Tlayuda Doblada con Pescado y Pitiona de la Costa

This is a coastal Oaxacan dish. Not the Central Valleys, not the city of Oaxaca. The coast. Pinotepa Nacional, Puerto Escondido, the stretch of Pacific shoreline where the Sierra Madre del Sur drops into the ocean and the cooking changes with the altitude.

The tlayuda is Oaxaca's tortilla, but calling it a tortilla is like calling a cathedral a building. It is wide, thin, leathery from slow drying on the comal, and it holds everything a cook puts on it without buckling. In the Central Valleys, the tlayuda goes open-faced with tasajo and chapulines. On the coast, the cooks fold it: doblada, with whatever came off the boats that morning. Huachinango, pargo, robalo, sierra. The fish changes. The structure does not. Asiento on the tortilla first, always. Then the black bean paste. Then the quesillo. Then the fish, grilled whole or in fillets over mesquite or huanacaxtle wood on a grate the fishermen's wives keep at the back of the kitchen.

Pitiona is the herb that places this dish on the coast and nowhere else. It grows wild in the lowlands from the Isthmus to the Costa Chica, and it has a flavor somewhere between oregano and mint with something floral underneath that neither of those herbs can replicate. The senoras in the market at Pinotepa sell it in fat bunches, still sandy from the hillside. They will tell you it is for fish, for tamales de tichinda, for beans. They are right about all of it. If you cannot find pitiona, I will tell you what to use instead, but I will also tell you what you are losing.

The chile costeno rojo is the other marker. Small, thin-skinned, bright with a sharp heat that does not linger the way a habanero does. It grows along the Oaxacan coast and is not widely available outside the state. My mother never used it because she was from Jalisco. I first encountered it in Puerto Escondido, in a salsa a woman was selling from a plastic bucket at the edge of the highway, and I wrote down what she told me in the same notebook my mother left me. Cada estado, su propia cocina. Every coast, too.