Machaca de Mantarraya Guisada Sudcaliforniana

This is a Sudcaliforniano dish. From La Paz, from Loreto, from the small fishing communities along the Sea of Cortez where the boats come in with mantarraya in the morning and the women on the playa salt and dry the meat in the sun the same afternoon. The peninsula has its own kitchen, separate from Sinaloa across the gulf, separate from Sonora to the north. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Baja California Sur is one of the states the rest of Mexico forgets when it talks about regional cooking.

Mantarraya seca is the ingredient that defines this dish. Stingray, salt-cured and sun-dried on wooden frames along the coast, the way the peninsula has preserved fish since long before refrigeration arrived. The drying concentrates the flavor and gives the meat its fibrous, shredded texture. That is why the cooks here call it machaca, even though northerners hear the word and think only of dried beef. The peninsula borrowed the name and gave it to their fish. Both are correct.

The guisada version is the comida, the midday main, eaten in a cazuela with frijoles peruanos and flour tortillas sobaqueras. It is not the breakfast plate of scrambled eggs and shredded fish that you will find in cafes around La Paz. That is machaca con huevo, a different dish entirely. Asking for machaca de mantarraya in Sudcalifornia and getting eggs is the kind of mistake a tourist makes once.

My mother never cooked this. She was from Jalisco and the peninsula was as far from her kitchen as Spain. I learned this dish from a senora named Dona Rufina in a small marisqueria in El Sargento, north of La Paz, who showed me her drying frames out behind the kitchen and told me the salt has to be coarse and the sun has to be honest. She wrote two lines in my notebook: 'soak twice, taste before salt.' Saber cocinar es saber vivir.