Capirotada Sonorense

Capirotada belongs to Lent and Lent belongs to capirotada. In Sonora, in the northwest, every Catholic household makes some version of this during Cuaresma, and every family argues that their version is the right one. I am giving you the Sonorense version, the one with bolillo toasted in lard, biznaga from the dryland cactus harvest, fried platano macho, peanuts and walnuts, raisins, prunes, and grated queso melted between the layers. Each ingredient carries meaning. The bread is the body of Christ. The syrup is his blood. The cinnamon sticks are the cross. The cheese is the shroud. The cloves are the nails. People who think Mexican food is taquitos and guacamole do not know that we have been writing theology into our cooking for four hundred years.

The technique is straightforward and the result is unforgiving if you cut corners. The bread has to be stale. Not yesterday-fresh, actually stale, dry enough to knock against the counter. Fresh bread collapses in the syrup and you get a pot of wet bread instead of a pudding with structure. The lard is not optional. La manteca es el sabor and in this dish it is also the difference between a Sonorense capirotada and a sad anglicized bread pudding. The piloncillo is not brown sugar. Brown sugar has no mineral depth, no cane smoke, no body. If your tienda does not carry piloncillo, find one that does before you start.

My mother made capirotada every Viernes Santo. She was from Jalisco and her version had a little less cheese and a little more fruit, but she always wrote in the margin of her notebook: 'In the north they use more queso. They are right.' She had been to Hermosillo once in the 1970s and she came back with that opinion and never changed it. The Sonorense capirotada is the one I make now. The cheese on top, melted into the syrup, is the line between a sweet that satisfies and a sweet that lingers. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one is the north's.