Recado Sinaloense for Mariscos a la Diabla

This is from Sinaloa. The Pacific coast, the boats that come in to Mazatlan and Topolobampo, the marisquerias where the shrimp is unloaded in the morning and on the plate by mid-afternoon. La diabla is not a generic spicy sauce. It is a Noroeste recado with a clear identity, and the identity is built on one chile: chiltepin.

Chiltepin is wild. It grows on knee-high bushes in the sierras of Sonora and northern Sinaloa, picked by hand by families who have been picking it for generations. The pickers call it the mother of all chiles because every domesticated chile in the Americas descends from this small round wild ancestor. The flavor is sharp, smoky, and clean, and the heat hits the back of the throat before it hits the front of the mouth. No jalapeno will do this for you. No habanero either. If you cannot find chiltepin, dried or in vinegar, look in any Mexican market that serves a Sonoran or Sinaloense community before you start improvising.

The recado fries in mantequilla, not lard. This is one of the few places in regional Mexican cooking where butter belongs more than manteca, and it is because the marisquerias on the Pacific coast borrowed the technique from the old hotel restaurants of Mazatlan in the 1950s and 1960s, where the cooks finished sauces with butter for body and shine. The butter rounds out the chiltepin, carries the garlic, and gives the recado the glossy red-brick finish you see in every photograph of camarones a la diabla worth the name.

My notebook from a week in Mazatlan in 2014 has six versions of this recado, all from different marisquerias, all of them arguing about Worcestershire versus Maggi, naranja agria versus regular orange, tomato paste versus none at all. The constants in every notebook page: chiltepin, garlic, butter, lime. Everything else is a cook's signature. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, y en Sinaloa, saber cocinar mariscos es saber respetar al chiltepin.