Dulce de Yuca con Miel Yucateco

This is a dulce from Yucatán. From the Maya towns south of Mérida, places like Maní, Oxkutzcab, and Ticul, where the meliponicultores still keep the stingless bees, xunan kab, in hollow logs the way their grandfathers did before there was a word for what they were doing.

The yuca, what the rest of the world calls cassava, grows everywhere in the peninsula. Maya cooks have been candying tubers in honey for centuries before the Spanish arrived with sugarcane and copper pots. What you are making is the meeting point: pre-Hispanic technique married to colonial almíbar. The miel de abeja melipona is the soul of the dish. It is thin, slightly fermented, floral in a way that no commercial honey can match, and the Maya cooperatives in the Sierra Puuc are the only place to get the real thing. If you cannot find it, the dish is still possible with good wildflower honey, but I will tell you what you are missing. Una sustitución es una compromiso, no una mejora.

The canela is true Ceylon, the soft, papery sticks you find piled in baskets at the Lucas de Gálvez market, not the hard cassia bark sold as cinnamon in American supermarkets. The orange peel comes from the bitter naranja agria that grows in every Yucatecan dooryard. And the queso de bola shaved over the top at the table is the salty colonial wink, the Dutch Edam that arrived through the port of Sisal in the 19th century and never left. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one is unmistakably yucateca.

My mother's notebook does not have this recipe. She was from Jalisco and never cooked yucateco. I learned this dulce from doña Marcelina in Maní, in 2009, on a trip I had funded with the sales of my first cookbook. She did not measure anything. She told me the honey goes in last and off the heat, and that if I boiled it I should not bother coming back. I have not boiled it since.