guanajuato, and Celaya does make a famous version, but the ranches of Sonora and the high pastures of Coahuila and Chihuahua have been cooking goat's milk down into caramel for as long as there have been goats in the north, which is to say since the Jesuits brought them in the seventeenth century. This is a northern dish. The goats came to the desert because cattle could not survive there, and the women on the ranches learned to use what the goats gave them.

Leche quemada means burnt milk, but it is not burnt. It is caramelized to the edge of burning, held there for hours by a cook who knows the difference. The piloncillo gives the molasses depth. The canela Mexicana, the soft, true cinnamon, not the hard cassia bark, gives the perfume. The pinch of baking soda is the technical trick: it neutralizes the goat milk's acidity so the proteins brown into mahogany instead of curdling into sour ruin. Skip the baking soda and you waste three hours and two quarts of good milk.

My mother did not make cajeta. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco has its own dulces. I learned this recipe from a woman named Dona Cuca in a small ranch outside Ures, Sonora, who set me on a stool next to her wood stove and made me stir for two hours while she told me about her husband, her grandchildren, and the price of alfalfa. Recetas probadas y garantizadas, she said when I tasted the first spoonful off the wooden paddle. She was right. Some recipes are not written down. They are stood next to.