Cecina Enchilada Oaxaqueña

This is Oaxacan meat. Not Puebla's cecina, which is beef and salted differently. Not Yecapixtla's, which is famous in Morelos. Oaxaca's cecina enchilada is pork, rubbed red with a paste of chile guajillo and chile ancho, hung on a line in the open air to cure, and cooked the next morning on a comal so hot the edges blacken before the center dries out. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the Valles Centrales.

I first ate cecina enchilada at six in the morning in the Mercado 20 de Noviembre in Oaxaca City, at one of the grill stalls in the pasillo de las carnes where the smoke hits you before you even find a seat. The señora pulled a sheet of cured meat off a hook behind her, laid it across a grate over mesquite coals, and within three minutes it was on a plate with a pile of memelas, a scoop of black beans, a knot of quesillo, and a bowl of salsa de pasilla oaxaqueño so dark it looked like mole. No menu. No choices. That is breakfast.

The technique is older than any cookbook. You take a piece of pork leg, and you cut it in a continuous spiral so it opens into a sheet as wide as your arm span and as thin as heavy cloth. That cutting is the skill. It takes practice and a knife sharp enough to shave with. The paste goes on both sides, thick enough to coat but not so heavy that you lose the pork. Then you hang it. The air does the rest, pulling moisture out and concentrating the chile and salt into a crust that caramelizes on the comal the next day. My mother didn't make cecina. She was jalisciense. But she had a page in her notebook, torn from a newspaper, with a photograph of the Mercado 20 de Noviembre and a handwritten note: 'Pedir la receta de la cecina.' She never did. I did it for her, twenty years later, from the granddaughter of a woman my mother probably walked right past.

Saber cocinar es saber vivir. And in Oaxaca, knowing how to cut and cure a piece of pork is knowing how to feed your family breakfast for a week.