Ensalada de Chaya con Pepita

This is from the Yucatán Peninsula. Mérida, Valladolid, Tizimín, the small towns of the milpa where chaya grows in courtyards like a tree and where the Maya have been eating its leaves for a thousand years. Chaya is not spinach. The Maya called it the tree of life and they were not exaggerating. The leaves are richer in iron, calcium, and protein than almost any green you can name. But you cannot eat them raw. The leaves carry hydrocyanic glycosides that have to be cooked out. Five minutes in boiling water and they become one of the most generous greens in Mexico. Less than that and you have a problem. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo.

Yucatecan salads are not lettuce-and-dressing affairs the way the rest of the country sometimes pretends. They are built on what the peninsula grows: jícama, cabbage, radish, betabel, cucumber, ibes, the small native lima bean. They are dressed with naranja agria, the bitter Seville-style orange that does the work vinegar does in other kitchens. They are finished with chile habanero, raw and minced, because habanero is to Yucatán what serrano is to Jalisco and chile de árbol is to Sinaloa. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

I collected this version from a señora in a courtyard kitchen in Mérida who had a chaya tree growing right outside her door and who told me, very directly, that anyone who blanches chaya for less than five minutes does not know what they are doing. She crumbled queso de bola over the top, that hard waxed Edam the Yucatecans inherited from Dutch sailors centuries ago and made their own, and she set the bowl down between a stack of warm tortillas and a glass jar of cebollas moradas. That is how the dish lives. Naranja agria, habanero, pepita, queso de bola. No me vengas con atajos.