Recipe.... in These titles mean nothing.

This is from Mary Welsh Hemingway’s How It Was.

As he told me about himself that evening in the galley, Gregorio was making us beef stew for supper. As with nearly all his other dishes, we thought it was the best in the world of its genre, and I asked him its secrets. You do the sauce first, he said, with plenty of garlic, onion, tomato puree, a can of pimiento chopped fine, lard, sherry, oregano and laurel. No water. You cook the sauce for fifteen minutes, stirring and improving seasonings, then add the beef in one- or two-bite sizes, turn the fire low and let it simmer slowly for an hour. Add raw potatoes in small chunks and cook another half hour. He usually served his stew with white rice. He never appeared to either measure his rice or the water or to time its cooking. We might be lounging or talking on the afterdeck when Gregorio would spring down to the galley to yank the rice off the fire, He could tell by the smell when it was cooked, he said. It should begin to smell faintly, barely noticeably, of mothballs. That was when it was sufficiently cooked and that was proof of its goodness.

He gave me tips on his red snapper stew which guests aboard the Pilar from far and wide had hailed as sensational. An hour before beginning to cook, you score the fish diagonally and rub salt into the cuts. The dish is best if your pan and fire are big enough to hold the entire fish with head and tail. (His two kerosene burners in Pilar were too small for that). As with the beef, he made the sauce first, with garlic, onion , fresh chopped red peppers, puree of tomato, bay leaf and oregano, cooking and stirring for half an hour. Next he added a tin of pimiento chopped very fine, capers, raisins, green olives, Manzanilla sherry, salt and finally the fish to simmer slowly just until its opalescent flesh turned white. He never liked to fish to be too fresh, he mentioned, because the skin shrinks in the cooking.

“How fresh is too fresh, Gregorio?” We were slupping up beef-stew juice from our plates on the generator box aft, while Earnest ate, plate in hand cross-legged on his bunk.

“Oh, maybe an hour, depending on size, depending on the fish. Two hours maybe.”

“Not a universal dilemma,” murmured Ernest.

Last updated May 26, 2016