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I like having friends for dinner. The other evening we welcomed Anna to the table. (and very tasty she was too.)
Vague cannibal references aside, this particular dinner was marked by it's total randomness, or, if I am to be less flippant, by my inspired 'fusion cooking.'
Anna is accustomed to big, warming, and filling dinners. She makes a fabulous 'bigos', or Hunter's stew, national dish of her native Poland. Bigos usually contains a variety of meats of which the only compulsory one is kielbasa, or Polish smoked sausage. As she puts it, Poles are big on dead pig. I have attempted bigos-making before as well, it appeals to my preferred style of cuisine: bung everything in a big pot, slow cook it an see what happens. Along with Miscellaneous Dead Pig, bigos also contains huge quantities of fresh cabbage and sauerkraut. It is one of the few dishes I am willing to describe as 'hearty', which is not a word I like to use often. It also gives you serious wind!
What do you feed a Pole? I asked myself. I wasn't willing to cook her bigos in case my version wasn't up to scratch. Instead, I did chose to do Trinidad Pepperpot - Caribbean as the name implies, but with some odd similarities to the Polish counterpart. The idea of a pepperpot is to slow cook the different meats (again, mainly pork) together with plenty of spices, so that the meat practically crumbles and melts in the mouth. The longer you leave it, the better it gets. Whereas the rest of a Bigos is made up of cabbage, a pepperpot is obviously full of colourful bell and chilli peppers. Another similarity though is the presence of vinegar, cider vinegar in pepperpot counterbalanced by rum and brown sugar, and residue from the sauerkraut in bigos, topped up with red wine.
The combination of roasted spices in the pepperpot gives it its distinctive Caribbean flavour, but those are my secret recipe and will remain undisclosed for now. That evening, I simmered it for nearly four hours, and it was indeed a thing of beauty. However, in a break from authenticity, I used my Potjiekos pot. The Potjie is my giant, cast iron cauldron that I lovingly lugged back from South Africa. As previously discussed, the Afrikaans are also fans of slow, meat-filled one-pot cookery. Pepperpot was originally a slave dish in the Caribbean, designed for ease of cooking - one pot suspended over a fire, and enough spices to disguise low quality meat and offal that would have gone in it. My recipe requires pork - shoulder or chop, belly if you have no alternative. However, the original recipe requires trotters, snout and other squidgy bits I'd rather not contemplate.
It does interest me a great deal that this style of cooking - big meaty slow-cooked stews pop up all over the world. The English equivalent I guess would be a good casserole or maybe even a pot-roast. Some Himalayan curries are done in this fashion using up tough goat meat; Norwegians do thick fish stew with heavy dumplings, but all are variations on the theme. It seems to equate to a cooler or possibly mountainous climate however - I cannot think of a Meditteranean or Oriental equivalent!
To celebrate the universality of this food, I cooked Caribbean pepperpot, using Danish pork, in a South African pot, in my kitchen in north east England, for a Polish gourmet. It was accompanied by Mexican guacamole using avocados from Israel, and for dessert I made Brazilian 'Santa Catalinas' (a mousse made from cream, rum, Italian-style espresso and in this case, Ecuadorian chocolate) and washed it all down with luxurious Nicaraguan coffees. Once digested, we drank Chilean wine and then boiled ourselves in an authentically Finnish sauna. It was a great night, and we are all encouraged to celebrate diversity, right? But not so much the Food Miles. Doh.
Vague cannibal references aside, this particular dinner was marked by it's total randomness, or, if I am to be less flippant, by my inspired 'fusion cooking.'
Anna is accustomed to big, warming, and filling dinners. She makes a fabulous 'bigos', or Hunter's stew, national dish of her native Poland. Bigos usually contains a variety of meats of which the only compulsory one is kielbasa, or Polish smoked sausage. As she puts it, Poles are big on dead pig. I have attempted bigos-making before as well, it appeals to my preferred style of cuisine: bung everything in a big pot, slow cook it an see what happens. Along with Miscellaneous Dead Pig, bigos also contains huge quantities of fresh cabbage and sauerkraut. It is one of the few dishes I am willing to describe as 'hearty', which is not a word I like to use often. It also gives you serious wind!
What do you feed a Pole? I asked myself. I wasn't willing to cook her bigos in case my version wasn't up to scratch. Instead, I did chose to do Trinidad Pepperpot - Caribbean as the name implies, but with some odd similarities to the Polish counterpart. The idea of a pepperpot is to slow cook the different meats (again, mainly pork) together with plenty of spices, so that the meat practically crumbles and melts in the mouth. The longer you leave it, the better it gets. Whereas the rest of a Bigos is made up of cabbage, a pepperpot is obviously full of colourful bell and chilli peppers. Another similarity though is the presence of vinegar, cider vinegar in pepperpot counterbalanced by rum and brown sugar, and residue from the sauerkraut in bigos, topped up with red wine.
The combination of roasted spices in the pepperpot gives it its distinctive Caribbean flavour, but those are my secret recipe and will remain undisclosed for now. That evening, I simmered it for nearly four hours, and it was indeed a thing of beauty. However, in a break from authenticity, I used my Potjiekos pot. The Potjie is my giant, cast iron cauldron that I lovingly lugged back from South Africa. As previously discussed, the Afrikaans are also fans of slow, meat-filled one-pot cookery. Pepperpot was originally a slave dish in the Caribbean, designed for ease of cooking - one pot suspended over a fire, and enough spices to disguise low quality meat and offal that would have gone in it. My recipe requires pork - shoulder or chop, belly if you have no alternative. However, the original recipe requires trotters, snout and other squidgy bits I'd rather not contemplate.
It does interest me a great deal that this style of cooking - big meaty slow-cooked stews pop up all over the world. The English equivalent I guess would be a good casserole or maybe even a pot-roast. Some Himalayan curries are done in this fashion using up tough goat meat; Norwegians do thick fish stew with heavy dumplings, but all are variations on the theme. It seems to equate to a cooler or possibly mountainous climate however - I cannot think of a Meditteranean or Oriental equivalent!
To celebrate the universality of this food, I cooked Caribbean pepperpot, using Danish pork, in a South African pot, in my kitchen in north east England, for a Polish gourmet. It was accompanied by Mexican guacamole using avocados from Israel, and for dessert I made Brazilian 'Santa Catalinas' (a mousse made from cream, rum, Italian-style espresso and in this case, Ecuadorian chocolate) and washed it all down with luxurious Nicaraguan coffees. Once digested, we drank Chilean wine and then boiled ourselves in an authentically Finnish sauna. It was a great night, and we are all encouraged to celebrate diversity, right? But not so much the Food Miles. Doh.
2 comments:
Would a stir fry not be the nearest oriental equivalent, but quicker?
Your blogs are always treat to read but you never share pictures of your food. Hope Anna liked the food as well. Can you please sahre pictures as well in the next post
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