Puchero Yucateco de Tres Carnes

Puchero is the Sunday dish of Yucatán. Specifically of Mérida, where the courtyards of the casonas in Centro fill with the smell of saffron and hierbabuena every weekend, and where the señoras have been running the same pot since before the henequen boom collapsed. This is not the Spanish puchero of Madrid. It is not the Argentine puchero of Buenos Aires. This is the peninsular version, marked by ripe plantain, sweet potato, chayote, saffron, and the citrus brightness of naranja agria at the table.

Three meats. Beef shank, pork ribs, chicken. They go in by cooking time, not at once. Beef first because it takes the longest. Pork in the middle. Chicken last because it falls apart if you forget about it. The same logic governs the vegetables. Chayote and sweet potato early. Cabbage, corn, and plantain later. Yucatecan cooks do not throw everything into the pot at the same moment and pray. They build the puchero in stages, the way a careful hand builds anything that matters.

The defining ingredients are the ones outsiders skip. Hierbabuena, not parsley. Saffron bloomed in broth, not dropped in dry. Ripe yellow plantain with black spots, not green. Xkatik chile charred on the comal. Naranja agria squeezed over the bowl at the table. Leave any of these out and you have a generic stew. Put them all in and you have a dish that any señora in Mérida or Valladolid would recognize as her own.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not make puchero yucateco. I learned this dish in a courtyard in Mérida from a woman named Doña Esperanza who ran a fonda out of her front room and who would not let me leave until I could tell her, without looking, which herb was hierbabuena and which was epazote. She wrote her recipe on the back of a paper bag from the mercado Lucas de Gálvez. I still have it. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.