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Puchero (National dish of Spain Put)
(National dish of Spain.) Put 2 pounds beef with a pig's foot, the liver of a chicken, cut up, 3 cups of dried peas soaked overnight, 1 quart of water, some herbs, and an onion. Do not cut the meat and pork. Cook, covered, for 2 hours. Add 2 leeks, a carrot, and a head of lettuce, a slice of squash or pumpkin cut into shreds, and 6 small sausages or balls made of sausage meat. Cook 1 hour longer, arrange the meat neatly with the vegetables, etc., around, strain the gravy, and pour it over. Serve with a border of toast.
A one-pot boiled dinner in the Spanish cocido family, written down for American cooks in 1902. The method is sound; the proportions and a few of the ingredient names need translating.
- Water is shortA quart will not cover 2 lb of beef, a pig's foot and three cups of soaked pulses for three hours. Add water to cover by an inch or two and top up as it reduces — the finished broth is the point of the dish, and scorching the peas ruins it.
- "Dried peas" means chickpeasThe authentic pulse in a puchero is the garbanzo, and it is likely what is meant here. Either works, but chickpeas soaked overnight and given the full three hours give the traditional result; split peas will collapse into the broth.
- The meat stays wholeThe instruction not to cut the beef and pork is the hinge of the recipe. A single piece surrenders gelatin and flavour slowly and can be sliced neatly at the end; cubes shred and cloud the broth.
- Pig's footSold split at butchers and Latin and Asian markets; ask for it fresh rather than smoked, which will dominate the pot. It is there for body, not for eating, though the skin is edible.
- The sausages"Six small sausages" in a Spanish context most likely means chorizo, and in many versions a blood sausage (morcilla) alongside. Use fresh or semi-cured chorizo, not the hard dry-cured slicing kind; the recipe already adds them with the vegetables.
- An hour is long for the vegetablesLeeks, carrot, lettuce and squash all added at once and boiled a full hour will be very soft — which is what the original wants. If you prefer them intact, put the carrot in at the hour mark and the lettuce and squash in for the last fifteen minutes.
- LettuceNot a mistake. Cooked lettuce, typically a firm head halved or quartered, appears in a number of European stews. It wilts to almost nothing and sweetens the broth.
- Skim, then strainSkim the grey foam off in the first twenty minutes and the fat off before straining, or the poured-over gravy will be muddy. Traditionally the strained broth is served first as a soup, with vermicelli or rice, and the meats and vegetables follow as a second course.
- YieldSix generous servings. The toast border is a period plating flourish; thick slices of country bread do the same job.
Puchero is simply the pot — an earthenware cooking vessel — and by extension whatever spends the afternoon in it, in the same way that cocido means no more than "cooked". The type is one of the oldest continuous dishes in Spanish cooking: meat, a cured pork element, a gelatinous cut, chickpeas and whatever vegetables the season offered, simmered together and served as two or three courses from one pot, broth first. Versions travelled to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and the Philippines with Spanish settlers, and puchero is still the everyday name there. Its appearance here, labelled the national dish of Spain, reflects the ambition of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that toured foreign kitchens for the home cook — the recipes were collected at a distance, which is why the garbanzo arrives on the page as a dried pea and the chorizo as "6 small sausages."