...Pavo de relleno negro, is turkey with a black "stuffing". But let's stop a moment to check out this word relleno which you will often come across in menus, as for example in crab or chile relleno. Like good cooks anywhere, Mexicans take considerable liberties with the literal Spanish meaning of words. Something or other that is described as relleno in all probability is not, literally, stuffed. Although sometimes the food really is stuffed, as often as not the "stuffing" mixture is served as a sauce or even side garnish.

This can be so even with peppers. At La Parilla the chiles rellenos consisted of bell peppers cut open and laid flat, with ground meat, bacon, mushroom, cheese, green salsa spread over, each ingredient somewhat separated from the others.

So far as I know, there is no such thing as a Yucatecan cookbook, and although I can say for sure that pavo de relleno negro is nationally known as something Mayans do well, it does not feature in the informative Mexican cookbooks I was able to find in Cancun. So I cannot be sure whether, literally, some part of the bird was supposed to be wrapped around the rellena stuffing. It would be very difficult to do, since the rellena is quite liquid, and much more in the nature of a beautifully contrived sauce or gravy.

I had the dish twice, at Los Venados and at Los Almendros, and once something similar under another name, a version of nouvelle cuisine, at Du Mexique. In neither traditional case did the turkey matter much, being stringy and tough at Los Almendros, and chunky tough at Los Venados. It was the juice, the sauce, the gravy, call it what you will, that was superb, and showed me without the slightest doubt that, as sauciers the Mayans can be the equal of any in the world.

At Los Almendros the ingredients included pork and hard boiled egg so finely ground they had no impact on texture whatsoever, together with almonds, epazote, olives, mild quemado chile, and I found a couple of raisins. At Los Venados the juice was a little thinner, and had bitter orange or lime, no raisins. But it came with rice to mop it up, and a roll of ground pork, like a two inch diameter sausage without the skin. The resulting colour of the gravy was such a dark green, from the chile, that at first I thought it was black, and the total concoction was redolent with flavours.

Jaivas in this part of the world are prized smallish crabs, about three inches. I had jaiva (jaiba) dishes twice, and was not thrilled. Indeed at El Calamar, an excellent restaurant, the stuffed crab shells, though powerful with minced crab, seemed to have no other flavouring, and I had to mix them with a supplied side ceviche salsa to make them palatable. Similarly at Los Flamingos a salpicon (mince) of stewed jaiva was just as tasteless. Yet Booth gives a Vera Cruz recipe for stuffing which contains almonds, olives, tomato, onion, egg, mustard and Tabasco sauce.....

And, truth to tell, I'm the kind of person who finds lobster, which also figures highly on all the menus of all the seafood restaurants in Cancun, totally uninteresting unless it is beautifully sauced. I did not find any special Yucatecan lobster sauce at all anywhere, but my French friend Murielle had an extraordinarily delicate Nantua-like preparation in the gourmet restaurant at the Melia Cancun hotel.

The most satisfying nationally known fish dish, which alas you will also not find in the kind of Mexican cookbook I consulted, is tikin zic. I had noticed it on several menus, including Los Flamingos and even places like Bellini in the Caracol shopping mall, and I chose it for the first time at the Contoy. As time went on more and more locals said the very best was at Rio Nizuc. So one day Jaime Rubio, the manager of Federal Express which had been looking after my mails to Canada, and I set off there for a kind of farewell lunch.

The fish was butterflied and grilled with oil, brushed with a sauce of achiote, pimiento, garlic and orange, giving a soft red-brown colour, and crisping the skin, served with a side salsa containing the Yucatecan habañero. The fish was a huge mero (grouper), served for two, the head garnished with marinated jalapeño pepper, and a raw salad mostly of onion. The fish must be butterflied, or the cook cannot brush the dryish paste onto the flesh, as well as the crispy tasty skin. At Contoy, there was also a side serving of rice. Rice, by the way, seems always to be garnished with a variety of possibilities, most often slightly reddish in colour, perhaps with tomato, minimal chile, beans, peas, and often fried, presented as a mound.

Other dishes are perhaps not so nationally known, at least as Yucatecan specialties. I enjoyed many, from which I select just a few. At Los Venados, albóndigas meat balls, about an inch and a half in diameter, held together with corn meal, came in a light tomato and lime broth, preceded by a chicken soup with peas and garbanzo beans. On the side there was a large soup plate full of black bean purée, hand made tortillas, and a somewhat runny but flavourful salsa.

