Pierna Mechada Yucateca

This is from Yucatán. Not from Mexico generally, from Yucatán specifically, the peninsula that has spent four hundred years building a cuisine separate from the rest of the country. The Maya kitchen married the Spanish kitchen, and then the Lebanese arrived in the 19th century with their own grinding stones and their own ideas about meat and spice, and the result is on this platter. You will not find pierna mechada like this in Sonora or Veracruz or Michoacán. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Mérida.

The word mechada comes from mechar, to lard or to thread, the technique of cutting deep slits into a piece of meat and packing them with seasoning and stuffing. In Yucatán, the slits get picadillo, a sweet-savory mixture of ground meats with olives, raisins, capers, almonds, and warm spices that reads as much Andalusi as it does Mexican. The braise is built on naranja agria and two recados: recado rojo for the achiote color and earthy depth, recado de bistek for the black pepper sharpness that cuts the sweetness of the picadillo. Both recados. Not one. The balance is the recipe.

This is a Nochebuena dish. Christmas Eve in Mérida, the families who set out the white platters with the carved leg in the middle, the cebollas encurtidas in the glass jar, the warm tortillas wrapped in a servilleta, the salsa xnipec in a small clay bowl. I learned this recipe from a señora named Doña Esperanza in the Mercado Lucas de Galvez in 2009. She walked me through every cut of the knife and made me repeat the spices back to her three times. She told me her grandmother taught her, and her grandmother's grandmother taught her grandmother, and that the only thing that had changed in a hundred years was the oven. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.