The Dish on Mexico City's Markets

I might have stuck around to press him (I am a reporter, after all), but I catch a whiff of grilling meat. We must be close to the hidden quesadilla stand Nick has been telling me about. I press on.

That's when I meet Gerardo Ramirez. He nods approvingly as I plant myself on a plastic stool next to the counter at "Antojitos Doña Celia" (Doña Celia's Snacks), a five-stool stand at the western edge of the market's main building. The handwritten menu offers quesadillas with brains, quesadillas with stewed pork stomach and quesadillas with pickled pork fat. I am feeling adventurous, but not that adventurous. I opt for a squash-flower quesadilla, and it doesn't disappoint. Nick chooses a quesadilla made with huitlacoche, an inky black corn fungus that smells of truffles and earth, and I'm grateful he lets me have a big bite.

Folded over, my quesadilla is 10 inches long, seared on a comal (a flat, cast-iron cooking surface) and blue, made from blue corn. Inside, the chewy white Oaxacan cheese -- think string cheese, but not as dense or as salty -- oozes to the edge of the tortilla. The squash flower has been toasted lightly on the comal, but not so much that it loses its clean, refreshing glint, a nice complement to the hint of salt in the cheese. I top it with Gerardo's salsa, a silky puree of red chilies, onions and garlic.

"The secret is the cheese: There are only one or two places in the whole city where you can get the real stuff, the real Oaxacan stuff," Gerardo tells me. But I can barely focus. I was in quesadilla nirvana, far from the under-grilled tortillas of my past, from the barely melted cheese, from the watery salsa.

Nick snaps me out of my dreamlike state. He wants more, and I am happy to be pulled along.

We pick our way through the thicket of stalls, winding around stacks of banana leaves being sliced up for tamales and battalions of young women shaving the spines off the paddle leaves of nopal cactus, which Mexicans saute until they are soft and have the gooey texture of okra. We stop under an orange tarp for rib-meat tacos with a plank of grilled nopal sticking out the ends, but we don't linger long.

We loop down the stairs of the subway station that pops up in the center of the market. Three stops later, we are tracking toward the San Juan Market, Mexico City's swankiest, a place where French diplomats contemplate the giant "chocolate" clams and housekeepers loaded down with bags trail after finely coiffed Mexican society matrons.

We beeline for the market's southwest corner, Stall No. 283. There, behind a basin-size ceramic bowl, Manuela Serrano swirls a long spoon through a smoky, simmering pot of something mysterious and wonderful.

Serrano, a restaurant-trained chef, is here every Saturday morning. The smart crowd knows to show up early or they'll miss her pozole, a rich, chili-infused broth with strands of stewed chicken meat and marble-size kernels of white corn that resemble hominy.

There are all kinds of pozole: green pozole, white pozole, Jalisco-style red pozole. But Serrano's is the deepest red I've ever seen.

"It's like paint," Nick coos as he scoops another spoonful.

We might have lingered, but not this afternoon. We are rolling and still ravenous. In the market center, we stop to see José Juárez, who charmed my parents last Christmas with his endless samples of fine imported cheese. Juárez is always surrounded by regulars who know they can practically make a meal out of the hunks of bread and cheese he doles out at no cost, and the oaky Spanish wine he pours.