Food&Wine Magazine

Melissa Clark tours the Yucatan one panucho at time with Patricia Quintana in tow. The eat in the Market and at hacienda Xcanatun. So should you.

"Quintana, the chef and co-owner of Izote, one of the hottest restaurants in Mexico City, is passionate about tracing Mexican cuisine back to its pre-Columbian roots. She's especially fascinated by the Yucatán, where she's made dozens of trips over the past quarter century to research her 14 cookbooks. Yucatán cuisine is distinctive partly because the region was geographically isolated from the rest of the country for centuries, Quintana explains as we head toward the market in the capital of Mérida, on the northwestern side of the peninsula. Our driver speeds along the Paseo de Montejo—a broad avenue lined with faded colonial mansions in varying states of restoration. This part of Mérida, just outside the center of the city, is architecturally reminiscent of Havana: The Yucatán peninsula juts into the Caribbean Sea, so Mérida is actually closer to Cuba than it is to Mexico City.

The Spanish influences on the cuisine are strong—the conquistadors arrived in the 16th century—but so are those of the Mayans, whom the Spanish were never quite able to obliterate, despite their bloody efforts. Northern Europeans have left their legacy too, particularly the Dutch: Holland was an active trading partner in the 19th century, when Mérida was the center for the production of henequen, a fiber traditionally used for making rope.

"The corn, the chocolate and the honey, the venison and wild turkey, squash, cucumbers, chiles and tomatoes are from the Mayans," Quintana says. "The pork and Seville oranges come from Spain, and the Edam cheese from the Dutch."

Edam? It sounds strange, but as we enter the dim, narrow lanes of the huge covered market, I see balls of Edam and Gouda everywhere, piled into pyramids next to dozens of bins of earth-toned recados, the ubiquitous herb-and-spice pastes. Quintana stops in front of the tubs of recados. "Each one of these is for a different dish, and people buy a few cents' worth to use that day," she says."