Moros y Cristianos Yucatecos

This is a Yucatecan dish, even though the name and the bones of it crossed the Gulf from Cuba. The Peninsula has always looked east as much as west. Merida traded with Havana for centuries, the boats came and went, and the cooks of Yucatan took the Cuban one-pot of black beans and rice and made it their own with epazote, with habanero, with the lard that anchors every serious dish on that side of the country.

The technique is not complicated and that is the point. You cook the beans first with epazote and a pricked habanero. You save the broth. You build a sofrito in lard, toast the rice in it, then pour the dark bean broth back in and let the pot do the work. The broth is what gives the rice its color and its weight. If you cook the rice in plain water and stir the beans in at the end, you have made something else. The rice and the beans have to share a pot from the beginning. That is the recipe.

My mother did not cook Yucatecan food. I learned this dish from a senora named Dona Lupe who ran a comedor near the Mercado Lucas de Galvez in Merida. She watched me toast the rice the first time and shook her head until the grains were the right shade of pale gold. She said: 'Si el arroz no canta en la manteca, el plato no sirve.' If the rice does not sing in the lard, the dish is no good. I have never forgotten it. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.