Pizzanucho de Mérida

This is from Mérida, Yucatán. Not from Mexico. From Mérida, and you have to understand that distinction before you understand the dish.

The Peninsula sits apart. For most of its history it was easier to get to Cuba or New Orleans from Mérida than to Mexico City, and the food carries that isolation: sour orange instead of lime, achiote where the rest of the country uses guajillo, queso de bola in its red wax rind brought in through the port of Sisal, smoked turkey from the milpa, habanero so hot it has its own dialect. Yucatecan cooks do not apologize for any of this. They built their own cuisine and they are correct to defend it.

The pizzanucho was invented in 1979 by a pizzero named José Luis Marrero, who looked at a panucho, the fried tortilla stuffed with refried black beans and topped with turkey and pickled red onion that anyone from Mérida eats by the half-dozen, and asked the obvious question: what if the base was a pizza. The answer is what you are about to make. Refried black beans cooked with epazote, smoked pavo, melted queso de bola, and a mountain of cebolla morada pickled in naranja agria. Every layer is panucho. The base is pizza. It should not work and it does, and Mérida has been eating it for almost fifty years.

My mother was from Jalisco. She did not cook Yucatecan food. I learned this dish in 2011 from a woman named Doña Reyna who ran a small pizzeria on Calle 62 in Mérida and who told me, while she pulled the wax off a queso de bola the size of a softball, that the secret was respecting both halves. You cannot cheat the pizza, you cannot cheat the panucho. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Yucatán's kitchen is one of the most particular of them all.