Cremita de Coco Yucateca

This is Yucatán. Specifically the coast: Chelem, Progreso, Telchac. The peninsula where coconut palms line the playa and the coco seco shows up at the Mérida markets by the truckload. The cremita is what the dulcerías and the marisquerias serve cold at the end of a long lunch, in little glass cups with footed bottoms, scattered with canela. It is not flan. It is not natilla. It is its own thing and it belongs to the Yucatecan coast.

The coco has to be fresh. Grated by hand from a mature coconut you cracked yourself. The canned coconut milk does work, and I use it here for richness, but if you skip the fresh grating you have made a different dessert. The texture of the fresh coco is the dish. You feel it on your tongue. You taste the oil that comes out of the meat as it simmers. Without it, this is just sweet milk pudding. With it, this is cremita yucateca.

The canela has to be Mexican canela. Ceylon, soft, fragrant, the kind that crumbles between your fingers. Not cassia, not the hard sticks they sell at the supermarket. If your canela does not break when you press it, find a better source. The Lucas de Gálvez market in Mérida sells it in bundles tied with twine.

My mother did not make this dish. She was from Jalisco and her dulces were ate, jericalla, capirotada. But I learned this cremita from a señora in Chuburná who served it to me in a glass cup on her patio, with a piece of queso de bola on the side, and told me her mother taught her with a wooden spoon and a warning: cold milk for the maicena, always. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.