Posole

Wednesday 22 August

The posole that I remember from my New Mexican childhood may not be the posole that I actually had in my New Mexican childhood. Nevertheless, the recipe is an attempt to recreate a Proustian moment (if Proust had had a New Mexican childhood). The first adult version came about on New Year's Day 1999 (posole is traditional for good luck on New Year's) with a frozen 5-lb. bone-in pork loin that had escaped notice in the back of the freezer. We pressure-cooked the porkberg and it worked pretty well. Our version of posole is sort of a green chile stew, and it's never made exactly the same way twice.

Today's recipe (to the extent that there is one) is Holt's, but except for the initial roasting and skinning of 6 or 7 poblanos from the garden, the execution was Barbara's.

First, get your pork: any cheap cut, in this case three pounds of "Western-style ribs," which turned out to have only two tiny bone fragments in them. Chop it into chunks, and sauté them in oil (or if you trim them a bit, in their own fat) in a dutch oven. Open up two one-pound cans of posole (ideally one white, one yellow). When the pork is browned, drain the posole water from the two cans into it, add a sliced onion and two or three peeled garlic cloves, cover, and simmer for an hour and a half. At the end of that, add the reserved posole, plus another sliced onion and more garlic if you want it; the previous flavorings will have dissolved in the broth. Also add your previously-roasted and chopped poblanos (or, okay, a pound or more of canned green chiles), the leaves from a big bunch of coriander (reserving a handful) and the juice of one lime. Simmer this (open or closed, depending on how liquidy it is) for another half hour, until the onion is tender and the pork is shredding nicely. Stir in the reserved coriander, season with salt, and serve in big bowls, with beer on the side. There'll be enough left over for another meal at least.

Stop by our house, and say those six words that mean so much: "I'll have a bowl of green."