Memelas Oaxaqueñas con Huevo y Asiento

This is Oaxaca on a comal at seven in the morning. Memelas are the breakfast that feeds the state before the day starts, sold by women at market stalls and street corners from the Central de Abastos to the smallest village in the Sierra Norte. They are not tortillas. They are thicker, wider, pinched at the edges into a shallow rim that holds the toppings in place. That rim is formed by hand while the masa is still on the hot comal. It takes practice. It takes fingers that do not flinch.

The ingredient that makes this Oaxacan and nothing else is asiento. Not manteca. Not rendered fat. Asiento is the dark, toasty sediment that sinks to the bottom of the pot when pork lard is rendered slowly over low heat. It is brown, grainy, intensely porky, and it tastes like the bottom of a well-seasoned cast iron pan concentrated into a spoonful. In Oaxaca, you buy it by the scoop at the market from the same vendor who sells the manteca. Outside Oaxaca, most people have never heard of it. That tells you something about how much of this cuisine the world has not bothered to learn.

The black beans are cooked with hoja de aguacate, the dried avocado leaf that gives Oaxacan beans their signature anise-like warmth. The salsa is made from chile pasilla oaxaqueño, a smoky dried chile grown in the Mixe region that has no real substitute. The quesillo is pulled into long strings and draped over the hot memela so it softens but does not fully melt. And the egg is fried in manteca until the edges lace and the yolk stays liquid.

I watched a woman in the Mercado 20 de Noviembre make forty memelas in an hour without looking down at her hands. She pinched the rims with her thumbs while talking to her neighbor about the price of avocado leaves. Her comal was black from decades of use. The memelas came off it with a crust on the bottom and the asiento already melting into the masa. That is what you are learning to make. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.