A Mexican Christmas Table for 35 °C

The Mexican Navidad table is a cold-weather table. Bacalao simmering for hours, a pot of pozole, romeritos, tamales steaming, ponche navideño on the stove filling the house with hot fruit and cinnamon — every one of those dishes is designed to warm a room and a body in December. In Australia, December is the hottest part of the year. Christmas Day here is prawns, a cold table, a salad, a pavlova, and someone in the kitchen refusing to turn the oven on.

Most attempts to reconcile the two are a bad compromise: the full Mexican menu cooked anyway, in a 35 °C kitchen, eaten by people who are too hot to want it. The better approach is to keep what the Mexican festive table is actually about — chilli, lime, smoke, pork and seafood, a lot of small bright things, a long table and an even longer afternoon — and rebuild the form around the weather.

The principle: move the heat out of the day

Everything that needs long cooking gets cooked the day before, or two days before, and served cold or at room temperature. Everything cooked on the day happens outside on the barbecue. The oven, if it runs at all, runs early in the morning. This is not a concession — a lot of the Mexican repertoire is genuinely better at room temperature than hot.

To start, cold and sharp

• Ceviche and aguachile. The single most obvious answer, and the one Mexico already has waiting. Australian seafood is superb and this is what it is for. Firm white fish, or prawns, cured in lime with chilli, onion and coriander. Made an hour or two ahead, kept over ice, eaten with tostadas. Aguachile — prawns, lime, a fierce green chilli and coriander purée, served almost immediately — is the sharper, hotter version and it is spectacular in heat.
• Prawn cocktail, Mexican style. The coctel de camarones served in a glass with tomato juice, lime, onion, coriander and avocado is close enough to the Australian prawn cocktail to feel familiar and different enough to be the thing people talk about. This is the best bridge dish on the whole table.
• Guacamole and salsas with totopos. Australia's avocado supply is genuinely world-class, and summer is not the hard season for it. Make the guacamole at the last minute; make the salsas the day before.
• Esquites, served warm or cold. Corn is in season in an Australian summer. Charred corn kernels with lime, chilli powder, crumbled dry cheese and mayonnaise, in cups, is a fifteen-minute dish that disappears instantly.

The main table

• Cochinita pibil, cooked the day before. Pork shoulder marinated in achiote and sour orange, wrapped and cooked low and slow — done on Christmas Eve morning, cooled, refrigerated, and gently rewarmed or served at room temperature with pickled red onion and warm tortillas. This is the centrepiece. It is a slow-cooked dish that eats perfectly warm rather than hot, and it does not need to be finished while guests are standing in your kitchen.
• Carne asada on the barbecue. Thin beef, hot plate, lime, straight into tortillas. This is the Australian Christmas cooking method and the Mexican grilling tradition meeting in the obvious place. Note that total fire ban rules apply to barbecues in summer and are set by your state or territory fire service, so check on the day if you are using charcoal.
• Whole fish or prawns on the grill. Pescado a la talla — a whole fish split, painted with chilli adobo, grilled over the coals — is a festival dish in coastal Mexico and belongs on an Australian Christmas more than almost anything else on this list.
• Bacalao, reconsidered. Bacalao a la vizcaína is the traditional Mexican Christmas dish and it is a hot stew of salt cod, tomato, olives and potato. It can be made the day before and served at room temperature, and it is good that way — but if the day is forecast at 38 °C, it is honest to admit this is the dish that does not want to be there, and to put a cold salt-cod salad or a ceviche in its place instead.

Sides that do not need a stove

Nopalitos salad from a tin, drained and rinsed, with tomato, onion, coriander and crumbled cheese. A jicama-style crunchy salad — jicama is scarce in Australia, so use very crisp apple, cucumber, or raw kohlrabi with lime, salt and chilli powder. Black beans cooked two days ahead and served at room temperature with onion and cheese. Pickled red onions and pickled jalapeños, made a week in advance, on the table throughout.

Drinks

Ponche navideño is hot spiced fruit punch and it is a wonderful thing in a cold December. The Australian version writes itself: make the same fruit and piloncillo and cinnamon base, chill it hard, serve it over ice, and add the rum at the table. It works. Alongside it, put out a big jar of agua de jamaica and one of horchata, and keep the beer and the mineral water in an esky rather than the fridge, because the fridge is going to be opened four hundred times.

Dessert

Buñuelos are fried, which nobody wants to do at four in the afternoon in January weather — fry them in the morning and serve them cold with a syrup. Flan is the perfect Australian Christmas Mexican dessert: made the day before, served fridge-cold, and everybody already likes it. Mexican hot chocolate becomes iced Mexican chocolate, blended with ice and a little cinnamon. And there is no rule against a pavlova with mango and passionfruit at the end of a Mexican meal; it is what the season is actually offering.

The cold-chain warning

Food sitting out on a long hot afternoon is the real risk of this menu. Australian guidance keeps cold food at or below 5 °C and treats the window between two and four hours out of refrigeration as the limit for ready-to-eat food. Serve the seafood in small batches from the fridge or from ice rather than putting everything out at noon, and be ruthless at the end of the day about what gets thrown.

For the individual dishes, see our recipe collection; for sourcing the achiote, the dried chillies and the masa in time, our guides and stores directory are the places to start. If the answer this year is that someone else cooks, the restaurant directory exists for that too.