Tabla de Cecina de Yecapixtla con Queso de Cincho

This tabla comes from Morelos. From Yecapixtla specifically, a town of about forty thousand people on the eastern skirts of the Popocatepetl volcano, where the cecina has been cured the same way for more than a century. You will not find this dish in Oaxaca or Yucatan. You will find it on Sunday afternoons in Cuautla, in Tepoztlán, in the family kitchens of central Morelos where the carniceria delivers the sheets of cecina wrapped in butcher paper and the longaniza in a coil tied with twine.

The cecina is the heart of the tabla and it is non-negotiable. Wide sheets of beef, salted, hung in the dry mountain air until the moisture concentrates the flavor into something that is not jerky and not prosciutto but its own animal entirely. Twenty seconds per side on a hot comal and it is done. The queso de cincho is its partner, a pressed cow's-milk cheese named for the cincho, the palm belt that shapes it as it presses, dusted with ground guajillo on the rind. The longaniza brings vinegar and chile. The crema de rancho brings the cool sour weight that holds the whole board together. The nopales come from the same volcanic soil that feeds the cattle.

My mother did not make this tabla. She was from Jalisco and her tablas had carne en su jugo and birria, not cecina. I learned this one from a señora named Doña Rosario who runs a carniceria in the Yecapixtla market and who let me sit on a stool by her counter for three days while I asked questions about the cure. She told me the volcano matters. The wind matters. The pasture matters. The hand that salts the beef matters. Recetas probadas y garantizadas, but only if you take the sourcing as seriously as the cooking. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and a tabla like this is how Morelos teaches the lesson.