Interestingly enough, that most internationally known of all Latin American dishes, ceviche, is not important enough, not Mexican enough, or too easy to manufacture, to figure in the home-grown Mexican recipe books. Naturally enough, in coastal Yucatan, they are magnificent, always featuring cilantro, and a minimum of extraneous material like raw onion and/or tomato, lime, with side wedges, side spicy salsa for those who want chile in it -- as was the case at Rio Nizuc. There I had a mixture of white fish and octopus.

Ceviche of conch is almost universal, with an octopus like texture -- but makes me wonder where all the conch comes from, and how long it can last, just as I do with crab and lobster, since, I am told, it is not farmed. At the Contoy restaurant the ceviche included mañero chile. At Los Flamingos, the chiles rellenos de mariscos were utterly superb. Great green bell peppers stuffed to the hilt with all kinds of shellfish, wrapped in corn tortillas, and covered with a red-brown sauce containing orange, tomato, puréed mild chile.

Snapper (huachinango, guachinango) is the most internationally famous of Mexican fish, primarily because of the way it is almost universally served with a Veracruzana sauce in Mexican restaurants outside the country. In Yucatan it is sometimes replaced with a similar fish called boquinete for which I have been unable to trace an English name. In any event, you don't have to have it with Veracruzana sauce, which, moreover, can be disappointing unless done by the best.

At El Calamar it was offered in four styles, and, exploring as I was, I chose the three that were unfamiliar to me, all on the same plate..... Believe it or not, it worked.

I left out the mantequilla (butter) sauce, and instead chose ajo (garlic, out of curiosity), chipotle and xcatic, the last two being varieties of chile. Seldom have I had as pleasing a fish, and, where fish is concerned, I'm very hard to please. The fillets of snapper were grilled in butter, firm, quite thin. On top of one was the chipotle, a red chile, sauce. On the other, the xcatic, a green chile'd sauce with tomatillo. On top of both fillets were tiny chips of roasted garlic, scattered. Nothing else. Alas, garnished with a useless helping of raw cabbage and some cooked carrots.

Once again it's time for a linguistic diversion. The Mexicans, who more or less invented tomatoes, don't use the word the way it is used in English. Our kind of intended-to-be-red tomato is jitomate. Somewhere along the historical line the word tomatillo came into North American English to describe a green fruit, like a tomato, of the genus Physalis. Nobody who writes cook books seems to know how. Just to confuse us poor foreigners, the Mexican word tomate, sometimes tomate verde, means tomatillo, which, botanically -- and don't let some of the cook books deceive you because they sometimes get it wrong -- is not a tomato at all.

There are other interesting foods. Longaniza, a long thin dryish spiced sausage, served as an antojitos with three different salsas at Los Almendros, jicama, a tasteless hard "fruit", which, however, is capable of absorbing flavours when properly handled, pepino or cucumber marinated with vinegar, lemon and cilantro as an appetizer and salsa (Contoy), sopa Azteca or sopa Maya, chicken based broth containing tostadas (triangular toasted tortilla chips like North American nachos), not very tasty, until you squeeze in juice from the supplied lemon wedges and add some side salsa, when it starts to bear a resemblance to the Greek avgolemono. But if you are here for any length of time you will want to go beyond Mayan only, and try out the way Mexican food is presented. Rather different. The restaurants divide into three -- traditional and family, tourist and bourgeois, and nouvelle cuisine.

The most exciting and genuine of the whole lot can be hard to find. I would not have known of it but for a chance remark of a lady on the staff of the little hurrican-destroyed Cancun Museum. First of all, it is normally open only on Sundays from early morning until three in the afternoon, though in some seasons you can have a meal on Saturdays. It is there for Mexican family Sunday treats, adjacent to Mercado 23 away from the tourist routes, upstairs over a large vegetable and chile store. Flor de Hidalgo, as it is called, is run by a charming lady who will do her best for you even if you have no Spanish and she no English, and seems proud of her enterprise. The main room is huge and packed, and there is another verandah style overlooking a square.

