Quesadillas Fritas de Comal

This is a Ciudad de México dish, and before anyone outside the Valle de México starts an argument, yes, in the capital a quesadilla does not have to have cheese. The vendors at Mercado de Coyoacán, Mercado de San Juan, the tianguis that take over a side street every Tuesday, they will ask you: ¿con queso o sin queso? It is not a trick. It is the dialect of the city. Quesadilla in CDMX means a folded masa pocket. The cheese is one of many possible fillings, not the definition of the dish.

The filling here is flor de calabaza with epazote, which is the most chilango thing I can put inside a quesadilla. Squash blossoms come into the markets in late spring and stay through the summer. Epazote grows in cracks in the sidewalk in Colonia Roma. The combination is older than the city's modern street food culture and you will find it in every market in the valley, made by señoras who set up a comal at six in the morning and fold quesadillas to order until the masa runs out.

The fried version, what the city calls quesadilla frita as opposed to the dry comal version, has a deep gold crust that crackles under your teeth and a tender interior where the masa met the heat of the lard. The trick is the masa. Too wet and it absorbs the fat. Too dry and it cracks when you fold it. The lard inside the dough is my mother's addition, copied from a market vendor she watched for an hour in Mercado Medellín. The vendor told her: pork fat in the masa, pork fat in the pan, that is why it crackles. My mother wrote it down. I am passing it on.

Do not skip the epazote. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and in this city, that means knowing what an herb does.