Gaznates Yucatecos

Gaznates are from Yucatán. From Mérida specifically, from the conventual kitchens of the colonial period where the nuns turned their dowries of flour, eggs, and Spanish wine into pastries that have outlived the convents themselves. You will find gaznates today at panaderías around the Plaza Grande and on dessert tables at weddings and quinceañeras across the península.

The name means throat. That is what they look like, hollow tubes of crisp pastry that the cook fills with a stiff meringue at the last possible moment. The dough is built on flour, lard, egg yolk, and white wine. The wine is not optional and it is not decoration. When the wet dough hits the hot fat, the alcohol evaporates fast and leaves behind the deep blisters that give the gaznate its crackling shell. Skip the wine and you have a fried dough tube. Use the wine and you have a gaznate.

The filling is an Italian meringue, hot sugar syrup poured into whipping egg whites until the foam turns glossy and architectural. The Yucatecan reposteras I have watched in Mérida do not pipe roses or decorate with sprinkles. They fill the tube cleanly from both ends and serve it within the hour. A gaznate that has been sitting filled since morning is a gaznate that has lost the point. The shell must crackle against the tooth and the meringue must hold its shape. That is the dish.

My mother's notebook does not have gaznates in it. She was from Jalisco and her sweet tooth went toward jericalla and capirotada. I learned this recipe from Doña Carmela in the Mercado Lucas de Gálvez in Mérida, who had been making them for sixty years and showed me how to roll the dough thin enough to read a newspaper through. She would not let me touch the meringue until I had rolled twenty rectangles to her satisfaction. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.