Empanadas de Chaya Yucatecas

These empanadas are from the Yucatan Peninsula. Not from Mexico in general. From the Peninsula, where chaya, a sturdy leafy green the Maya have been eating for thousands of years, grows in every backyard and along every roadside from Merida to Valladolid to Campeche. If a Yucateca sees a chaya bush, she sees lunch.

The masa is what makes this dish. You blanch the chaya, squeeze it dry, and knead it into the masa until the dough turns the color of jade. You cannot taste each individual leaf in the finished empanada. You taste something deeper: a vegetal, almost mineral note that runs through the masa and stains the inside of the shell green. Spinach is the closest compromise outside the Peninsula. It is not the same. But a green empanada made with spinach is honest. A yellow empanada called chaya is a lie.

The filling is usually refried black beans. Sometimes pork picadillo if there is leftover cochinita. Sometimes a little queso de bola, the Dutch wax-rind cheese that came to the Peninsula through Campeche's port and stayed. The empanadas fry in lard until the shell is crisp and the inside is hot. They get topped with cebolla morada, those bright pink pickled onions in sour orange and oregano yucateco, and a spoonful of salsa xnipec, the habanero salsa whose Maya name means dog's nose because it makes yours run.

My mother never made these. She was from Jalisco and the Peninsula was as foreign to her as France. I learned them in a cocina in Izamal from a senora named dona Concha who picked the chaya from the bush behind her kitchen while I was still asking her questions. She told me chaya is the Maya's spinach, the Maya's medicine, the Maya's reserve against hunger. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and on the Peninsula, knowing how to cook chaya is part of what saber vivir means.