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Puchero, Spanish
This is a Spanish soup. Like the "pot-aufeu" in France, it appears daily at the tables of families in Spain. Take two pounds of brisket of beef, place it in an earthen stock-pot with a pig's ear, the giblets of a chicken, half a pound of blanched ham or salted pork, and three handfuls of softened peas or beans. Moisten the meats with five or six quarts of water, put the stock-pot on the fire, skim, and when the liquid begins to boil, set it on one side. After two hours, add to the soup two leeks tied together, a bunch of chervil, a pinch of wild mint, a slice of good pumpkin from which the peel and seed have been removed, a large carrot, a head of cabbage-lettuce, and half a blanched savoy cabbage. After another hour add a few small sausages, and continue to boil moderately. Before serving, remove the stock-pot from the fire, pass the soup gently through a sieve into a stewpan, and from that pour it into a tureen. Add the leeks and lettuces cut up, and some slices of fried toast. Place the beef on a dish, surround it with the sausages, the vegetables, and the ham. The meats appear at table with the soup. To be thoroughly appreciated, puchero must be eaten in Spain. PUDDING-MOULDS. (See Illustration accompanying the article on Aunt Susie's Pudding.)
A full cocido in soup form: one pot yields a clear broth served first, then a platter of the boiled meats and vegetables. The whole thing hangs on keeping the pot below a rolling boil so the broth stays clear.
- "Set it on one side"This is the hinge. On a coal range the pot was pushed off the hot centre to a cooler edge so it barely trembled. On a modern hob, bring it to a boil, skim, then hold at the lowest simmer you can manage, uncovered or barely covered, for the full three to four hours. A boiling pot will give you cloudy grey broth and stringy beef.
- Quantities and yieldFive or six quarts of water with two pounds of brisket makes a generous amount: figure eight to ten servings of soup plus the meat course. "Three handfuls" of dried peas or beans is roughly 10-12 oz; chickpeas (garbanzos) are the traditional choice in Spain.
- Softened peas or beans"Softened" means soaked, ideally overnight in cold water. Older dried pulses could take three hours or more to yield, which is why they go in at the start; modern chickpeas will hold up over that time but supermarket beans may collapse, so use whole dried chickpeas if you want them intact on the platter.
- Blanched ham, blanched savoyBlanching here means a preliminary boil in plain water, poured off and discarded. For salt ham or salted pork it draws out excess salt; for cabbage it removes the sulphurous edge that would otherwise flavour the whole broth. Do not skip it with salt pork or the soup will need no seasoning at all and still taste of brine.
- Pig's ear and gibletsBoth are ordering items now rather than shelf items. The ear contributes gelatine and body more than flavour, and a piece of pork hock or a trotter does the same job. Chicken giblets in the modern sense means gizzard, heart and neck; leave out the liver, which clouds and muddies a long-simmered broth.
- Cabbage-lettuce and the herbsCabbage-lettuce is a firm round-headed lettuce of the butterhead or crisphead type, as distinguished from cos, cooked, not raw. Chervil wilts to nothing in an hour of simmering, so add a fresh handful at the end if you want to taste it. "A pinch of wild mint" is a small amount deliberately: mint here is a background note, not the flavour.
- Straining and the toastPassing the soup "gently" through a sieve is about clarity, not texture: you are separating broth from solids without crushing anything. The fried toast is sippets, thin slices fried in fat or oil until crisp, put in the tureen so they soften in the broth.
- FatBrisket, ham and sausage between them will throw a considerable slick. Skim during cooking, and if you can, chill the strained broth and lift the set fat before reheating for the table.
Puchero simply means the cooking pot itself, and the dish is named for its vessel in the same way pot-au-feu is, a comparison the book makes at once. The Spanish family of one-pot boiled dinners runs from the Madrid cocido to Andalusian and Latin American pucheros, all built on the same logic: cheap cuts, cured pork, a pulse and whatever vegetables the season offers, simmered long enough to give both a broth and a meat course from a single fire. Chickpeas and the sequence of courses are sometimes traced to the olla podrida of the early modern Spanish kitchen, and the dish travelled with Spanish settlement to Argentina, Uruguay and the Philippines, where local versions still carry the name. The compiler's closing line, that puchero must be eaten in Spain to be appreciated, quietly concedes that the recipe is offered as much for interest as for use.