Lima-Style Boiled Dinner (Olla ó Puchero Limeño)

History

This is a puchero — a long-simmered one-pot boiled dinner in which beef brisket, four pig's trotters, salted beef tongue, tocino, an unsmoked sausage and a blood sausage cook for hours with cabbage, a bundle of aromatic herbs, garlic and peppercorns, then are bound with a ground aderezo of chickpeas, tomato, cooked cabbage leaves and pimentón and finished with potatoes, batatas (sweet potatoes) and fruit steamed over the pot. Carmen Gorriti de Montes contributes it as Lima's own version, and her headnote sets it inside a whole family of dishes: under the names olla, puchero or bouillie, she writes, it is the base of the daily meal and 'the patriarch of the family table' across, in the period phrasing of the text, 'all the countries of our race' — that is, the shared Hispanic and criollo world.

That framing is documented. Puchero is a stew 'originally from Spain,' today prepared across Latin America — Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru and southern Brazil among them; the word first meant the earthenware pot and only later the food cooked in it. It is 'essentially equivalent to the cocido of Spain', the Iberian main-dish stew of assorted meats, cured pork sausages and vegetables with chickpeas. The recipe's own closing line makes the ancestry explicit: the Lima olla, 'with more or less added or taken away, is the olla podrida of the mother country' — the Spanish chickpea-and-mixed-meat stew associated with Burgos and old enough to appear in print by 1570.

What marks the dish as criollo rather than Peninsular are the New-World foods layered onto that Iberian frame: the tomato ground into the aderezo, the potatoes and batatas steamed over the cabbage leaves, and — in the final note — a dab of ají amarillo, the Andean yellow chili, stirred into the parsley-and-breadcrumb serving sauce for those who like heat. These are native American ingredients, expected in a late-nineteenth-century Peruvian kitchen, where the criollo table routinely joined Andean staples to Spanish-introduced meats and techniques. The chickpeas, cabbage, cured pork, tongue and blood sausage carry the Spanish half of the dish; the potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomato and ají carry the American half. The recipe reaches Gorriti's 1890 compilation from a contributor writing in Buenos Aires, yet it points its authority back to Lima — naming the city's women as the ones who give the puchero its particular savor.

The evidence stops there. That Lima cooks make the dish 'exquisite' is the contributor's own praise, not a documented culinary fact, and the text does not tell us whether her formula was a Lima standard or one household's hand. Nor does the source establish how Carmen Gorriti de Montes stood to Juana Manuela Gorriti; the shared surname is suggestive but the book gathered recipes from many correspondents, so any family tie is left unstated here.

Ingredients

• beef brisket
• 4 white pig's trotters
• salted beef tongue
• vinegar
• tocino (fatback/bacon), fresh or salted
• 1 bunch aromatic herbs: parsley, hierba buena (mint) or torongil (lemon balm), basil, rosemary, bay
• 1 head onion with its green leaves
• 1 cabbage
• 1 clove garlic, toasted
• peppercorns
• salt
• 1 sausage (salchicha)
• 1 relleno or morcilla (blood sausage)
• 2 handfuls chickpeas
• 1 clove garlic, toasted
• 1 tomato
• parsley
• fat from the meat
• pimentón (paprika)
• 4 leaves cabbage leaves
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp cumin (cominos)
• 3 tbsp vinegar
• 3 tbsp oil
• broth
• potatoes
• batatas (sweet potatoes)
• fruits

Instructions

1. Wash the beef brisket, four cleaned white pig's trotters, and a salted beef tongue in warm water with a little vinegar.
2. Put the meats to cook in plenty of water over a lively fire and skim carefully.
3. Add tocino (fresh or salted), a tied bundle of aromatic herbs around an onion with its green leaves, the cabbage tied with pita twine, a toasted garlic clove, and peppercorns.
4. Cover the top with cabbage leaves, salt lightly (the tongue is salty), and boil covered for three hours over a lively fire.
5. Remove half the broth and add an unsmoked sausage and an unsmoked relleno or morcilla.
6. For the aderezo, grind chickpeas with toasted garlic, tomato, parsley, meat fat, pimentón, and the four cooked cabbage leaves; mix in pepper, salt, cumin, vinegar, oil, and a little broth.
7. Pour the aderezo over the stew, cover again with cabbage leaves, and cook over low heat, tightly lidded.
8. Over the top layer of cabbage leaves, steam the potatoes, batatas, and fruits that garnish the olla, and serve.