Empanadas de la Concepción

This is a Yucatán dish, and more specifically a Mérida dish. It came out of the Convento de la Concepción, the Conceptionist convent founded in 1596, where the cloistered nuns turned wheat, lard, sugar, and what the criollo households brought them into a tradition of conventual sweets that fed the city's holiday tables for centuries.

These are not the savory empanadas of the north. They are not the meat picadillos of Hidalgo or the cazón empanadas of the Campeche street vendors. Estas son de dulce, fried in lard until the shell blisters, filled with manjar blanco or piloncillo-sweetened camote, and rolled in cinnamon sugar while still warm. Wheat, not corn, because the convents were Spanish institutions and wheat was what they grew, milled, and taught. Lard, not butter, because Yucatán's kitchens have always been lard kitchens. Canela de Ceylan, not cassia, because Mérida was a port city on the Caribbean trade routes and the true cinnamon from Sri Lanka arrived here long before it arrived in the interior.

I collected this version from a señora in the Barrio de Santiago who learned it from her great-aunt, a woman who in turn had worked in the kitchens of one of the old Mérida families that received the nuns' sweets every feast day. She wrote nothing down. I sat at her table for three afternoons with my notebook until I had the proportions right and she nodded. My mother kept a similar dough recipe in her notebook, brought from Jalisco, but the Yucatecan version is its own creature: more sherry, more lard, the canela softer. Cada estado, su propia cocina. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.