Cazuela (Chicken and Vegetable Pot)

History

This is a cazuela — a single-pot dinner in which a fat hen and its giblets are simmered in a good quantity of broth with sliced potatoes, carrots and turnips, chopped green beans (bainitas), and a handful of soaked rice, cooked tightly covered 'so the perfume does not escape' until the leg meat falls apart under pressure. Amelía Lopez de Soruco sends it from Santiago as 'este plato de mi cocina nacional' — a dish of my national cuisine.

The name and the dish are documented. 'Cazuela' is the Spanish word for the earthenware cooking pot, extended to the food cooked in it; it labels a family of stews found especially across South America. The Chilean cazuela is the best-known of these — everyday home cooking, 'nourishing, inexpensive' meat-and-potatoes rather than restaurant fare. Its lineage is criollo: the dish 'shares roots with a Mapuche stock called korrü', and food writing on Chile traces its immediate origin to the mixing of that Indigenous korrü with the Spanish olla podrida — the peninsular long-simmered one-pot. Onto the native base of potato, squash, corn and beans the Spanish added domesticated fowl and beef, carrots, onion and rice, the layering of Andean staples with Spanish-introduced meats and techniques that defines the nineteenth-century criollo table.

Soruco's version sits squarely in that tradition while showing one household's hand. Documented Chilean cazuela is typically built on bone-in meat with potatoes, green beans and rice — all present here — but the fuller template also carries a piece of squash and an ear of corn (choclo), and this recipe names neither, reaching instead for carrots and turnips. The pot is a chicken cazuela (cazuela de ave), the lighter and very common form, rather than the beef cazuela de vacuno. Reaching Gorriti's 1890 compilation from a Santiago contributor, it is offered plainly, without a stated occasion.

The evidence stops there. The recipe gives no squash or corn, but their absence marks this as one cook's rendering, not a different dish; the omission is the contributor's, and the sources do not tell us whether her carrot-and-turnip formula was a Santiago norm or her own. Nor does the text establish any tie between Amelía Lopez de Soruco and the compiler beyond the fact that the book gathered recipes from many correspondents.

Ingredients

• 1 fat hen, with its giblets
• salt
• potatoes, sliced
• carrots, sliced
• turnips, sliced
• green beans (bainitas), chopped
• 1 handful rice, soaked
• good broth

Instructions

1. Prepare a fat hen: pluck, open, and wash it and its giblets, and salt it lightly.
2. Slice potatoes, carrots, and turnips; chop green beans; add a handful of soaked rice.
3. Put the vegetables, rice, and the hen's pieces and giblets in a pot with a good amount of broth.
4. Cover well and cook over a good fire until the leg meat falls apart under pressure, then serve.