Pollo Mongol Mexicalense

This is from Mexicali. Not from China, not from generic 'Mexico,' but from the capital of Baja California, where the largest Chinatown per capita in Mexico has been cooking this dish since the early 20th century. If you do not know that Mexicali has a Chinese quarter called La Chinesca, with hundreds of restaurants and a Cantonese cooking lineage older than most American Chinatowns, then you do not know northern Mexican cuisine.

Pollo Mongol is what happens when Cantonese cooks who arrived to build the railroads and work the cotton fields of the Mexicali Valley settled in, raised families, opened restaurants, and started cooking for the Mexican palate around them. The technique is Cantonese: the velveting, the high-heat wok work, the soy and oyster sauce. The seasoning is Baja: chile de arbol instead of dried Sichuan chile, Maggi sauce on the table next to the soy, a splash of Mexican Coca-Cola in the sauce because Mexicali cooks figured out decades ago that the cane sugar caramelizes the way nothing else does. Flour tortillas show up alongside the rice because this is the north and flour tortillas are what the north eats. Asi se hace y punto.

My notebook has three versions of Pollo Mongol, all collected from senoras and one senor in La Chinesca over a long weekend in 2017. Don Felipe at a corner restaurant near the Plaza del Mariachi told me his abuelo arrived from Guangzhou in 1919 and the recipe has not changed since the 1940s. He uses lard, not oil. He laughed when I asked about substitutions. La manteca es el sabor, even in a Cantonese-Mexican kitchen. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.