So this dish is not unlike something I’ve done when I have leftover tortillas, leftover spicy meat like carnitas, and leftover starch or vegetable mix along with some available sauce.
The difference in this case is first that Sterling’s recipe is extremely oriented on dogfish, the small sharks that surf fishers catch frequently. I remember seeing dogfish a lot when I used to skindive as a teenager off of the South Bay in Los Angeles. The basic idea is that this is a common bycatch off piers, with net fishing, etc., and this is a way to use them productively: you soak them a bit to get the urea out of their flesh, you grill them, you flake the grilled fish off into a tomato-onion-pepper mixture and cook it down a bit (with all the nice blackened grill bits), you then layer them freshly cooked thus on corn tortillas fried in a bit of lard with alternating layers of pureed black beans.
I’m a big fan of the basic idea, on all levels. But there’s some issues here. The first is the dogfish. Sterling is pretty much “the dogfish is the Mayan, Yutacan thing” and that’s what the book is trying to teach. You can find shark in steak form around the Mid-Atlantic without too much difficulty, but it’s usually mako or some other big deep-water shark and it’s not a sustainable fishery. So I decided to use some monkfish and a bit of cod, both of which I had. I wasn’t going to grill them today, so I put them under the broiler to try and get a bit of charring and browning on it. That sort of worked, but not fantastically so. The cuisine that Sterling describes in the book is very very built around charring on a lot of food, so I tried to reproduce that as much as I could—it’s a taste I like anyway.
I made some usual substitutions: poblano chiles for green bell peppers (I just hate the flavor of green bell peppers). The black beans I mostly made according to Sterling’s recipe but I made it in the Insta-Pot. I was an Insta-Pot skeptic but for beans? It’s the answer to a chef’s prayers. You can make beans with tremendous layered flavor reliably whereas I previously found that beans were multi-day agony where you weren’t always sure whether it was going to work no matter how much soaking and cooking you did.
But let’s talk about the corn tortillas. The fundamental idea of this recipe as described by Sterling is more or less that you come up to a Mayan abuela and ask humbly for one of these and they take some corn tortillas they’ve already made, some black beans they’ve already made, and some fish and tomatoes they’ve already stewed lightly and they assemble on the spot something delicious and hot for you by frying the tortillas in pork lard, dipping them quickly in a tomato salsa, and then alternating bean and fish layers until you say no mas! and that’s your meal.
The tortilla instructions aren’t any different than the others I’ve seen, but this time I resolved to obey the injunction to do it by hand (no tortilla press). They came out pretty damn well. I hate to be withholding but I’m pretty sure that’s a function of: 1) I bought Bob’s Red Mill Masa Harina this time; 2) I paid close attention to the masa to water proportion and 3) I was super-focused on the corn tortilla cookery because I was going to have to put it to print.\
So yeah, ok, they worked! It may just be that the flour tortillas I’m used to making are just…something I’m used to making. Sterling makes a lot of noise about sweet old Mayan ladies being super-expert about making hundreds of corn tortillas a day for family and everyone else, and that’s right, I’m sure. I felt more confident this time, but I can’t help but feel that’s just a matter of focus and not instruction.
A good recipe, a good meal, but I still have ambiguous feelings about the cookbook itself. It might warrant another test in the future.
Extra coda: I did not use epazote because I didn’t have epazote. But also because having cooked with epazote I’m an epazote-agnostic. I’m not entirely sure it makes a difference; I feel as if most of the time fresh cilantro does the job just fine where epazote would be called for.