Pulique

As tradition built it

Pulique

Sololá, Chimaltenango, Quiché; pre-Hispanic origin

Ingredients

The meat

• 1.35kg beef (manita de rochoy), in pieces
• as needed water
• to taste salt
• a piece onion

The vegetables

• ½ güicoy sazón (ripe squash), in medium pieces
• 1 güisquil (chayote), in medium pieces
• 900g potatoes, peeled and cut small
• 225g peas
• 12 sprigs cilantro, finely chopped
• ¼ cabbage

The recado

• 900g tomatoes
• 1 chile guaque común
• 4 chiles guaque from Santiago Sacatepéquez
• 1 chile pimiento
• 450g corn masa

Method

1. Cut the meat into pieces. Fill a pan with water, add salt and a piece of onion, then the meat, and cook over a medium heat for 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile cut the güicoy and güisquil into medium pieces. Peel the potatoes, cut them small, and keep them in a bowl of water. Wash the peas and chop the cilantro finely.
3. Add them all to the pot and cook over a medium heat for 20 minutes.
4. Boil the chiles in another pan. The tomatoes can go in raw or cooked.
5. Blend the tomatoes and chiles to a fine sauce. Work the masa into it until there are no lumps; that is the recado.
6. Add the cabbage, the recado, the cooked vegetables and the meat's cooking water. Stir all the time until it boils, and season with salt.
7. Serve with the vegetables and tamalitos blancos.

Notes

The recipe is CulturaGuate's, the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala, which records pulique as an offering in Maya ritual, above all in Holy Week, in Sololá and Suchitepéquez. Aprende Guatemala grinds raw tomato and miltomate with onion, garlic, allspice and soaked rice for the recado, uses chicken, beef or pork, adds green beans and epazote, colours it with achiote and thickens with masa to taste.

What a modern chef changes

Recado clarified, meat cooked apart

Method

1. Build the recado base with toasted, spice-ground chile guaque and stone-mortar-pounded aromatics, then finish it in a high-power blender and pass through a chinois for a properly smooth sauce.
2. Cook whichever meat is used sous vide separately from the vegetables, adding it to the finished, thickened sauce only at the end, so the meat stays tender rather than simmering to greyness alongside the vegetables the way a single-pot version tends to.

Notes

Given the real absence of a documented traditional quantity, this elevation is offered as a technique framework for the reader to apply their own judged proportions to, rather than as a rescaling of a recipe that does not survive in the sources reached.