Clients come and go, busy, talkative, enthusiastically examining their food, most of the men of huge girth. Tables come together for parties of six, eight, ten, babies, children on laps, balloons in the air. People get up to look at where the food is cooking, others come in and take dishes out wrapped in the universal foil. Flor de Hidalgo is clearly an institution for expatriate Mexicans.

I wandered over to the open cooking area. Girls patting tortillas into shape, frying the antojitos in great pans, huge hot cauldrons of the moles and stews, the back wall hung with equipment and pans of all descriptions, men and women sweating and joking as I photographed, huge pottery bowls of salsas of a dozen kinds.

I had a wonderful ensalada de nopales, prickly pear salad, marinated like a ceviche with onion, tomato and cilantro, molotes I have described above, and for main dish the wondrous mixiotes. Take very tender lamb, marinade it in the outer membrane of the leaves of agave (maguey), a family of spiky leaved plants some of which produce Mexico's indigenous drinks. In the marinade include ancho chile, garlic, oregano and supposedly avocado leaves. The classic recipe calls for the lamb then to be wrapped in pouches of the mixiote leaves and steamed. Here the lamb was in large chunks, dripping off the bone, wrapped in aluminium foil, and presumably baked in the marinade, the reddish sauce having been brushed over it. Whatever, it was totally seductive. Other items on the menu were just as mouth-watering and away from the tourist clichés. Flor de Hidalgo, with its nice black skirted white bloused waitresses, if you can pull yourself away from the beach one Sunday, is a must to experience in Cancun.

Among the more bourgeois, atmospheric Mexican restaurants, not quite into nouvelle cuisine, but presenting their food in style, are Rosa Mexicana off Tulum and La Habichuela tucked beside a residential park. For me, the trouble with such places can be that, even when catering to the Mexican elite, they modify their recipes and presentation so as to please, if not to offend, foreign palates. It is touch and go as to whether you are going to be satisfied, though the style is usually careful and gentle. Rosa Mexicana is more like the tourist's expectation of a Mexican restaurant -- bright table cloths, candlelight, attractive hostess and graceful waiters, lively music, a patio surrounded by tropical plants, and a menu with most of the expected dishes, plus a few others. I tried my first ensalada de jicama and found it almost inedible, with large slices of wooden tasteless jicama and ordinary salad trimmings. (Jicama is the root of a plant which Ortiz identifies as exogonium bracteatum and Kennedy as pachyrrizus erosus). The supposed marinade of lime and mild chile could not be tasted. Off-putting, but exploration is not always successful. A dessert of dulce de papaya more than made up for it, the papaya baked in cinnamon and honey, tasting for all the world like pear poached in wine.

The main dish, puerco en naranja consisted of slightly dry pork loin slices baked in a banana leaf, in a smooth soft delicious sauce of orange and lime, said also to have ancho chile and garlic which I could not find in my tastebuds at all. Western style baked potato and sour cream, boiled carrot and onion on the side.

La Habichuela ("the bean") could possibly win the prize for the most romantic (alas I was alone) and expressive restaurant in Cancun. Both exterior and interior is a blend of superb modern-Mayan sculpture, falling water, and tropical plantings. The main dining room, softly darkened, has panelled woods, metal and wood separated alcoves giving privacy, decorated with well chosen artefacts, and the outside patio (reserve for it) is a dream Mexican garden out of a novel by Grahame Greene, D.H.Lawrence or Malcolm Lowry, occupied by the chic and also alas the soul-less. It is the place for you, for you to make your own mark for your inner self. Although many come in casual Cancun wear, it is a place worth dressing for, where you can please your partner's eyes. But the food. The Cantina shrimp soup was described as "a favourite of Mexico City cantinas". Fair enough, but I wondered in this form. It was a smooth bisque with cosmetic touches of potato and carrot, but no life. On the side were lime and tabasco sauce; the lime at least made a difference.

Chicken Tenango, named for its origin in Tenango City had beautifully tender chicken -- in the commoner restaurants one does not expect tenderness -- in a totally mild tomatillo sauce. At the side on the plate were the most tender sautéed beans imaginable, guacamole with a minimum of tomato chopped in, cheese, and a purée of dark refried beans. I have no way of knowing the degree to which the character of the original recipe had been removed, but to me it felt like high class Tex Mex. I wanted to try other classical Mexican dishes that one finds abroad -- posole, the corn and meat stew, mole poblano, a really decent snapper Veracruzana -- to let me establish standards. Alas, time, and weight, ran out on me.

