Vaporcitos Yucatecos

Vaporcitos are Yucatecan. Not from any other Mexico. The Peninsula has its own grammar, recado rojo, naranja agria, achiote, banana leaf, pib, and these small tamales speak it from the first bite.

They are smaller than the tamales of any other state. A vaporcito fits in your palm. The masa is thinner than central Mexican tamales, the meat just a streak through the middle, the whole thing wrapped in a folded square of banana leaf and steamed until the leaf gives off its perfume into the dough. You eat them at breakfast in Merida, from baskets the panaderia women carry on their heads, three or four at a time with a cup of coffee. They cost almost nothing. They are the food of working people who need to eat fast and well before the heat of the day rises.

The orange color of the masa is achiote, ground with garlic and naranja agria and a few spices into the recado rojo that is the foundation of Yucatecan cooking. Without it, you have a tamale. With it, you have a vaporcito. I spent two weeks in Merida in 2009 sitting at the Mercado Lucas de Galvez watching the recado vendors weigh out their pastes by the kilo, and what I learned is that no two are the same. Every family adjusts. Every cook has her version. That is how a regional cuisine stays alive.

My mother never made these. They were not from her Jalisco. But there is a page in her notebook with the words 'recado rojo' written across the top and a list of ingredients copied from a Yucatecan friend, and a note in the margin: 'sour orange or it is not the same.' She was right. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.