Enchiladas de Valladolid

These enchiladas are from Valladolid, Yucatán. Not Mérida, not Cancún, not the highland enchiladas of central Mexico that get red sauce and crema. Valladolid is a colonial town in the middle of the peninsula, halfway between Mérida and the Caribbean, and it has its own kitchen, its own recado, its own longaniza smoked over hardwood until the achiote in it turns almost black at the edges. This dish belongs to that town.

The sauce is what tells you where you are. Chile ancho for sweetness and body. Chile guajillo for color. Mexican chocolate, canela, pimienta gorda, and a spoonful of recado rojo dissolved in naranja agria. That combination is pure Peninsula. The chocolate is not sweet here. It rounds the chiles and gives the sauce a depth that reads almost like a young mole, but it is not mole. It is what the cocineras of Valladolid have been making for generations to dress the smoked longaniza their carniceros hang in the markets.

The longaniza is non-negotiable. Smoked, achiote-stained, fattier than chorizo and gentler in spice. If you live anywhere near a Yucatecan butcher, buy it. If you do not, a good smoked Mexican chorizo de pueblo will get you close. Do not use breakfast sausage. Do not use Spanish chorizo. The smoke is the point.

My mother never made these. She was from Jalisco and the Peninsula was a foreign country to her kitchen. I learned this dish from a woman named Doña Carmen at a loncheria off the zocalo in Valladolid, in 2011, who let me sit on a stool behind her comal for three afternoons and write down what she did. She told me the egg on top is not decoration. The runny yolk thins the sauce, sweetens the chile, and turns three rolled tortillas into a complete plate. She was right about everything. Cada estado, su propia cocina.