Name: Red Snapper Hash (Salpicón de Huachinango)
Yield: 6 to 8 servings as a first course, more as a taco filling
Cuisine: Mexican
Ingredients: 2 teaspoons ground cumin; 3 medium-sized ripe, red tomatoes, chopped (about 2½ cups); 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste; 6 to 7 scallions, white and some of green part, minced (about 1 cup); 2½ pounds red snapper fillets, skinned and small bones removed with tweezers; 6 large garlic cloves, finely minced; ¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves; 1½ teaspoons ground true (Ceylon) cinnamon, preferably freshly ground in a spice grinder; ½ teaspoon ground cloves; ½ cup (1 stick; ¼ pound) unsalted butter; 3 fresh chiles, either jalapeño or serrano, stems removed but not seeded, finely chopped

Preparation info

6 to 8
servings as a first course, more as a taco filling

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Food from My Heart

By Zarela Martínez

Published 1992

About

This recipe has become my signature dish, but actually I adapted it from one of the dishes my mother found when everyone was passing recipes on to me in El Paso. It was originally done with crab, but here the cost would be prohibitive for what was originally a simple dish from a bar in Tampico, Tamaulipas state.

The story is this: My stepfather and my mother were in Tampico on a business trip. My Tío Chacha is a nosher. (We call him tie—uncle—because we have known h