Pan de Yuca de Mayultiaguis

This bread is from Mayultiaguis, a small Chinanteco community in Oaxaca's Sierra Norte. It is not pan de muerto. It is not a cookie. It is a pre-Columbian flatbread of cassava, ajonjolí, and a little manteca, baked dry on a comal the way it has been baked since long before wheat reached this continent. If you came looking for the sugared shell-shaped pan de muerto of Mexico City, close this page. That is a different bread for a different altar.

The yuca is the whole thing. Sweet cassava, peeled, boiled, the woody cord pulled out and discarded, then grated fine while still warm. In Mayultiaguis the women grind it on a metate until the texture turns almost powdery, and they bind it with just enough manteca de cerdo to hold the dough together. A handful of masa harina gives the disk enough structure to lift cleanly off the comal. The ajonjolí is toasted first, never raw, and you should taste it in every bite. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the Sierra Norte cooks with what the milpa and the monte give them. Yuca grew here before wheat existed in this hemisphere, and this bread carries that lineage on its surface.

My mother did not know this bread. She was from Jalisco. I learned it from doña Tomasa in Mayultiaguis on a trip in the second year of the 32-state project, sitting on a low wooden bench while she grated yuca into a clay bowl on her lap. She told me her grandmother made it for the altar every November and that the souls preferred it to the wheat breads from the panaderia in Tuxtepec because the yuca was the older food, the one their mothers had fed them. I wrote it in the notebook exactly as she gave it to me. I am giving it to you the same way. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.

Do not skip the banana leaf. The leaf is not decoration. It carries the dough to the comal without tearing it and it leaves a faint vegetal scent on the underside of the bread that you cannot get any other way. If you cannot find banana leaf at a Mexican or Asian mercado, wait until you can. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and part of knowing how to live is knowing when to wait for the right ingredient.