Pan Francés Yucateco con Chocolate

This is from Yucatan. Not from anywhere else. Pan francés is a specific bread, the small crusty loaves the Yucatecan panaderos bake every morning, the kind you find piled in baskets at the panaderias of Merida and Valladolid before the heat of the day sets in. The bread has nothing to do with France. The name is a regional inheritance, the way half of Yucatan's vocabulary tells you about who passed through this peninsula and what stayed behind.

You make this on Sunday. The comedores in Merida know it, the home kitchens know it, the abuelas in Izamal and Motul know it. Day-old pan francés, sliced on the bias and soaked in a custard of egg, whole milk, condensed milk, vanilla, and a stick of canela de Ceylon. Fried in butter and a little manteca, because butter alone burns and tastes flat. Coated in cinnamon sugar. Then brought to the table with a tall jarro of Mexican chocolate, hot and frothed with a molinillo, and poured over the top until the bread drinks it. You eat it with a spoon. Anything else and the chocolate runs off the plate.

My mother did not make this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does its own breakfast. But I learned this version from a senora named Doña Lupe, no relation, who ran a tiny comedor in the Mercado Lucas de Galvez in Merida and served it every Sunday morning to families coming home from mass. She used pan francés from a panaderia three blocks away, butter and manteca from her own pantry, and chocolate de mesa she broke off a tablet with the handle of a wooden spoon. The recipe is in my notebook in her handwriting. She wrote at the bottom: 'el chocolate al final, en la mesa, nunca antes.' The chocolate at the end, at the table, never before. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.