Chaya Frita Yucateca

Chaya is from Yucatán. From the Maya, specifically, who have grown it in their solares, the family gardens behind the house, for over a thousand years. The Spanish brought spinach. The Maya already had chaya. The Peninsula chose chaya and never looked back.

The leaf is not optional botany on the Yucatán table. It is on the comal in the morning with eggs, in the broth at midday with pork, in the tamales at the saint's day fiesta, in the agua verde the abuelas drink to keep their blood moving. But it has one rule and the rule is absolute. You boil it before you eat it. Raw chaya carries hydrocyanic compounds and the heat breaks them down. Five minutes in salted water and the leaf becomes the medicine the Maya have always known it to be. No me vengas con atajos. This step is the recipe.

My mother never cooked with chaya. She was from Jalisco and chaya does not grow there. The first time I made this dish I was in Mérida in the second year of my 32-state project, sitting in the kitchen of a señora named Doña Elvia who had been cooking chaya frita every Tuesday for fifty-three years. She handed me the gloves before she said hello. She made me strip the leaves before she gave me coffee. Then she showed me how the lard goes in first, how the habanero gets one pierce and not two, how the chaya should glisten and not swim. I wrote it in the notebook. I have been making it her way ever since. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the Peninsula.