Relámpagos Yucatecos

This is a Mérida pastry, and it carries a particular piece of history that most people do not associate with Yucateco cuisine. During the Porfiriato, between 1876 and 1911, Mérida was one of the richest cities in Mexico. Henequen, the agave fiber known as sisal, made the hacendados wealthy enough to send their sons to Paris and import European pastry chefs to staff the fine bakeries along Paseo de Montejo. The éclair, the relámpago, lightning, came with them and never left.

The Yucateco bakeries did not change the French formula. They learned it exactly. What they did change was the vanilla. The Papantla vanilla from Veracruz is the original vanilla, the orchid the Totonacs cultivated centuries before the Spanish arrived, and any pastelero with sense who could get his hands on it used it instead of the imported pods. That is the Mexican fingerprint on a French pastry: not in the technique, but in the ingredient.

My mother kept a yellowed clipping from a Mérida newspaper in her notebook, an advertisement from 1962 for a panaderia called La Flor de Mérida. It listed relámpagos de chocolate at the top, above the conchas and the orejas. She wrote in the margin: 'siempre con vainilla de Papantla.' Always with Papantla vanilla. She was right.

Do not be afraid of the choux. It is not difficult. It is exact. Boil, dump, stir, beat, pipe, bake, and do not open the oven. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Mérida's includes this French pastry by way of henequen money and a hundred and twenty years of Yucateco bakers who never stopped making it.