Chalupas Poblanas

Chalupas are from Puebla. Not the Tex-Mex fried boat with lettuce and yellow cheese, that thing is a costume. The real chalupa poblana is a small, soft tortilla, slightly thicker than a regular tortilla and about the size of your palm, briefly fried in lard on a comal, dressed with salsa verde or salsa roja, topped with shredded chicken and raw white onion. Nothing else. They come to the table by the half-dozen, alternating green and red, and you eat them with your hands while they are still hot.

In Puebla, the chalupas at El Carmen and along the streets near the centro are made on big black flat-iron comales, one cook pressing masa, another dressing them with salsa from clay cazuelas with a wooden spoon, a line of people watching the assembly. The chalupita goes from press, to comal, to lard, to salsa, to plate in under two minutes. That speed is part of the dish. A chalupa that sits is a chalupa that fails.

The key is the lard. Not oil. La manteca es el sabor. You are not deep-frying. You are passing each little tortilla through hot lard for ten seconds, just long enough to seal the surface and give the masa the flavor of manteca de cerdo. Then it gets dressed immediately, while it is still hot enough to drink in the salsa. Skip the lard, use oil, and you have a flat tortilla with sauce on it. That is not what a poblano eats on a Tuesday night.

My mother was not from Puebla. She was jalisciense. But she had a recipe for chalupas in her notebook, copied from a woman she worked with at the office where she kept the books before I was born. The woman was from Puebla and she made my mother promise she would not use cheese. I have kept that promise. Cada estado, su propia cocina.