Torrejas en Miel de Piloncillo

Torrejas belong to Puebla and to Ciudad de Mexico, the colonial heart of the country where Spanish convent recipes were rewritten with Mexican ingredients and Mexican patience. This is a Cuaresma dish, eaten through Lent, when the Catholic calendar called for no meat and the kitchens of central Mexico turned to bread, eggs, dairy, and the dark sweetness of piloncillo.

The inheritance is Spanish. The torrija arrived with the conquistadores and the nuns, made with stale bread, milk, wine, and white sugar. Mexico kept the bones and changed the soul. Out went the wine and the refined sugar. In came piloncillo, the unrefined cane sugar cone with its smoky mineral edge, infused with canela mexicana and clavo until the syrup tastes like the inside of a colonial pantry. Out went vegetable oil or butter. In came manteca de cerdo, because lard is what the convents had and lard is what makes the crust crackle. La manteca es el sabor.

Use bolillo or telera, the everyday white breads of Mexican panaderias, and use them stale. Fresh bread collapses in the milk and shames the dish. The bread has to be a day or two old, dry enough to drink the milk without surrendering. The capeado, the whipped egg coating, is the same one you use for chiles rellenos and it puffs into a golden crust around the soaked bread.

My mother made torrejas every Viernes Santo, Good Friday, in her kitchen in Colonia Roma. The syrup simmered for an hour on the back burner while she ironed my school uniform and the apartment filled with the smell of piloncillo and clove. The recipe in her notebook is three lines long and ends with a note in the margin: 'el pan tiene que estar duro,' the bread has to be hard. She was right. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.