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Yucatán's dulce de yuca, slow-candied in stingless-bee honey and piloncillo with Ceylon canela. A Maya sweet from the small towns south of Mérida, served with shavings of queso de bola.
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.
The Maya have cultivated the stingless bee Melipona beecheii, known in Yucatec Maya as xunan kab or 'royal lady bee,' for over 3,000 years, and pre-Columbian codices including the Madrid Codex depict ritual beekeeping practices specific to the peninsula. Yuca (Manihot esculenta) was domesticated in the Amazon basin and reached Mesoamerica before 2,000 BCE, becoming a staple alongside maize in the lowland Maya diet. The marriage of these two ingredients with Spanish-introduced cane sugar, citrus, and Ceylon cinnamon produced the colonial-era dulce de yuca con miel, a dish that survives today primarily in the Sierra Puuc region, where Maya beekeeping cooperatives have worked since the 1990s to protect the melipona bee from displacement by African honeybees and from the herbicide-heavy agriculture of the Mennonite settlements in Campeche.
Quantity
2 pounds
peeled and cut into 2-inch chunks
Quantity
1 cup
Quantity
1 cup (about 6 ounces)
chopped
Quantity
4 cups, divided
Quantity
2 sticks, about 4 inches each
Quantity
1
no pith
Quantity
1
no pith
Quantity
4
Quantity
1
Quantity
1/2 teaspoon
Quantity
for serving
Quantity
for serving
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| fresh yuca rootpeeled and cut into 2-inch chunks | 2 pounds |
| miel de abeja melipona (Yucatecan stingless bee honey) | 1 cup |
| piloncillochopped | 1 cup (about 6 ounces) |
| water | 4 cups, divided |
| Mexican canela (true Ceylon cinnamon) | 2 sticks, about 4 inches each |
| wide strip of orange peelno pith | 1 |
| wide strip of lime peelno pith | 1 |
| whole cloves | 4 |
| star anise pod | 1 |
| kosher salt | 1/2 teaspoon |
| queso de bola (Edam) shavings (optional) | for serving |
| Mexican canela sticks (optional) | for serving |
Yuca has a thick brown bark and a waxy pink skin underneath. Both come off. Cut the root crosswise into 2-inch sections, stand each section on end, and run a paring knife down the sides to strip the skin. Split each chunk lengthwise and pull out the woody fibrous core that runs down the center. Leave the core in and you'll bite down on a string. Pull it out and the candied flesh stays tender.
Place the yuca chunks in a heavy pot and cover with 2 cups of water and the salt. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then lower to a simmer. Cook for 20 to 25 minutes, until the yuca is fork-tender at the edges but still firm at the center. You are softening, not cooking through. The almíbar will finish the work. Drain the yuca and set aside. Discard the water.
In the same pot, combine the remaining 2 cups of water, the piloncillo, the canela sticks, the orange peel, the lime peel, the cloves, and the star anise. Bring to a simmer over medium heat. Stir until the piloncillo dissolves completely, about 8 minutes. The syrup should be deep amber and smell of cinnamon and citrus oil. This is the colonial half of the recipe. The honey comes next.
Pull the pot off the heat and stir in the miel de abeja melipona. Do not boil the honey into the syrup from the start. Melipona honey is fragile, almost floral, slightly fermented, and high heat will burn off the very things that make it worth the price you paid for it. Off-heat is how it gets folded in. This is the pre-Hispanic half of the recipe meeting the colonial half. Esto no es comida de un solo México.
Return the pot to low heat and add the parboiled yuca chunks. The syrup should just cover the yuca. Simmer uncovered, very gently, for 60 to 75 minutes. Do not stir hard, that breaks the yuca. Tilt the pot every 15 minutes and spoon the syrup over any chunks that rise above the line. The yuca is ready when it has turned translucent at the edges, taken on a deep amber color through the flesh, and the almíbar has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo.
Pull the pot off the heat and let the yuca sit in its own almíbar for at least 30 minutes, uncovered. This is when the candying finishes. The chunks keep absorbing syrup as they cool and the texture goes from soft-fork to dense and slightly chewy at the edge. Fish out the canela sticks, the citrus peels, the cloves, and the star anise before serving. Or leave them in the bowl. The señoras in Mani leave them in.
Spoon two or three chunks of dulce de yuca into a small cazuelita with a generous puddle of the almíbar. Shave queso de bola over the top, the salty Edam wheel that hangs in every Yucatecan tienda, and lay a stick of canela alongside. The salt of the cheese against the floral honey is the whole point. Eat it warm or at room temperature. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.
1 serving (about 200g)
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