Chaya en Salsa de Pepita

Chaya is from the Yucatán peninsula. The Maya call it chay or ku'um chay and they have been eating it since long before anyone wrote down a recipe. The leaf grows on a shrub in the dooryard of nearly every rural house from Mérida to Valladolid to Felipe Carrillo Puerto. You do not buy chaya at a supermarket. You walk into the yard and you cut what you need. Ten times the vitamin C of an orange, more protein than spinach, and the medicinal reputation of a plant the abuelas swear can cure almost anything.

The sauce is sikil, the Mayan technique of toasted pumpkin seed ground into a paste, married to chiltomate, the peninsular roasted tomato salsa built on charred tomato, charred onion, charred garlic, and a whole habanero left intact so its perfume threads through the dish without taking it over. Both techniques are pre-Hispanic. The Spanish brought the pig and therefore the lard, but everything else on this plate is the food the Maya were cooking when the conquistadors arrived. Esto no es comida de un solo México.

A few rules you do not break. Chaya is never eaten raw. The leaf contains compounds that need 15 minutes of boiling to neutralize, and you cook it in stainless steel or clay, never aluminum, because aluminum reacts with the chaya and turns the whole pot toxic. The habanero stays whole. The pepitas get toasted on the comal until they puff, then ground while still warm. The epazote is added at the end so its perfume survives. These are not suggestions. They are the recipe.

I learned this dish from doña Eulalia in a small kitchen outside Tizimín. She grew the chaya in her side yard and pulled the leaves while she talked to me. She used a tin can of pepitas she had toasted that morning and a habanero she charred on a comal over a wood fire. She did not measure anything. She told me, en Yucatán comemos chaya como otros comen espinaca, pero la chaya es más seria. Así se hace y punto.