Cemita Poblana de Milanesa

The cemita is from Puebla. From the city itself, from the Mercado El Carmen and the stalls at the Mercado de Sabores where the cemiteras have been building these sandwiches the same way for generations. Anybody who calls this a torta has not been to Puebla. The cemita is a different bread, a different build, a different dish.

The bread is the dish. A round, domed, sesame-crusted roll with a hard crust and a dense yellow crumb made with egg and lard. Without a real cemita, you do not have a cemita. You have a sandwich. The name of the dish is the name of the bread, and the bread was built specifically to hold what goes inside: a wide flat milanesa, a generous tangle of quesillo from Oaxaca, slices of avocado, raw white onion, chiles chipotles in adobo, and the herb that makes the whole thing sing, pápalo.

Pápalo is not cilantro. Do not substitute cilantro. Pápalo, also called papaloquelite, is a wild herb with a flavor between cilantro, arugula, and rue, and it is what tells your tongue you are eating a cemita and not anything else. It grows in the milpas around Puebla and Tlaxcala. In Mexican mercados you find it tied in bunches in summer and early fall. If you cannot find it, do not make this with cilantro and call it a cemita. Make it when pápalo is in season. Mexican grandmothers cook with what the mercado is selling today, not what looks good on a Pinterest board.

My mother did not make cemitas, she was from Jalisco, and the cemita does not travel. But I learned the build from a cemitera named Doña Lupe at Mercado El Carmen, a woman who has been making them since 1972 and who sells out by two in the afternoon. She told me three things and I will tell them to you now: the bread is non-negotiable, the chipotle has to be adobado not in vinegar, and you put the pápalo last so the heat from the milanesa does not wilt it. Así se hace y punto.