Huevos Tirados con Frijol Colado

This dish lives in Veracruz, in the southern stretch that brushes up against Tabasco and Campeche, where the Mayan kitchen never left and the black bean still runs the breakfast table. You will find huevos tirados in jarocho fondas from the port of Veracruz down through Los Tuxtlas and Catemaco, served before the heat of the day with a stack of hand-pressed tortillas and a bowl of salsa de chile habanero. This is not a Mexico City dish. This is a southeastern dish, and the bean tells you so.

Frijol colado is the key. You cook the black beans soft, blend them with epazote, and strain out the skins through a fine sieve until what is left is a dark, silky puree, almost the consistency of a thick atole. That straining is what separates a Mayan-rooted bean preparation from a generic refried bean. The texture has to be smooth enough that when you pour the beaten eggs into it, they fold through in long soft curds. The eggs are not scrambled separately and topped with beans. They are thrown into the beans, tirados, and cooked together until the black and the yellow live in the same spoonful.

The fat is manteca. Not oil, not butter. The epazote is fresh, not dried, because dried epazote loses the medicinal green note that makes this dish taste like Veracruz and not like a beige version of itself. If you cannot find fresh epazote, ask at any mercado with a good herb vendor or grow it on a windowsill. It is a weed. It survives anything. My mother kept a pot of it by the back door in Colonia Roma and never lost a sprig in thirty years.

This is a weekday breakfast. It costs almost nothing. It feeds four people from a pot of beans you already had in the refrigerator. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and a cook who can turn yesterday's beans and today's eggs into this dish is never going to go hungry.