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Puchero (Spanish Soup This also)
(Spanish Soup.) This also is a national dish, common to rich and poor. Cut up three pounds of beef, 1 pig's foot, 1/2 pound of ham, the giblets of a fowl, and three handfuls of garbanzos, or chick peas. Simmer 2 hours, add a slice of pumpkin, free from seeds, 1 large carrot, 1 head of lettuce, 1/2 a cabbage, and a bunch of herbs. Cook 1 hour longer, add 6 small sausages, and boil till they are done. Strain and thicken the soup and serve the meat and vegetables, neatly arranged on a separate dish.
GARBURE. (Another national dish of Spain.) Parboil, peel, and slice a small white cabbage, drain it, and add 1/4 pound of sliced bacon, salt, pepper, a clove, 1 leek, 1 carrot, 1 onion, and 6 pieces of celery. Stir these with enough suet or butter to brown them, add two quarts of good stock, and cook for two hours, or as much as will cover the meat and vegetables. Make a forcemeat with 1/4 pound of stale bread, butter, stock, and herbs, and line a dish with it, arranging the vegetables, etc., in layers with forcemeat between. Add enough stock to moisten all and have forcemeat and a layer of grated cheese on top. Bake in the oven half an hour and serve with a tureen of hot consomme. When helping the latter, put a tablespoonful in each plate.
Two recipes run together here: a puchero, which is a boiled dinner served as two courses, and a "garbure" that is really a baked layered cabbage dish. Both are forgiving, but the chickpeas set the schedule.
- Start with the chickpeasThree handfuls of dried garbanzos is roughly 1 1/2 cups; soak them overnight in salted water or they will still be chalky after three hours in the pot. The recipe assumes they go in at the beginning with the meat, which is correct — chickpeas and beef shin want the same long, low simmer.
- Simmer, do not boilOnce the pot comes up, hold it at a bare tremble. A rolling boil clouds the broth, shreds the beef and splits the chickpea skins, and the point of a puchero is a clear golden soup poured off at the end.
- Cuts and substitutionsUse beef shin, brisket or short rib for the three pounds. The pig's foot is there for gelatin and body, not meat; ask a butcher to split it. The half pound of ham means a piece of dry-cured or smoked hock, not sliced sandwich ham. Giblets: heart, neck and gizzard only — the liver turns the broth bitter and grainy.
- The sausages"Six small sausages" in a Spanish pot most likely means chorizo, with morcilla if you can get it. Twenty minutes at a simmer is plenty; longer and the paprika fat leaches out and colours the whole broth orange.
- Vegetables in stagesThe lettuce and cabbage collapse quickly, so the hour given for them is generous — add the pumpkin and carrot first and the greens in the last 25 minutes if you want them intact on the serving platter.
- Thickening the strained soupThis is often done with a handful of fine noodles, rice, or a little of the cooked chickpeas mashed and stirred back in, rather than flour. Any of the three gives the body the instruction is after.
- Serving and yieldThis feeds six to eight as written, in two courses: broth first, then the drained meats and vegetables on a platter. Oil, vinegar or mustard alongside is an optional addition, not part of the original instruction.
- Garbure: forcemeat means bread panadaThe quarter pound of stale bread, butter, stock and herbs is worked to a thick, spreadable paste — closer to a stuffing than to a meat forcemeat. Keep it firm enough to hold a layer; if it is loose the dish turns to porridge.
- Garbure ovenThe original gives none. Bake at 375F for the half hour specified, uncovered, so the cheese and top layer of forcemeat brown. Serve the consommé alongside as directed rather than pouring it over.
A puchero takes its name from the earthenware pot it was cooked in, and it belongs to the family of one-pot boiled dinners that runs from the Spanish cocido through the Argentine and Filipino pucheros carried abroad by Spanish settlers. The structure — broth poured off and drunk first, meats and vegetables brought in after — is the defining feature, and in Spain each successive tipping-out of the pot is called a vuelco, as in the cocido de tres vuelcos. The chickpea rather than the bean marks it as Iberian; the pig's foot and cured ham are the frugal additions that make a modest quantity of beef feed a table. The compiler's second dish is more loosely labelled: garbure is generally traced to Béarn and the Pyrenean southwest of France, where it is a thick cabbage and bacon soup, and layered, cheese-topped baked versions of it have a long history in French cookery writing. That both are filed as "national dishes of Spain" says something about the way such recipes travelled, gathered as souvenirs without much fuss about which side of a mountain range they came from.