Pambazo Jarocho (Veracruz-Style Pambazo)

This is Veracruz. The port. And this is the original pambazo, the one that came before Mexico City got hold of it and started dipping the bread in guajillo. The chilango pambazo is red, soaked in chile, stuffed with papa con chorizo. The jarocho pambazo is pale. It stays pale. That is the whole point.

The bread is a white roll dusted in flour, and the flour stays on. You do not drown it in red sauce here. The name says it plainly: pan bazo, the humble bread, the cheap bread of the poor, dusted white and split down the middle. Inside go frijoles negros refritos, fried in manteca until they turn dark and glossy. Black beans. Not pinto. Then chorizo, then chipotle. That is the trinity of the jarocho pambazo and it does not need a fourth thing.

Veracruz does not cook like the central highlands. There is no guajillo-ancho-mulato base here. The port's pantry is jitomate, olive, caper, chipotle, chiltepín, the Indigenous hand and the Spanish hand and the African hand all working the same plate. This is La Tercera Raíz, the third root. Veracruz is where Spain came ashore, where the wheat and the olives and the capers landed, and where the cooking of three continents learned to live in one kitchen.

My notebook has a page from a señora who sold pambazos near the portales on the malecón, the ones you eat at sunset with the boats coming in. She refried her beans in lard until they were the color of dark chocolate and warmed the bread on a plancha so old it had a groove worn into it. She told me the bread should never be wet. Toast it, do not soak it. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.