Pellizcadas Oaxaqueñas con Asiento y Frijol Negro

This is Oaxacan street food, and the name tells you everything. Pellizcar means to pinch. You press out a thick round of masa, cook it on the comal, and while it's still hot enough to burn your fingers, you pinch up the edge all the way around to make a rim. That rim holds the asiento, the beans, the salsa. Without it, you have a fat tortilla. With it, you have a pellizcada. The pinch is the dish.

The asiento is what makes this Oaxacan and not from anywhere else. Asiento is the dark, caramelized residue that sinks to the bottom of the pot when you render lard for chicharron. It's brown, granular, intensely porky, with a depth that clean lard cannot touch. In the Valles Centrales, you buy it by the scoop at the market from the chicharronera, and it costs less than the lard itself. Outside Oaxaca, most people have never heard of it. Inside Oaxaca, it's on everything: pellizcadas, tlayudas, memelas, tamales de rajas. La manteca es el sabor, and asiento is the soul of the manteca.

The beans are black, cooked with hoja de aguacate, the dried leaf of the native Mexican avocado tree that gives Oaxacan frijoles their anise-like perfume. Not basil. Not anise seed. Hoja de aguacate. There is no substitute that does the same thing, and I will not pretend otherwise. If you can find it, your beans will taste like Oaxaca. If you cannot, your beans will still be good, but they will not be the same.

I learned pellizcadas from a senora named Dona Reina at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre in Oaxaca city. She pinched the rims without flinching, her fingers calloused from years of it, and she spread the asiento with the back of a spoon in one motion. She told me: 'If it doesn't burn your fingers a little, the masa is too cold and the pinch won't hold.' She was right. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.