Horchata de Coco Yucateca

This horchata is from Yucatán. Not from Mexico City, not from Jalisco, not from the generic taqueria pitcher you have seen in every state. The peninsula makes its own version, richer, creamier, perfumed with the coconut that grows on every other corner of the henequen towns between Mérida and Progreso.

The central-Mexican horchata is rice, water, canela, sugar. That is one tradition. The Yucatecan version takes that base and pulls it toward the tropics: fresh mature coconut, blended into the rice milk, then enriched with evaporated and condensed milk the way the peninsula enriches everything from café con leche to flan. The heat in Mérida is brutal from March through October. The drinks have to do real work. A thin horchata cannot stand up to a plate of cochinita pibil or a midday sun that bakes the limestone streets.

Use a real coconut, not the bags of dried shredded coconut sold for baking. Peel the brown skin off the meat with a vegetable peeler. Steep your rice in hot water with true canela overnight, not the hard cassia sticks most American stores sell as cinnamon. The patience is the recipe. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo. My mother kept a yellowed page in her notebook from a trip to Mérida in 1991, written by a woman named Doña Estela who ran an horchata stand near the Mercado Lucas de Gálvez. The note in the margin said: 'no escatimes en la canela.' Do not skimp on the canela. She was right.