Totonac-Style Beans with Pumpkin Seeds

Soledad Gómez Atzín, the eighty-seven-year-old matriarch of the family who run the House of Masks museum in Papantla, taught me this simple version of a traditional dish of the Totonac Indians. It features toasted pumpkin seeds lightly crushed in a mortar rather than ground to a paste as in most versions.

Good pork cracklings (chicharrones) are essential to the dish. If you don’t make your own — the best way — then buy them fresh from a Latin American butcher. Avoid the facto