Pescado a la Talla Afromestizo

This is from the Costa Chica. The long strip of Pacific coast that runs from southern Guerrero into Oaxaca, through Cuajinicuilapa, Pinotepa Nacional, and the lagoons of Chacahua. This is the heartland of Afro-Mexican Mexico, the descendants of Africans brought to this coast centuries ago who built a cuisine the rest of the country is only now learning to see. Pescado a la talla is theirs. La tercera raíz no es nota al pie. The third root is not a footnote. It is the main course.

You butterfly a whole snapper, open it flat like a book, and paint it with an adobo built on three chiles: chile costeño, the bright, fruity chile of this coast; chile guajillo for body and color; and chile pasilla oaxaqueño for smoke. Achiote turns it the color of brick. Manteca de cerdo carries it. Then you grill it over coconut wood, leña de coco, because this is coconut country and the sweet smoke off that wood is half the dish. Not charcoal. Coconut wood. La manteca es el sabor, and so is the smoke.

My mother's notebook does not have this recipe. She was from Jalisco, and the Costa Chica was as far from her kitchen as another country. I had to go and find it: in Cuajinicuilapa, at a fire on the sand, from women who have been opening fish to the flame their whole lives and learned it from their mothers and grandmothers before them. They do not measure. They know. I measured it for you so you can learn it, but the principle is theirs: a flat fish, a hot adobo, a coconut fire, and your hands.

You eat this standing up, building tacos off the bone. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this coast guards one of the best.