Huarache

A ball of masa is pressed and pulled into a flat oval the length of a hand and griddled until the outside firms. That oval is the huarache, named for the woven leather sandal it resembles, and it is a platform you eat with your fingers, dressed across its whole surface like an open plate. Refried beans are worked into the masa first, then a protein, then a red or green salsa, crumbled cheese, shredded lettuce, raw onion, and a spoon of crema. The defining fact of the dish sits underneath all of that: this is a substantial slab of corn, big enough that the masa is half of every bite rather than a wrapper for the topping. Flatten it to a thin sheet and it becomes a tostada; pinch a wall onto a small round and it becomes a sope. The huarache is the long, thick, open one.

Made well it is mostly a masa problem. The dough, ground from nixtamalized corn, has to be shaped long and even and cooked on the comal until the skin firms while the interior stays tender, so it can carry a wet load without going chalky or limp. The beans go on thin and warm so they bind the toppings rather than slide under them. The salsa is applied with restraint, enough to season the corn without flooding it. The cold elements go on last so they stay cool and distinct against the warm base. A well-made oval crackles at the edge and stays soft through the center, the beans holding the structure and each topping still tasting like itself. The base is the part everything else is judged against, because if the masa is wrong nothing on top can save it.

It collapses from the bottom up. Press the masa too thin and it cannot hold a full dressing, tearing across the long middle under the weight. Griddle it too pale and it stays bendy and folds in the hand; griddle it too dark and the skin turns brittle and cracks at the first bite, spilling the load. Skip the bean layer and the salsa soaks straight into the porous corn, so the top still looks intact while the base has gone to paste underneath, the failure you only discover halfway through. A huarache that goes soggy is not a huarache with a problem; it is a soggy raft, the whole point lost.

The smell off a fresh one is toasted corn first, then warm beans and whatever salsa has just hit it, a little smoke from the comal. The rim crackles and the center stays soft and faintly sweet. The beans are smooth, the cheese salty and dry, the crema cool, the raw onion and lettuce sharp and crisp against the warm masa, the salsa stinging a beat behind. It is long and loaded enough that you eat it flat or cupped across one hand, working from one end toward the other, and the corn is present in every bite rather than disappearing under the dressing.

At a Mexico City huarachería the base is the constant and the board lists the toppings: the cook presses the long oval to order and asks what goes on it, con bistec, con suadero, de nopales, con huevo. It is eaten standing at the comal, cheap and filling, a market and street-corner food more than a sit-down one. The masa is shaped by hand in front of the customer, and the size of the thing, far longer than a tortilla, is itself the signal that the corn is meant to be the meal.

The variations are almost entirely a question of what sits on the base. Dress it with seared steak and it is a huarache con bistec; dress it with soft, fatty suadero and it is a huarache con suadero, the same platform under a different protein. Pull the masa thicker and split it into a pocket and you leave the form for a gordita, which holds its filling inside rather than on top. Shrink it to a small walled round and you reach the sope, a deeper, fried cousin built for a wetter load.

Carmelita's sandal at the La Viga canal

The huarache has a name and a place behind it. It was created by Carmen Gómez Medina, known as Carmelita, a widowed street vendor raising five children, at a stall beside the La Viga navigation canal in Mexico City in about the early 1930s. She had been selling tlacoyos and began stretching the masa longer and flatter until the shape resembled the sole of a sandal, the huarache the dish is named for.

The form traveled with her as the city changed around it. When the La Viga canal was filled in and paved into a road she relocated, and once the Mercado de Jamaica opened its doors in 1957 she moved the stall into that market, then later to a spot on Torno street. The huarache spread by word of mouth from those locations across Mexico City and eventually well beyond it.

The word itself is older than the dish, a Purépecha term for the leather sandal whose elongated sole the masa was made to echo. The base shape is the invention, fixed to one widow's stall on the La Viga canal in the early 1930s; everything piled on top of it across the decades since is a variation on that long corn oval.