Margarita de Habanero Yucateca

This is from Yucatán. Not from a Cancún hotel bar, not from a Tex-Mex chain that put habanero on a menu to look brave. From the peninsula itself, where habanero grows in nearly every household garden and where lima agria sits in market stalls year-round next to the bitter orange the Mayans have been cooking with for centuries.

The drink depends on two things you have to take seriously. The habanero, which is not interchangeable with jalapeño or serrano, you cannot swap chiles and call it the same drink. Habanero has an orange, perfumed heat that builds in the back of the throat and stays. Use too much and you have ruined the cocktail. Use it correctly and it is the most haunting margarita you will ever taste. The other ingredient is lima agria, the sour orange of the Yucatán, which is the citrus in cochinita pibil, in recados, in escabeches across the peninsula. Regular lime is a substitute, not the real thing. The peninsula citrus is rounder and more aromatic and the drink knows the difference.

My mother did not make this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco drinks its tequila straight or with sangrita. The first time I tasted a real habanero margarita was in Mérida, in a cantina off Calle 60 where the bartender was a woman in her sixties who looked at me when I ordered it and said in Mayan-accented Spanish, 'Tú sabes lo que estás pidiendo?' I did not, then. I do now. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Yucatán has its own bar too. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and that includes knowing what to drink.