Empanadas de Cazón

This is Campeche's empanada. Not Argentina's, not Spain's, not the wheat-flour empanadas of northern Mexico. Campeche, the Gulf state on the western side of the Yucatan Peninsula, where the cazón comes off the boats in the morning and the women at the Mercado Pedro Sainz de Baranda have been frying these since before any of us were born.

Cazón is dogfish, a small coastal shark. The Peninsula eats it because the Peninsula has it, and the cooks of Campeche turned an unromantic fish into a regional signature by doing what good cooks always do: poaching it clean, shredding it fine, and building a guiso around it with charred tomato, sweet chile dulce, and enough epazote to push back against the richness of the shark. The epazote is the soul of this filling. Without it, you have a tomato fish empanada. With it, you have something that belongs only to the Gulf coast.

The masa is corn. Not flour. The Peninsula does not negotiate on this. The empanadas are pressed by hand, filled while the masa is still soft, and fried in lard or good clean oil until the outside crackles and the inside stays tender. At the table they get the Peninsula's grammar: chile xcatic charred and dressed in naranja agria, pickled red onions slicked through with habanero, a lime to squeeze. No cheddar. No sour cream. No flour tortillas pretending to be empanada wrappers.

My mother did not cook Yucatecan food. She was jalisciense. But there is a page in her notebook from a trip she took to Campeche in 1981, written in pencil, with the line at the top: "la senora del mercado dijo que el cazon huele fuerte y eso es bueno." The woman at the market said the cazón smells strong and that is good. She was right. If your fish smells like nothing, you have nothing. If it smells like the sea, you have empanadas de cazón. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.