Ibes Guisados al Chiltomate

This is from Yucatán. Not from a generic Mexican kitchen. The ibe is a small white lima bean cultivated in the milpa, the ancient three-sisters planting of corn, beans, and squash that has fed the Maya for more than three thousand years. You will not find ibes in a supermarket in Ciudad de México. You find them at the markets in Mérida, Valladolid, Tekax, sold by women who weighed them out by hand and know the harvest by the field it came from.

Chiltomate is the Yucatecan tomato sauce. Not Italian, not Mexican-national. Yucatecan. The tomatoes go on the comal and char until the skins blister, the habanero goes on whole and stays whole. The smoke from the fire is half the flavor. The other half is the manteca de cerdo it gets fried in. La manteca es el sabor. Use olive oil and you have made something else.

The women of Tekax cook this dish without ceremony. It is weeknight food, milpa food, the kind of pot that holds together for two or three days and gets better each time you reheat it. My notebook from a trip to the southern Yucatán in 2018 has a margin note from doña Felipa, who fed me ibes guisados in her kitchen behind the market: 'el ibe se cocina solo, tú solo lo acompañas.' The ibe cooks itself. You only keep it company. That is the philosophy. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.