Cazuela de Machaca con Chile Verde Sonorense

This is a Sonoran dish. Not a Tex-Mex dish, not a generic northern Mexican dish, a Sonoran one, born on the cattle ranches of a state where summers run dry and refrigeration arrived late. Machaca is the answer the rancheros gave to the desert: take the beef, salt it, dry it in the sun and the wind, pound it on a stone until the fibers fall apart, and store it for months in a clay jar. When the cook needs a meal, she rehydrates the machaca in lard and tomato and chile and feeds the family.

The chile here is chile verde del norte, what most people outside Mexico call Anaheim. Mild, grassy, sweet when roasted. Not all Mexican food is spicy, and the north proves it. Sonoran cooking leans on beef and wheat, lard and chile verde, and on the flour tortilla, which is a northern tradition, not a national one. If you serve this with corn tortillas you are eating it wrong. The flour tortilla, large and thin and pliable, is the spoon and the plate.

The potatoes and the tomatoes stretch the meat. Drought-era cooks did not waste an ounce of beef when an ounce could feed three more mouths with the right pot of stew around it. That logic is still in the dish. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo.

My mother was from Jalisco, not Sonora, but I have a page in her notebook from a friend in Hermosillo who sent her the recipe in 1991, written on lined paper with the words 'no le pongas sal hasta el final, la machaca ya viene salada' underlined twice. She was right. Cada estado, su propia cocina.