Ensalada de Nopales

This is a highland salad. Milpa Alta in the south of Ciudad de México grows the nopales that feed most of the country, and the surrounding states of the central plateau, Estado de México, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, Morelos, eat them daily. When a family on the meseta says ensalada, they often do not mean lettuce. They mean this.

The defining choice is technique. There are two ways to cook a nopal: boiled, with a copper coin and an onion in the pot to tame the baba, or asados on a dry comal until the surface chars and the paddle goes flexible. The asado method is the highland method. It concentrates the flavor instead of leaching it into water. It is also faster. Boiling gives you a salad that tastes apologetic. Asar gives you a salad that tastes like the plant it came from. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the cooks of the central plateau settled this argument generations ago.

Queso panela is the right cheese. Firm, mild, slightly squeaky, made to hold its shape against the lime. Queso fresco will work in a pinch, but panela is what the cooks in Toluca and Pachuca reach for. The tomato should be a tomate saladet, ripe but firm, the chile serrano fresh and finely minced, the onion white and never red.

My mother kept a small notebook page on nopales, copied from a woman she met at the Mercado de Sonora. The note in the margin read: "sal antes, no después" (salt before, not after). She meant before the heat, to draw out the baba. That single instruction is the difference between a clean salad and a slimy one. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.