Codzitos con Chiltomate

Codzitos are from Yucatan. Not from a generic 'southern Mexico,' from Yucatan, and more specifically from Merida and the small towns around it where the word codzito comes straight from the Maya 'kots,' meaning roll. The Peninsula has its own grammar, sour orange, banana leaf, recado, pib, and codzitos belong inside that grammar. They are not taquitos. They are not flautas. Call them either of those at a cantina in Merida and watch the bartender's face.

What makes them codzitos is what is not inside them. Nothing. They are empty rolled tortillas, fried until rigid and hollow, made specifically to be a vehicle for chiltomate. This is the Yucatecan answer to the question of what to do with yesterday's tortillas, and it is a brilliant answer. The crispness of the tortilla, the smoky depth of the charred tomato salsa, the perfume of habanero, the salt of the queso seco de Bola, all of it works because nothing is fighting for attention. This is the first botana that arrives at your table when you order a beer at a Merida cantina, before you have even decided what else you want.

The chiltomate is the dish. Tomato charred on a comal until the skin blackens in patches, habanero blistered whole, garlic in its papery jacket, onion turned hard against the iron, all of it broken down with epazote and warmed in lard until the fat separates at the edge. The habanero stays whole. It perfumes, it does not burn. The cocineras at the Mercado Lucas de Galvez taught me that years ago, and I have not made it any other way since.

My mother did not cook Peninsula food. She was jalisciense. But there is a page in her notebook from a trip she took to Merida in 1982, the writing small and tight, with a note in the margin that says 'no se le pone nada adentro, va hueco' (nothing goes inside, it goes hollow). That margin note is the entire recipe. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Yucatan keeps this one for itself.