Enchiladas Suizas Capitalinas

This dish is from Ciudad de Mexico. Not from a state with a deep pre-Columbian root, not from a mercado abuela's notebook. From the Centro Historico, from the Sanborns lunch counter at the Casa de los Azulejos, from the mid-century moment when CDMX cooks looked at salsa verde and decided to fold dairy into it. The Swiss in the name does not mean the dish is Swiss. It means it is white with cream, suiza, the way the capitalinos in the 1950s thought of Switzerland: cows and dairy and white-on-white.

There are two non-negotiables. The salsa verde gets charred, not raw. Roast the tomatillos and the chile serrano and the poblano on a dry comal until the skins blister, then blend with cilantro and epazote, then fry the puree in manteca until it darkens. That is the body of the dish. The second non-negotiable is queso Chihuahua, not mozzarella, not Monterey Jack, not the yellow cheese on top of bad Tex-Mex enchiladas. Chihuahua melts clean, browns honestly, and tastes like the cheese a Mennonite community in northern Mexico has been making since the 1920s. Cada estado, su propia cocina, even when the dish itself was assembled in the capital.

My mother did not grow up with enchiladas suizas. She was from Jalisco, where enchiladas come in red mole de tomate and are eaten on the street. The first time she ate them was at the Sanborns on Madero in 1968, and she came home and wrote the recipe in her notebook from memory before she lost the taste of it. She added more epazote than the menu version, more chile, less sugar in the crema. That is how it sits in her notebook, and that is how I make it. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.