Ensalada de Remolacha Yucateca

This is from Yucatán. The peninsula that cooks differently from the rest of Mexico because it sat for centuries with its back turned to Mexico City, looking out at the Caribbean and across to Cuba and New Orleans instead. The Yucatán has its own chiles, its own citrus, its own oregano, its own cheese, its own way. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the peninsula proves it harder than anyone.

Yucatecan salads are not what most of the world imagines when it hears the word salad. There is no iceberg lettuce. There is no ranch. There is jícama with chile piquín dust. There is cabbage with sour orange. There is this betabel salad, served cold from a glass jar in a cantina, cubed deep red beet tossed with pink onion that has been bathing in naranja agria. It arrives with the cold beer and the saltines and it sits on the table until it is gone.

The ingredient that makes this Yucatecan is the naranja agria. Sour orange. The same citrus that cures cochinita pibil, the same juice that turns red onion into the pink confetti you see on every Mérida plate. It is not lime. It is not regular orange. It is bitter and floral and slightly resinous and there is no proper substitute, though I will give you one in the tips because I am practical, not because I am happy about it. La cocina yucateca tiene su propio idioma, and naranja agria is half the alphabet.

My mother did not cook Yucatecan food. She was jalisciense. But I spent a month in Mérida in my second year of the 32-state project, staying with a señora named Doña Elvira in a courtyard house behind the Mercado Lucas de Gálvez, and she taught me that the Yucatecan kitchen is built on three pillars: achiote, naranja agria, and chile habanero. This salad has two of the three. Pregúntale a las señoras del mercado.