Polvorones Yucatecos de Naranja

These polvorones are from Yucatán. Mérida, specifically, where the panaderías open before dawn and the women buy bread on the way home from early Mass. You will find polvorones in many states. Each one is different. The yucateco version is the one perfumed with agua de azahar and naranja agria, because Yucatán cooks with the sour orange the way other states cook with lime, and because the Lebanese and Spanish influences that shaped Mérida brought orange blossom water into the pantry and it stayed there.

The fat is lard. Not butter, not shortening, not coconut oil. Manteca de cerdo. That is what makes a polvorón crumble the way it does, the way that gives the cookie its name, from polvo, dust. The lard coats the flour and stops the gluten from waking up, and the cookie falls apart on your tongue instead of crunching. Use butter and you have made a Scottish shortbread with a Mexican accent. That is not what we are doing.

My mother had a recipe for polvorones de naranja in her notebook, written in the margin of another recipe, almost an afterthought. She made them for Día de los Muertos every November. The kitchen smelled like anise and orange for a week. I learned the Yucatecan version later, from a señora named Doña Aurora who ran a panadería in the Mercado Lucas de Gálvez in Mérida and who told me, the first time I asked for her recipe, that the agua de azahar was non-negotiable and the lard had to be fresh. She was right about both. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.

In Yucatán these cookies are eaten hacer chuc, the local custom of dunking bread or galletas into hot chocolate or coffee. The polvorón is engineered for it. It holds its shape just long enough to lift, then dissolves on the tongue with the chocolate. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Mérida.