Quesadillas de Huitlacoche con Hoja Santa

This is Oaxacan. The huitlacoche, the hoja santa, the quesillo, the hand-pressed masa on the comal. Every ingredient in this quesadilla tells you where you are on the map.

Huitlacoche appears in the markets of Oaxaca's Valles Centrales during the rainy season, June through October, when the corn fungus swells inside the ears and turns the kernels into something silver-gray and extraordinary. The vendors at the Central de Abastos in Oaxaca city sell it by the kilo from plastic tubs, still wet from the milpa. If you've never worked with it, the look is strange. Trust the cooks who have been buying it for centuries. The flavor is earthy, mushroom-deep, with an inkiness that stains the pan and rewards the patience. My mother never cooked with huitlacoche. She was Jalisciense and it wasn't part of her vocabulary. The first time I tasted it was at a market stall in Etla, north of Oaxaca city, folded into a quesadilla with a strip of hoja santa and a long pull of quesillo. I understood in one bite why this ingredient has survived five hundred years of people trying to call it a disease.

The hoja santa is the other half of the equation. That large, heart-shaped leaf with the anise backbone. It doesn't just flavor the filling, it perfumes the entire quesadilla from inside the fold, releasing its oils against the hot masa. You lay a piece of leaf against the quesillo so the heat draws out the fragrance. In Oaxaca, the senoras at the market don't measure hoja santa. They tear it. You'll learn to do the same. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.