Ropa Viga
Select fine ripe tomatoes. Pour boiling water over them so as to remove the skins readily. Put them in a pan of melted butter, with some pepper and salt. Shred cold meat or fowl over them. Fry sufficiently, and serve hot.--Mrs. A. D.
A leftovers dish that reads as a sketch rather than a formula: no quantities, no times. The proportions are yours to set, but the technique is sound and the whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- Working proportionsFor four people, figure 2 lb ripe tomatoes, 3 tablespoons butter, and 2 to 3 cups shredded cooked beef, pork or chicken. The tomatoes should outweigh the meat; this is a tomato dish carrying meat, not the reverse.
- PeelingScore an X in the blossom end, hold the tomatoes in boiling water 20 to 30 seconds, then drop them into cold water. The skins slip off. Core them and cut them up before they go in the pan.
- "Fry sufficiently" means reduceThis is the hinge. Peeled tomatoes throw a great deal of water, and the dish is only good once that water has cooked away and the butter comes back out of the sauce. Fifteen to twenty minutes over medium heat, stirring, until it mounds on the spoon.
- Add the meat lateThe instruction to shred it over the tomatoes suggests it goes in early, but already-cooked meat only toughens with long simmering. Fold it in for the last three or four minutes, just to heat through.
- Shred, do not chopCold roast beef or brisket pulls into threads along the grain; a knife gives you cubes, which behave differently in the pan. Chicken and turkey pull apart by hand.
- SeasoningThe recipe stops at pepper and salt. A little garlic, onion softened in the butter first, or a spoonful of vinegar at the end all sit comfortably with the Spanish dish the title seems to point back to, without turning it into something else.
- ServingHot, over rice or with bread to catch the sauce. It reheats well and is arguably better the next day.
The name is a garbling of ropa vieja, Spanish for "old clothes" — often said to refer to the frayed, ragged look of long-shredded meat. The dish is generally traced to Spain, where it is said to have been a way of using boiled beef left from making broth, and it travelled through the Caribbean, where the Cuban version with peppers, onions and cumin is now the best known. What survives here is the essential idea — yesterday's roast, shredded fine and rescued in a pan of tomatoes — with the seasoning pared back to butter, salt and pepper. Recipes of this kind were the working heart of a nineteenth-century household book: a joint of meat was expected to reappear at later meals, and the cook's skill lay in making the last appearance not look like the last.