Memelas Oaxaqueñas con Asiento

This is Oaxacan food. Not Mexico City Oaxacan food. Not the version you get at a restaurant that says "Oaxacan-style" on the menu. This is the memela you eat standing at a fonda outside the Mercado de Abastos in Oaxaca de Juárez at seven in the morning, bought from a woman who has been pressing masa on that same comal since before you were born.

The memela is a thick oval of masa, cooked on a clay or metal comal and pinched at the edges while it is still hot to form a shallow wall. That wall holds the asiento, the refried beans, the quesillo. Without the rim, you have a thick tortilla. With it, you have architecture. The shape is the recipe.

Asiento is the ingredient that separates Oaxacan cooking from everywhere else in Mexico. It is the dark, caramelized residue left at the bottom of the pot after pork lard is rendered. Not lard itself, the sediment beneath the lard: smoky, concentrated, almost burnt in its depth. In the Valles Centrales, every market has a vendor selling asiento in plastic bags, dark brown and grainy, smelling like pork and wood smoke. If you have never cooked with it, you do not yet know what Oaxacan food actually tastes like. It goes on memelas, tlayudas, tamales de rajas. It is as essential to Oaxaca as mole negro.

My mother did not make memelas. She was from Jalisco. But the first time I ate one in the Central de Abastos, standing at Doña Elvira's counter with black bean paste on my fingers and quesillo stretching from the memela to my mouth, I wrote down everything I saw her do. The masa pressed thick, not thin. The comal screaming hot. The pinch done with bare fingers, fast and sure. The asiento spread while the masa was still warm so it soaked in. I went back three mornings in a row to make sure I had it right. That is how this recipe was built. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.