Cemita is a Mexican sandwich-like food originating from Puebla, with fillings including avocado, onions, cheese, and meat. It is typically made with a sesame-seed egg bun and is popular as a cheap and convenient street food. Variations exist across different regions, including the use of different meats and cheeses.
Cemita is a sandwich-like food originating from the Mexican city of Puebla, once a Spanish settlement. It may look like a typical sandwich, but its many fillings are very different from the usual beef patty. Cemita is also similar to another Mexican sandwich called a “torta,” but the former typically uses a sesame-seed egg bun, while the latter uses white bread.
A historian named Carlos Eduardo Benitez has speculated that the word “cemita” is related to the word “semita,” indicating the Judaeo-Spanish community that migrated to Spain and Portugal during the Roman conquests. Apparently, the Semites baked a similar bread from which the bread for the sandwich was made. The Royal Spanish Academy, on the other hand, traced the word from an old-fashioned Spanish word, “acemite,” meaning “bran.” There may be disagreement in terms of the origin of the word, but timeline shows that the Pueblan sandwich’s emergence overlapped with the revival of the pottery industry in the city, which may explain its early popularity as a street food. Both workers and artisans would have cemite as a meal because it was cheap, convenient, and complete.
The main ingredients among the egg sandwich include avocado, onions, cheese and meat. Beef milanesa, which is thin and deep-fried, is one of the more popular beef choices. For cheese, panela and quesillo are popular choices, while whole chiles, especially chiles, are stuffed inside the sandwich to give the cemita some spice. These fillings create the classic “cemita poblana”.
Of course, there are some variations of the Mexican sandwich across different regions. In the city of Sahuayo, the bread used is flat and has no sesame seeds on top, but does include pinoncillo, or a piece of brown sugar, as an ingredient, which gives it a sweeter flavor. In other areas of Puebla, the sandwich has carnitas, a braised pork, instead of the beef milanesa.
The popularity of cemite has led to its many variations, particularly in the United States. Sometimes, other meats such as chicken, lamb, and veal are used to make the sandwich, or a combination of different meats may be used. American restaurants will also replace panela and quesillo with mozzarella, as Italian cheese is more widely available in stores. Some restaurants would even cut corners and use regular sesame seed buns instead of the authentic egg rolls.
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