Virgin Mojito de Lima Agria con Yerbabuena

This is from Yucatan. Specifically from Merida, the white city, where the afternoon heat from March through September makes any serious drinking before sundown a bad idea. The cantinas adjusted. They built a roster of cold, sharp, herb-driven drinks that keep a body cool without putting it to sleep, and this virgin mojito is one of them.

The foundation is lima agria, the sour lime of the Yucatecan peninsula. It is not the small green Mexican lime of central Mexico, and it is not the Persian lime that fills supermarket bins north of the border. Lima agria is closer to a bitter orange in perfume, with a floral edge that makes Yucatecan cooking taste like nowhere else in Mexico. It is what gives sopa de lima its identity and it is what makes this drink taste like Merida and not like a hotel pool somewhere in the Caribbean. If your market does not carry lima agria, I will tell you how to fake it, but I will also tell you what you are missing.

The yerbabuena matters too. The soft, slightly fuzzy mint that grows in clay pots on the patios of Merida, not the sharp spearmint that bartenders abuse in cocktail bars. You bruise it. You do not pulverize it. There is a difference and your tongue will know. Cada estado, su propia cocina, y Yucatan tiene la suya.

My mother was from Jalisco and never made this drink in her life. I learned it from a senora named Dona Filomena who ran a sorberia near the Plaza Grande in Merida, where the same green-glass jarras have been sweating on the counter every afternoon since her grandmother opened the place. She taught me to slap the yerbabuena against the back of my hand before I dropped it in the glass. That slap, she said, is the last thing the drink needs to know it is home. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and that includes knowing what to drink when the sun is too high.