Chow Mein Mexicalense

This is from Mexicali. Baja California, the border city across from Calexico, the dusty capital of the Valle de Mexicali where the canals run straight and the summer hits 115 degrees. Mexicali has the largest historical Chinese community in Mexico, families who arrived in the late 1800s to work the cotton fields and the railroad and who stayed to build a neighborhood the locals call La Chinesca. There are more chinescos, Cantonese-Mexican restaurants, in Mexicali than there are taquerias. That is not an exaggeration. It is the shape of the city.

Chow mein mexicalense is what those families made when Cantonese cooking met the Sonoran Desert. Wheat noodles, because the Valle de Mexicali grows wheat. Cabbage piled in heavy, because cabbage is cheap and stores well in the heat. Chicken or beef, soy and oyster sauce, garlic and ginger, all of it stir-fried hard in a wok pulled from a hot fire. Then, at the table, the Mexican signature: chiles toreados blistered black on a comal, lime cut into thick wedges, and a small bottle of soy sauce that nobody calls salsa de soya because in Mexicali everyone just calls it salsa china.

The noodle technique is what separates this from a tired weeknight stir-fry. You boil the noodles, shock them cold, then press them into a screaming hot wok and let one side toast into a golden crust before you toss them. Crisp on one face, soft on the other. That texture is the dish. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo. I learned this in a chinesco off Avenida Reforma where the cook was a woman in her seventies whose grandmother had come from Guangzhou in 1908. She told me: do not stir until you smell it. When I asked her if she considered the dish Chinese or Mexican, she looked at me like the question was stupid. Mexicalense, she said. Asi se hace y punto.