Toksel de Ibes

Toksel is from Yucatán. Not from Mérida exactly, from the milpa villages around it, the small Mayan communities where the milpa still feeds the family and the words for the ingredients are still in Maya. Toksel means "toasted" in Yucatec Maya. The dish is named for what you do to the pepitas.

This is one of the oldest dishes I have collected. Older than achiote on the peninsula, older than the Spanish pig, older than the colonial recados that define the rest of Yucatecan cooking. Beans, squash seeds, herbs, fire. That is the entire architecture. The ibes are a small white bean grown in the milpa alongside corn and squash, the three sisters of Mesoamerican agriculture, and they have a buttery interior and a thin skin that the dried lima bean only approximates. If you can find true ibes at a Yucatecan specialty market, buy them. If you cannot, use small dried lima beans and know that you are making a respectful approximation, not the real thing.

In the villages, the pepitas are toasted on a comal set directly on wood coals, and the smoke goes into the seed. Some cooks add a hot stone from the hearth into the finished dish for a few minutes to push that smoke deeper. That is where the recipe gets its name in the deeper sense: toasted by stone, toasted by fire. You will not have a hearth. You will have a comal and a stove. That is fine. Toast slowly, watch the color, pull them off the moment they turn gold. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo.

My mother did not cook Yucatecan food. She was from Jalisco. But I have a page in my own notebook now, copied carefully from a señora in the village of Yaxunah who showed me how she prepares this dish for the milpa workers who come home hungry at midday. She told me: "The pepita is the meat. The bean is the body. The cebollina is the breath." I have not found a better way to explain it. Así se hace y punto.