Tortillita Dulce Tabasqueña

Tabasco, especially Villahermosa and the humid lowlands around the Grijalva, has a merienda bread that does not need wheat to prove anything. Tortillita dulce is corn masa made small, sweet, and toasted until the surface freckles on the comal. You buy them by the dozen near the mercado, wrapped in paper or tucked into a woven palm tortillera, still warm enough that the piloncillo smells like caramel.

This is not a northern flour tortilla with sugar thrown at it. Flour tortillas belong to the north. Here the base is maiz nixtamalizado, the same corn that feeds the state in pejelagarto empanadas, tamalitos, pozol, and everyday tortillas. The sweetness comes from piloncillo or coarse cane sugar, the perfume from canela de Ceilan, and the tenderness from manteca de cerdo. La manteca es el sabor. Use oil and the tortillita turns dry and flat.

I learned this style from a woman near the Villahermosa market who cooked them on a blackened comal while her granddaughter folded banana leaves beside her. She did not measure with cups. She pinched the masa and said, 'It should feel like a tortilla that wants to be a cookie, but still remembers it is corn.' That is the lesson. Sweet, yes. Still corn. Cada estado, su propia cocina.