Marquesitas Yucatecas con Queso de Bola

The marquesita is from Yucatán. Specifically from Mérida, where the marquesiteros set up their carts around the Plaza Grande at sundown and press these wafers one at a time on cast-iron irons over portable gas burners. This is street food and it should be eaten standing up, the way the people of Mérida have eaten it since the 1930s.

The filling is what makes it Yucatecan. Queso de bola, the Dutch Edam wrapped in red wax that arrived in the peninsula through the port of Progreso during the henequen boom, when Yucatán traded sisal with Europe and the Caribbean and the cheese came back on the return boats. The Yucatecans kept it. Today no household in Mérida is without a ball of queso de bola in the refrigerator. The salty, slightly aged cheese against the sweet caramel of cajeta is the contrast the dish lives on. No me vengas con atajos, do not use cheddar, do not use mozzarella, do not use cream cheese. Queso de bola or nothing.

My notebook has a page from a marquesitero named Don Beto who works the corner near the Catedral de San Ildefonso. I bought three marquesitas from him over the course of one evening in 2014 and on the third one he told me his batter ratio. He said the trick is the resting time and the speed of the roll. The wafer must be hot when the cheese hits it. If you roll a cold wafer, you have made a cookie with cheese inside. That is not a marquesita. Cada estado, su propia cocina.