Ensalada de Atún Yucateca

This is from Yucatán. Specifically from the cantinas of Mérida and the family kitchens of Valladolid, Tizimín, and Progreso, where a bowl of ensalada de atún sits on the counter at midday next to a stack of galletas de soda and a plate of sliced habanero. It is botana, the food you eat while you are drinking, and it is also lunch on a hot day when the kitchen does not want to be turned on.

The Yucatán Peninsula does not cook like the rest of Mexico. The naranja agria, the bitter orange the Spanish brought and the Maya cooks absorbed into everything from cochinita pibil to escabeche, is what makes this salad yucateco and not a generic tuna salad. If you have it, use it. If you do not, mix lime with a little sweet orange and you will get close, but understand what you are missing. Naranja agria has a perfume that lime does not have, a soft bitterness underneath the sour. It is the citrus of Yucatán the way lime is the citrus of Jalisco.

The other thing you need to understand: there is no mayonnaise in this salad. None. Mayonnaise is for Sonoran tuna sandwiches and American school lunches. The Yucatecan version is dressed with the juice of the bitter orange and a little olive oil, and the body comes from the tuna and the finely diced vegetables. The habanero is not optional. Hierbabuena is not optional. These are the ingredients that make it the dish it is.

My mother never made this. She was from Jalisco and she would have looked at habanero with suspicion. I learned it in Mérida from a woman named Doña Cristina who ran a small cantina off Calle 60 and who showed me how to dice the onion finer than I thought necessary and to drain the tuna harder than I wanted to. No me vengas con atajos. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.