Hoja Santa con Quesillo al Comal

Hoja santa is Oaxaca's herb. It grows in backyards across the Valles Centrales and the Sierra Norte, large heart-shaped leaves the size of your hand, with a perfume that is part anise, part root beer, part tarragon, part something nobody has named yet. Take a leaf from the plant and crush it between your fingers and you will know in three seconds why this herb anchors so much of Oaxaca's cooking.

This is a weeknight dish. A peasant dish in the best sense of the word: three ingredients that respect each other and a comal. The leaf is the wrapper, the quesillo is the filling, the chile pasilla oaxaqueno is the spine that keeps the whole thing from tasting flat. Every element is from Oaxaca. The herb from the patios of the central valleys. The cheese from Reyes Etla, where it has been pulled and wound into balls since the late nineteenth century. The chile from the Sierra Norte, where they smoke it over pine and oak fires until it tastes like a bonfire.

The technique is the comal. Not the oven, not a pan, the comal. A flat clay or cast iron disc set over a flame, the surface that has done the work of Mexican kitchens for thousands of years. The leaf chars at the edges, the cheese melts, the chile warms and releases its smoke into the cheese, and what comes off the comal is something that tastes like the sum of three places at once.

My mother did not cook with hoja santa. It was not a Jalisco herb. The first time I tasted this was at a comedor inside the Mercado 20 de Noviembre in Oaxaca de Juarez, a senora named Dona Soledad making them on a clay comal blackened by twenty years of fires. She let me watch. She did not give me the recipe because there is barely a recipe to give. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Oaxaca. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.