Quesadillas Oaxaqueñas de Quesillo y Flor de Calabaza

This is an Oaxacan quesadilla. Not a Mexico City quesadilla, not a Chihuahua quesadilla, and certainly not whatever gets called a quesadilla north of the border with cheddar and a flour tortilla. In Oaxaca, you press the masa by hand, fill it with quesillo and whatever the mercado is selling that morning, fold it closed, and lay it on a hot comal. That is the entire architecture. Simple to describe. Difficult to do well.

The quesillo is what makes this Oaxacan. It is a string cheese, pulled and wound into balls by hand in the Valles Centrales, and it melts into long threads that stretch when you pull the quesadilla apart. No other cheese does this the same way. Monterey Jack will melt. Mozzarella will melt. Neither one will give you those threads that cling to the tortilla and snap when you finally bite through. If you can find real quesillo from Oaxaca, use it. If you cannot, use the best Mexican quesillo available and know what you are missing.

Flor de calabaza, squash blossoms, is a rainy-season ingredient in Oaxaca. The women at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre and the Central de Abastos sell them in bundles, bright orange and green, still damp from the morning. You clean them, strip the pistils, chop them roughly, and cook them fast in a little lard with white onion and epazote. Not cilantro. Not parsley. Epazote. It is the herb that belongs here, and it has a mineral, almost medicinal flavor that rounds out the sweetness of the blossoms. My mother did not make Oaxacan quesadillas, she was from Jalisco, but she kept a page in her notebook about flor de calabaza that said: "Don't overcook. Two minutes. The flower is already tender." She was right.

In Oaxaca, the argument about whether a quesadilla must contain cheese does not exist. Of course it does. The word has queso in it. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and in this state, the quesadilla is cheese first, filling second, debate never.