Tacos de Cecina de Yecapixtla

This is from Morelos. More specifically, from Yecapixtla, a small town in the eastern part of the state where every Sunday the streets fill with people who drove in from Cuernavaca and Ciudad de México just to eat cecina. The cooks there have been salting and sun-drying beef in long, thin sheets for generations, and the town's name is now inseparable from the product. When a Mexican says cecina de Yecapixtla, they are not naming a style. They are naming a place.

The cecina that defines this taco is not jerky and it is not bresaola. It is beef leg or round, butterflied into sheets thin enough to see through, salted by hand, and hung to dry under the sun for a few hours, not days. The result is meat that keeps the structure of beef but concentrates the flavor, and that gives up everything the moment it hits a hot comal. The whole technique is in the comal: hot, fast, with a smear of manteca. Slow heat kills cecina. So does crowding the pan. One piece at a time, or two, and you flip when the edges curl.

The tacos themselves are simple, and that is the point. Crema, queso fresco, avocado, raw onion, cilantro, lime. Nothing competes with the cecina because the cecina is the dish. No me vengas con atajos. Do not substitute carne asada and call it cecina. Do not buy thick, heavily smoked supermarket beef and pretend it is the same product. The cooks of Yecapixtla guard this tradition because it is theirs and because it works. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Morelos has this one.

My mother did not make cecina. She was from Jalisco and the cecina tradition does not travel west the way it travels into the valley around the capital. But I have spent enough Sundays in Yecapixtla, watching the women in white aprons slice meat into curtains and hang it on poles in the courtyard behind the carniceria, to know exactly what this taco is supposed to taste like. Salt. Beef. Sun. The cool brightness of crema and lime against the dark sear of the meat. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.