Coditos con Camaron Sinaloenses

This is from Sinaloa. The Pacific coast, where the shrimp comes off the boat by the kilo and where every birthday, every wedding, every quinceanera, every backyard pinata party has the same long folding table with the same two dishes: a pot of frijoles puercos and a wide cazuela of coditos con camaron. The two of them travel together. You will not find one without the other in Mazatlan, in Culiacan, in Los Mochis. That is the law.

The shrimp is camaron mediano, the small Pacific shrimp that Sinaloa fishes more of than any other state in Mexico. Big shrimp does not belong here. This is a salad of small bites where every spoonful catches a piece of pasta, a piece of shrimp, a chunk of jalapeno, a slice of olive. The dressing is mayonnaise, crema, and, the part nobody outside Sinaloa believes until they make it, a generous pour of the brine from a can of pickled jalapenos en escabeche. That brine is the whole dish. It carries the heat, the vinegar, the spices that pickled the chile and the carrot. Without it you have a sad American macaroni salad. With it you have something that tastes like a Mazatlan beach in July.

This is not a refined dish and it is not trying to be. It is party food, family-style, served in a glass cazuela big enough to feed twenty cousins. My notebook from a trip to Mazatlan in 2014 has a recipe from a senora named Dona Carmen who ran a stand near the malecon, written on a paper napkin. Her note in the corner: 'la salmuera no es opcional.' The brine is not optional. She was right. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Sinaloa.