Tartaletas de Queso de Bola Yucatecas

These tartaletas are from Yucatán. Not from Mexico generally, from Yucatán specifically, and inside Yucatán from Mérida and the small towns around it where every wedding, every quinceañera, every baptism ends with a tray of these on the dulces table. The peninsula has its own pastry tradition, separate from the rest of the country, shaped by sugar from Cuba, butter and cheese from Holland, and the trade routes that ran through Havana before they ran through Veracruz.

The cheese is the dish. Queso de bola is the Edam wheel the Yucatecos adopted from Dutch traders in the 19th century and never let go. They use it in queso relleno, they shave it over panuchos, and they fold it into the custard that fills these tartaletas. The salt of the cheese against the sweet of the guayaba is the whole point. If you make this with mild cheddar or with cream cheese, you have not made tartaletas yucatecas. You have made a vague cheese pastry. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

The shell is pasta quebrada built on manteca de cerdo, not butter. The Yucatecan pastry kitchens cook with lard the same way they cook savory food with lard, because the climate is hot and lard holds up better than butter and because the flavor is part of the inheritance. Do not preempt yourself with a substitution. Buy the lard. The dough will be flakier and the shells will taste like the ones at La Sorpresa or Dulcería La Flor de Santiago, where my notebook from a 2009 trip to Mérida has half a page of corrections from a señora named doña Pilar, who watched me overwork the dough and took it out of my hands without asking.