Elenitas Yucatecas

This cookie is from Merida. Specifically from Pan Elena Vales, the panaderia on Calle 65 in the centro historico that has been baking the same recipe since 1865. Yucatan has a baking tradition that has nothing to do with the rest of Mexico, and the elenita is the proof.

The Yucatan peninsula sits across the gulf from Cuba and across the sea from Lebanon and Syria, and Merida is closer to Havana than to Mexico City. The families who arrived from the Levant in the late 19th century brought orange flower water and almond. The Spanish brought butter and powdered sugar. The Maya cooks who ran the kitchens used lard, because that is what was rendered fresh every morning from the family pig. The elenita is what happens when those three traditions meet on the same counter. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Yucatan.

The recipe at Pan Elena Vales is not written down. I sat in the back of that bakery one afternoon in 2017 with a notebook and watched the granddaughter of Elena Vales work, measuring nothing, weighing nothing, the dough coming together by feel after a hundred and fifty years of family memory. She would not give me the recipe and I did not ask. What you have here is mine, reconstructed from what I saw, from what I tasted, and from three other Merida panaderas who were willing to talk. It is faithful to the cookie. It is not the original. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.

The lard is not optional. The orange flower water is not optional. The two coats of powdered sugar are not optional. Skip any of them and you have made a butter cookie. Make all three and you have made an elenita.