Pescado al Horno con Mayonesa Sinaloense

This is a Sinaloa dish. Coastal Sinaloa, specifically: Mazatlan, Culiacan, the fishing towns along the Pacific where the boats come in at dawn and the family eats fish three or four times a week because that is what the sea is offering.

The mayonesa is what gives it its name. People outside Mexico hear mayonnaise and think of a sandwich. In Sinaloa, mayonnaise is a cooking medium. The home cooks along the coast have been smothering whole fish in a salsa of mayo, mustard, garlic, and salsa inglesa for at least three generations, and they bake it in clay cazuelas or aluminum trays until the top turns golden and the inside cooks gently in the cream of its own coating. The mayonesa is the marinade, the basting medium, and the sauce. Three jobs in one.

The fish has to be whole. Head, tail, bones. A fillet will not give you the same dish. The bones flavor the flesh from the inside, and the head holds the cheek meat that any Sinaloan grandmother will tell you is the best part. If the fishmonger only has fillets, wait. Come back tomorrow when the boats come in. Mexican grandmothers cook with what the mercado is selling today, and on the Sinaloa coast, the mercado is selling whole snapper.

My mother did not cook this dish. She was from Jalisco and she cooked Jalisciense food. I learned this one from a senora named Lucila in Mazatlan who was sixty-eight years old and had been making it every Sunday for her seven children since 1968. She showed me how to spread the mayonesa thick, how to slash the fish three times on each side to let the seasoning in, how to know it was done by the way the eye turned cloudy. Recetas probadas y garantizadas. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Sinaloa.