Pastel Azteca Norteño

Pastel azteca is a northern dish. The version cooks make in Mexico City uses poblano, but the norteño version, the one you eat in a kitchen in Chihuahua or Sonora, leans on chile Anaheim verde, the long, mild green chile that grows along the borderlands and hangs in ristras outside the kitchens of the Sierra Madre. The cheese is queso Chihuahua, also called queso menonita, made by the Mennonite communities of Cuauhtemoc since they arrived in the 1920s. The crema is thick and tangy, the kind they sell by the kilo in the dairy aisles of Hermosillo and Ciudad Juarez. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the north.

The dish is built in layers like a lasagna, but do not call it that. The structure is Mexican: tortillas softened in oil, salsa de tomate fried in lard until it thickens, rajas of green chile cooked with onion, shredded chicken from a bird poached that morning, queso Chihuahua that melts into long ropes when it comes out of the oven. Each layer earns its place. Skip the lard fry on the salsa and the casserole runs watery. Skip the oil dip on the tortillas and the layers turn to paste. These are not optional steps. These are the recipe.

My mother did not cook northern food. She was from Jalisco. But I have a page in my notebook from a senora named Doña Cristina, who fed me this pastel in her kitchen in Delicias, Chihuahua, on a January afternoon when the wind was cutting and her wood stove was the only warm thing for blocks. She made it with chickens she raised, chiles her brother grew, and queso from the Mennonite colony down the road. That is the dish. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.