Potaje de Lentejas Yucateco

This is from Yucatán. Not from central Mexico, not from the Gulf coast, from the Peninsula, where the cooking carries Maya, Spanish, and Lebanese fingerprints in the same pot and where the calendar of the week tells you what is for lunch. Wednesday is potaje. Ask any señora in Mérida or Valladolid and she will tell you the same thing.

The broth is stained the color of Ticul roof tile by recado rojo, the achiote paste ground with garlic, cumin, oregano, allspice, clove, black pepper, and naranja agria. The recado is not a spice paste in the way the rest of Mexico means it. It is the spine of Yucatecan cooking, and a kitchen without it is not a Yucatecan kitchen. Add to that the pork ribs cooked slowly for the broth, the longaniza for fat and color, the lentils for body, and the chayote and potato for substance, and you have a pot that feeds eight without breaking anyone's budget. Then comes the move that confuses everyone outside the Peninsula: fried sweet plantain on top. Black-skinned, caramelized in manteca, sweet against the savory broth. That contrast is the whole point. Yucatán's cooks have understood sweet and savory in the same bowl for centuries, long before fusion was a word anyone used.

My mother did not cook Yucatecan food. She was jalisciense and her notebook stopped at Tabasco. I learned this potaje in a courtyard kitchen in Mérida from a señora named Doña Conchita who had been cooking it every Wednesday for fifty-three years. She did not measure the recado. She broke off a piece the size of a walnut and that was that. When I asked her how she knew, she shrugged and said, 'Mi mamá lo hacía así.' My mother made it this way. That is the only authority Yucatecan kitchens recognize, and it is enough. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.