Pastelitos de Queso de Bola

This is from Yucatán. Specifically from Mérida, where the panaderías along Calle 62 line their wooden trays with these small pastelitos in the late afternoon and the women come in with cloth bags to pick out three, four, five at a time. They cost a few pesos each. They are eaten standing up, in the courtyard, with a glass cup of black coffee. This is the rhythm of a Yucatecan afternoon.

The cheese is queso de bola. Aged Edam, the round ball wrapped in red wax that came to the peninsula on Dutch ships through the port of Sisal in the nineteenth century and stayed because Yucatecan cooks decided it belonged here. It is the same cheese that goes into queso relleno, the great Mérida banquet dish. Here it gets a humbler home: grated into a short, lard-rich dough with a whisper of sugar, sealed, brushed with egg, baked until the cheese inside softens and the pastry edges flake. The sweet against the sharp salt of the Edam is the entire point. Do not reduce the sugar. Do not substitute cheddar. Do not use butter instead of lard. Each of those choices erases a piece of what makes the dish Yucatecan.

My mother did not make these. She was from Jalisco and her notebook holds no pastelitos. I learned them from a panadera in Mérida named Doña Carmela who let me sit in her kitchen one August afternoon while she rolled out dough and complained about tourists who asked for them with cheddar. She handed me one hot from the oven and said, mira, this is a small pastry but it is from a place. Cada estado, su propia cocina. Yucatán's bakeries are different from Puebla's, which are different from Coahuila's, and the pastelito de queso de bola is a Mérida thing. Make it the way Mérida makes it.