Frijoles Refritos con Manteca y Epazote Yucatecos

These are Yucatecan refritos. Black beans, not pinto. Manteca de cerdo, not vegetable oil. Epazote, not bay leaf. If any of those words feel like a suggestion, this is not the right recipe for you yet.

The Peninsula, Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo, cooks frijol negro almost exclusively. The black bean is what grew there, what the Maya cultivated for centuries, and what the Peninsula kitchen still puts on the table at almost every meal. The northern half of Mexico cooks pintos and bayos. The Peninsula does not. If you are making refritos with pinto beans, you are making frijoles refritos del norte, not yucatecos. Both are real. They are not the same dish.

The other thing the Peninsula does, and this confuses people who learned Mexican beans somewhere else, is keep these refritos with texture. They are not silky. Silky is frijol colado, the strained black bean puree that anchors panuchos and huevos motuleños. Frijol colado is its own dish, born of the same beans but pushed through a sieve until it looks like dark cream. Refritos are the texture before the sieve: mashed but still rough, glossy with lard, holding the shape of the spoon for a second before they slump.

My mother was from Jalisco and she fried beans in lard. But the first time I ate true Yucatecan refritos was in a tiny fonda in Valladolid in 2009, on a plate next to a panucho, with a smear of habanero salsa on the side. The woman who served me, doña Esperanza, told me her secret without my asking: 'Mucha manteca y la rama entera de epazote.' Plenty of lard and the whole epazote branch. I wrote it in the margin of my notebook. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.