It doesn’t matter if you are at a hotel, restaurant, market, street-food stand or the home of a local in Yucatán, Mexico — if salsa de mesa, or table salsa, is not there when you sit down, you can count the minutes until someone quickly mashes some together or opens the refrigerator to pour some into a bowl.
In Yucatán, people drizzle it over, spoon it onto and dip into it everything except dessert. It is so ubiquitous that, like table salt, it needs no other descriptor. But everyone knows what it is made of: the small but mighty habanero chile, roasted and mashed with just enough sour orange juice and a pinch of salt to make it salsa-ble.
Within the vast and diverse foodways of Mexico, chiles shape the personality of regional cuisines. In Chihuahua, it is the fresh chilaca chile, which is called chile Colorado when dried. In Sonora, it’s the fresh or dried chiltepín. In Michoacán, it is the dried pasilla, and in Veracruz, the jalapeño. In Yucatán, the habanero is king. If it is not already part of a dish, the obligatory salsa de mesa stands by to add zing and heat.
“The habanero is the life of our cuisine,” said Elio Xicum, a chef who grew up and still lives in Yucatán. “If our food doesn’t have habanero in it, or at least on the side of it, it is halfhearted.”
