Caldo de Camarón con Chepil

This is an Oaxacan caldo. Valles Centrales, specifically, though versions of it run down to the Istmo. It shows up every Cuaresma, when the church says no meat and the dried shrimp steps in as if it had been waiting all year for its turn.

Chepil is the ingredient that makes this Oaxacan and not just another shrimp soup. It is a leaf that grows wild in the milpas and along roadsides across the valleys. The flavor is impossible to describe by comparison because it does not taste like anything else: mineral, green, slightly bitter, with a depth that spinach or chard cannot approach. Outside Oaxaca, almost nobody knows what chepil is. Inside Oaxaca, it goes into tamales de chepil, arroz con chepil, and this caldo, where it meets the brine of dried shrimp and the bright, direct heat of chile costeño.

The chile costeño comes from Oaxaca's Pacific coast, dried under the sun in the villages between Pinotepa Nacional and Jamiltepec. It is thinner than guajillo, hotter, more direct. The masa stirred into the broth at the end is not there to turn it into something heavy. It rounds the edges, gives the liquid just enough body to coat the back of a spoon. The caldo should be thin, briny, aromatic. A bowl you drink as much as eat.

I learned this from a señora at the mercado de Etla who made it every Friday during Lent. She kept a bag of dried shrimp from the coast under her stall and a bundle of chepil she grew in her own solar. She stirred the masa into the pot with one hand and stripped chepil leaves off their stems with the other. No recipe card. No measurements. She'd been making it since before I was born. I wrote it down because somebody has to. Cada estado, su propia cocina.