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Mexican Kid
Brown pieces of young kid in olive oil, add 1 small onion (cut up), crushed garlic, balled potatoes, minced parsley, and sweet marjoram. After 10 minutes' cooking add 1 cup white wine, season, cover, and cook slowly 1 hour.
A simple braise that assumes you have butchered a young goat and are cooking over a fire. The quantities are left almost entirely to the cook, so the proportions below are a starting point rather than a correction.
- Scale itThe single cup of wine and one small onion suggest roughly 2 to 3 lb of bone-in kid, serving three or four. If you cook more meat than that, keep enough liquid to come a third of the way up the pieces.
- Sourcing kidYoung goat; milk-fed kid is often sold as cabrito or capretto, and kid meat generally comes from animals under a year. Look in halal and Latin American butchers and some farmers' markets. Shoulder and leg cut into 2-inch pieces braise best; loin chops will dry out in an hour.
- "Balled potatoes"Small potatoes turned into spheres with a melon baller, or simply new potatoes left whole. They go in with the aromatics, so choose a waxy variety that will hold together through a full hour.
- Brown properlyThe hinge of the dish is the initial browning. Dry the meat, work in batches, and do not crowd the pan, or it steams and the finished braise tastes flat.
- That 10 minutesThe onion, garlic, potatoes and herbs cook in the fat before the wine goes in. Keep the heat moderate and stir; scorched garlic will carry through the whole pot.
- Sweet marjoramA milder, sweeter relative of oregano, sold dried in most supermarkets. Use about a teaspoon dried, or a tablespoon fresh, added toward the end of the aromatic stage so it does not turn dusty.
- Cooking slowlyBarely a simmer, tightly covered, on a low burner or at the edge of a fire bed. Bone-in kid may want 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours before it pulls easily from the bone; check rather than trusting the clock.
- SeasonSalt and pepper. The recipe seasons when the wine goes in; you can also salt the meat before browning and taste again at the end.
Goats arrived in the Americas with Spanish colonization and became one of the earliest European meat animals there; roasted or braised cabrito remains a signature of northern Mexico, Monterrey especially, where whole young kids are cooked over coals. The version here is not that open-fire style but a wine braise, closer to Mediterranean shepherd's cooking. The reliance on olive oil, garlic, parsley and marjoram, and the absence of chiles, suggests the national label sits loosely on the dish.