Mestizas con Queso de Bola

This is from Campeche. Not Yucatan, not Quintana Roo. Campeche. The Peninsula shares a grammar of sour orange, achiote, banana leaf, and habanero, but each state inside it has its own dishes and the mestiza belongs to the campechano panaderias. You will find it at the Mercado Pedro Sainz de Baranda, wrapped in brown paper, sold by the half dozen, eaten on the seawall in the late afternoon.

The bread is the dish. A mestiza is bicolor by design: one half made from refined wheat flour, the other half from whole bran. The two doughs are pressed together before baking, and when the bread comes out of the oven it carries both worlds in one crumb. Mestiza, mixed, two-blooded. The campechanos named it for the same reason the country was named what it was named. It is sweet on one side and savory on the other, and the only filling that makes sense in it is queso de bola.

Queso de bola is Dutch Edam, the red-wax wheel, and it arrived in Campeche through the trade routes that ran between the Peninsula and the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries. The campechanos took the foreign cheese and made it their own. They pair it with the mestiza, they shave it into relleno negro at Christmas, they stuff it whole and call it queso relleno. In this sandwich the cheese does not melt. It yields. It softens against the warm bread, against the thin layer of lard the cocinera spreads on the cut side, and that is the whole dish.

My mother did not make mestizas. She was from Jalisco and the Peninsula was a foreign country to her kitchen. I learned this sandwich the first time I went to Campeche, sitting on a stool at a panaderia near the old city wall, watching a senora wrap them in paper for the schoolchildren who came in at noon. She told me: la mestiza takes lard, not butter, and the queso de bola takes a sharp knife, not a grater. I wrote it down. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.