Pork Adobo (Adobo de Chancho)

History

Adobo de Chancho is pork — the recipe names loin and rib rack as the best cuts — steeped in a marinade of vinegar, ground garlic, cumin, chopped onion, powdered oregano, salt and bay, then hung to air in a cool, shady draft and finally roasted in the oven over a little butter. Adobo in this sense is the Iberian marinade-and-preservation method: food immersed in a stock of vinegar with garlic, oregano, salt and paprika to keep it and to enhance its flavor, a Spanish and Portuguese practice that was widely adopted across Latin America and that served, in the era before refrigeration, to preserve surplus meat. Justa Garcia Robledo's version sits squarely at that Iberian pole, and its stated logic is preservation first: she opens by recommending the adobo as the way to make pork keep and to render an otherwise 'insipid' meat delicious however it is cooked, and even casts the strong vinegar and garlic as destroying the 'microbes' the meat was blamed for — a period, germ-theory rationale contemporary with the 1890 book.

What is striking for a Peruvian entry is what is absent. The dish Peru now most identifies as pork adobo — the adobo arequipeno of the southern highlands — marinates the pork in aji (aji panca or rocoto) and in chicha, the fermented-corn drink, both native to the Andes, and cooks it in a clay pot. That marriage of Spanish pork with native aji and chicha is the celebrated criollo version, the layering of Andean staples onto Spanish-introduced meat. Robledo's Lima recipe carries none of it: no aji, no chicha, only the vinegar-garlic-cumin-oregano-bay of the Peninsular marinade — though it does keep the earthenware or porcelain vessel the tradition prefers. It documents adobo at its Spanish end, as it lived in a coastal Lima kitchen, rather than the aji-and-chicha adobo of Arequipa.

Beyond the dateline and the contributor's name the entry tells us nothing of the household it came from, and it cannot say whether this aji-less coastal adobo was Robledo's own preference or a wider Lima norm. The recipe records one cook's practice; the silence on aji is the recipe's own, not a gap to be filled.

Ingredients

• chancho (pork), loin and rib rack
• 1 liter good vinegar
• 4 heads garlic, ground
• pepper
• cumin (cominos), ground
• 1 head onion, well chopped
• powdered oregano
• salt
• 2 leaves bay (laurel)
• butter

Instructions

1. Choose pork loin and rib rack, the best cuts for adobo.
2. In a porcelain or terracotta vessel combine a liter of good vinegar, four heads of ground garlic, pepper, ground cumin, chopped onion, powdered oregano, salt, and two bay leaves; grind and stir with a wooden spoon.
3. Submerge and turn the meat in the mixture, cover, and keep three hours.
4. Hang the meat to air in a cool, shady place with a draft.
5. Roast in the oven in a pan with butter in the base; the same mixture makes other adobos (always in earthenware or porcelain).