Chop Suey de Verduras Mexicalense

This is a Mexicali dish. Specifically, it is from La Chinesca, the Chinatown of Mexicali, Baja California, which at one point in the early 20th century held the largest Chinese population in Mexico. The Cantonese laborers who came to dig the irrigation canals of the Valle de Mexicali stayed, opened restaurants, married into local families, and built a cuisine that belongs nowhere else on earth. This is not fusion. Fusion is a marketing word. This is what people have been cooking and eating in Mexicali for more than a hundred years.

The technique is Cantonese: a screaming-hot wok, high oil, fast hands, vegetables that finish with a snap. The ingredients shift into Baja: chile de arbol toasted whole in the oil, manteca de cerdo as often as peanut oil, flour tortillas on the side because this is the north and corn is not the bread of Mexicali. The soy sauce is the same soy sauce the Chinese grocers on Avenida Reforma have been importing since the 1920s. The chile is local. The plate is mestizo in the truest sense.

Do not call this chop suey from a chain restaurant. Mexicalense chop suey has its own grammar. The vegetables stay crisp. The sauce is not gloppy, it glazes. The chile de arbol perfumes the oil at the start and stays whole in the dish, a warning to whoever bites one. My notebook from a trip to Mexicali in 2014 has the line, written in pencil by a senora named Esperanza Wong who ran a cocina economica on Calle Altamirano: 'manteca, ajo, chile, soya, fuego.' Five words. That is the recipe. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Baja California has this one.