Salsa Macha Sonorense de Chiltepín y Cacahuate

Salsa macha is from Veracruz. The original, the one made with chile morita and pasilla and pureed almost smooth, belongs to the Gulf coast and to the cooks of the Orizaba and Coatepec sierra. Let me say that first because the people of Veracruz earned it.

But what you are making here is the noroeste version. Sonora's. And it is its own animal. The defining ingredient is chiltepín, the wild round chile that grows on shrubs in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, harvested by hand from August through October by families who have been doing it for generations. Sonoran cooks call it the mother of all chiles because botanists believe it is genetically the closest living relative to the original wild capsicum that every other chile in the world descends from. You hold a chiltepín in your palm and you are holding the beginning of the chile family.

The Sonoran macha has texture. It is not pureed. The peanut stays in pieces, the sesame stays whole, the chiltepín cracks but does not pulverize. The fat is neutral oil, sometimes cut with a little olive oil, never lard, because this is a noroeste sauce and the noroeste cooks differently than central Mexico. It is built for the parrilla, for the carne asada that defines a Sonoran weekend, for a flour tortilla the size of a dinner plate, for the mariscos that come off the Sea of Cortez.

My mother's notebook does not have a recipe for this one. Sonora was not her territory. I learned this version from a senora named Doña Beatriz at the mercado in Hermosillo, who sold chiltepines en frasco out of a wooden crate and corrected my Spanish three times before she would tell me how she made it. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Sonora's belongs to the desert and to the chile that grows there wild.