Mextlapiques de Charales y Nopales

This dish comes from the Valle de México, from the lake country that once stretched from Texcoco to Xochimilco to Chalco, before the Spanish drained the basin and turned a city of canals into a city of concrete. Mextlapique is a Nahuatl word. The technique is older than the conquest. The Mexica wrapped small lake fish, herbs, and chile in corn husks and laid the packets directly on hot stones or on the comal. No pot. No water. Just the husk, the fire, and what came out of the lake that morning.

Charales are tiny silver fish, no longer than your finger, that still come out of Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán and the few remaining lakes of the central highlands. They are sold dried in mounds at the mercados of Toluca, Cuernavaca, and the Merced. Toast them on a comal before you do anything else. Untoasted charales taste like the bag they came in. Toasted, they taste of mineral and smoke and a body of water that has been feeding people for a thousand years.

The nopales must be purged. Salt them, let them weep, rinse them clean. Wet nopales turn the filling slimy and ruin the char. The epazote is not garnish, it is structure. Without epazote, this is not mextlapique, it is a sad packet of fish. The salsa verde is raw. Tomatillo, serrano, garlic, onion, all crushed cold so the brightness stays.

My mother did not make mextlapiques. She was from Jalisco and lake fish were not her tradition. I learned this dish from a woman named Doña Estela in a tianguis outside Texcoco who sold them wrapped and ready, three for ten pesos, charred on a clay comal over a wood fire. She told me the recipe in five sentences and made me repeat it back. I am giving it to you the same way. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the cocina of the Valle de México lakes is older than almost anything else on this continent.