Twice I did have something called Veracruzana. The first time it was just spaghetti sauce. The second time it did have olives, but the tomato and onion were presented like a thickish ratatouille. Nowhere did I find the jalapeño chile, marinated chile, chile powder, cinnamon, garlic or lemon juice, or the required density of the olives. There should be a law. And in Jaime Rubio's home I called one day to find a wonderful pot of mole stewing away slowly and contentedly. In its dark black juice were pieces of meat, whole chayote (small christophene squash, sechium edule), and on a table nearby were sprigs of epazote, tomato and onion to be introduced later.

Mole, once again an untranslatable term. Stew, yes and no. Reduced sauce, sometimes. Black, yes, but it can be red or green. With chocolate as in mole poblano, hardly ever.

Before we conclude with Mexican nouvelle cuisine, a few words about drinks. Here I can mostly only give you hints for you to explore, since I quickly found my favourites and stuck with them, and because many I was not lucky enough to find.

If you buy fruit juice for the frig in your room, and if you don't like the addition of sugar, you are in for a disappointment. If packaged presentation is any guide, Mexicans must be crazy about sugar. All the supermarket juices have at least 5% and sometimes more. There is one, however, called Delli, which makes the most scrumptiously thick unsugared orange juice I have ever had the luck to find. And Super-Deli carried, expensively, Dutch packaged unsugared juices of various kinds. Throughout town, though, there are ice cream and fruit juice bars, and even the Americanized cafes, that offer you the most exotic huge glasses of ready made, freshly pulped, whatever you want, including many from fruits like mamey you have never heard of before. They are delicious, as good as anything in any tropical country including Kenya, inexpensive, and come in the hugest glasses -- so that on demand you can mix them, as I did, like a combination of papaya and banana.

Atoles are more difficult to find. They are non-alcoholic drinks, designed as refreshment, based on semi-dissolved corn meal, with a variety of flavours, including especially cinnamon and vanilla. The only one I managed to try was a hot chocolate atole that tasted just exactly that.

My Mexican friend Jaime Rubio, when he took me home, decided to experiment for his first time with Mayan posole, which is not a corn based stew as in most of Mexico, but a corn-based drink. He bought the makings in the market, bringing home two big round balls of a kind of mas de maïs, corn meal. With our fingers we made it dissolve in water; to that you can add vanilla or chocolate or anything you like. The national alcoholic drink of the Mexican centre derives from Aztec times, pulque. It is brewed like beer from an agave similar to, but different from, that from which mescal and tequila are distilled. (Some books, quite erroneously, infer that tequila and mescal are made from pulque -- not so, and the plants are different.) Archaeology tells us that pulque had sacred properties, its use limited to ritual. History tells us that the Spaniards recognized a good thing when they saw it, worked hard to turn it into a common popular drink, established agave plantations and breweries, making their fortunes in the process, and, until the government started to get restless, by which time it was too late, inventing pulquerias, or drinking pubs patronized by regular clients, or brotherhoods. They still exist.

But pulque's fermentation only gives a short shelf life, so that it cannot be successfully bottled for national distribution. It does not survive the journey to Cancun very well. Cancun therefore lacks pulquerias and it is almost impossible to find as a drink. When it is a little past its truly fresh prime, it can be mixed with fruit like a sangria, or otherwise jollied up, but it is not the same. I was given addresses, but didn't get to taste. Nevertheless, you may be luckier or more determined. Here they are.

There is a cafe on a side street near the main post office -- I do not have its name -- which has fruit added pulque if you get there at seven in the morning as people go to work...... Le Flor de Hidalgo has two types of pulque on its typewritten menu. The day I was there it was not available. It was firmly promised for the following Sunday, but I was leaving town. My guess is that you would have to be there early. Tequila, distilled, is a form of mescal made from a special agave in the area around Tequila township, a town of distilleries. There are numerous mescals with their own characters made in different parts of the country, from different varieties of agave. The naming is now controlled, the distillations differing in colour and age.

I confess I like the stuff, but not when I follow the mystiques attached to it. Contrary to Mexican mythology it is not as strong in alcohol content as most distillations in other countries, and it may be drunk with fewer side effects. It is, in fact, an uncomplicated dr