Tacos de Castacán con Queso

This is a Yucatán dish. Specifically from Mérida, where castacán is sold at storefronts and panucherias by the kilo and the cooks chop it on wooden boards stained dark from years of pork fat. Outside the Peninsula, this dish is barely known. Inside it, castacán is breakfast, lunch, and the late-afternoon snack that holds you over until cena.

Castacán is pork belly, simmered first to tenderness and then fried in lard until the skin crackles and the meat turns mahogany at the edges. It is not chicharron. Chicharron is dry. Castacán keeps its fat, keeps its meat, keeps the soft layer between the skin and the flesh. You chop it on a board with the skin and the fat and the meat all in one cut, and you pile it on a small warm tortilla with grated queso de bola, the Edam wax-wrapped wheel the Yucatecans adopted from Dutch traders centuries ago and made their own. The cheese is salty and dense. It softens against the hot pork. It does not stretch. If you want stretchy cheese, make something else.

The Peninsula has its own grammar. Recado, naranja agria, banana leaf, achiote, pib. Not chiles anchos and guajillos. Not crema and cilantro the way central Mexico does. The salsa here is habanero, charred and ground with sour orange and salt, nothing more. The pickled red onions are sharp with vinegar and oregano. The tortilla is small, the bite is concentrated, the heat is real. Mi madre nunca cocinó comida yucateca. She was from Jalisco. I learned this dish from doña Rosario at a panucheria off Calle 62, who let me sit on a stool and watch her chop castacán for a week before she told me how she seasoned the lard. Cada estado, su propia cocina. This one belongs to Yucatán.