Earth-Buried Meat Preparation for Roasting

History

This is less a finished dish than a way of readying meat for the fire. A washed piece of beef or fowl is wrapped — loose but well closed — in a thin cloth napkin, or for a larger cut sewn into a small linen sack so the earth reaches it on every side, and tied off with a strand of pita (agave-fiber) twine. It is then buried in clean, moist earth: a garden or vegetable plot, or, as the contributor improvised when she had no open ground, a box of damp clay earth kept for the purpose, with a hole about half a meter deep for a large sack. After three hours the hole is refilled and the surface pressed; the bundle is lifted out, dusted clean before untying, salted, and only then cooked — a quick boil, about ten minutes of lively fire on the spit, a turn on the grill, or the oven until golden. The supply of earth is renewed every three days. The contributor sets the whole thing inside a story: she learned the method from a celebrated cook, first tried it on a carne con cuero — beef roasted in its hide — at a gathering in Belgrano, where two gauchos did the roasting, and later on a turkey, and credits it with turning tough meat tender and fragrant.

The frame the method attaches to is solidly of the Pampas. Carne con cuero — beef cooked without skinning, so the hide holds a good part of the juices in and the meat stays moist — is one of the oldest gaucho ways with beef, and the gauchos are remembered as the first Argentine asadores. The gauchos and other rural people of the Río de la Plata were famous for relishing fresh beef roasted over a wood or charcoal fire, so bound to it that they were said to live largely on grilled meat and mate; encyclopedic accounts of that fire cooking even note that the cook sometimes wrapped the meat in a hide and laid it on a bed of hot coals — the very hide-on roasting the two gauchos in the story are performing. The asado they made is traced back to these plains.

That beef, though, is not native to the grass. Cattle reached what is now Argentine territory only with the Spanish — a herd is held to have arrived around 1556 and to have been at Buenos Aires for the city's second founding in 1580 — after which the animals multiplied so freely on the open, fertile plain that they were reckoned in the tens of millions by the early eighteenth century, and the gaucho pausing at midday to set a few hunks of meat over a fire became the origin story told for the asado as a social ritual and for the country's devotion to beef. So the roasting the recipe honors rests on an introduced herd. The burial itself is the harder part to place: none of the surviving accounts of gaucho asado or carne con cuero describe tenderizing meat by burying it in earth, and the contributor offers it not as folk tradition but as a chef's secret she adopted and fitted onto an existing hide-roast. Whether it did what she says — leave the meat so tender that a single boil cooks it through — is her own testimony, given without explanation and left here as she gave it.

Ingredients

• 1 piece of meat (beef or fowl)
• salt

Instructions

1. Wash and prepare the piece of meat, beef or fowl.
2. Enclose it, loose but well shut, in a thin cloth napkin (or a linen sack sewn closed for a larger cut), gathering and tying the ends with a strand of pita twine.
3. Dig a hole in clean, moist earth (a garden or plot, or a box of moist clay earth), and bury the wrapped meat for three hours; refill and press the surface.
4. Lift it out carefully so no soil enters, dusting the cloth with a feather duster before untying.
5. Set the meat on a plate and season with the necessary salt.
6. Cook as desired: a brief boil, about ten minutes on a lively spit, on the grill, or roasted in the oven until golden.
7. Renew the supply of earth every three days.