Ensalada de Papas Menonita

This is a Chihuahua dish. More specifically, it is a Cuauhtemoc dish, from the Mennonite colonies that settled the high plains north of the city in the 1920s and brought a German Low-Saxon kitchen with them. Drive an hour northwest of Chihuahua city and you are in Campos Menonitas: wheat fields, dairy barns, blonde children speaking Plautdietsch, and a food culture that reads almost nothing like the rest of Mexico. The queso menonita on every Mexican grocery shelf comes from these colonies. So does this potato salad.

The signature is the sweet pickle and the mustard. Not jalapeno. Not chipotle. Not lime. Sweet pepinillo and yellow mustard, folded into mayonnaise loosened with crema mexicana, dressed over warm boiled potato. That sweet-tang is the German heritage of the Mennonite kitchen, and it is found nowhere else in Mexico. If you try to make this with dill pickles or hot pickles, you have made a different salad. The sweetness is the point.

I spent a week in Cuauhtemoc on the 32-state project, eating in Mennonite kitchens where the women still bake their own bread on Tuesdays and roast their own coffee. The potato salad showed up at every comida, on the same table as queso menonita, kielke noodles, and warm flour tortillas, because flour tortillas belong to Chihuahua the way corn tortillas belong to Oaxaca. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Chihuahua's includes this. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.