North America · Volume 30, The Three Sisters, the Bison and the Piki Stone
Pashofa
Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, Oklahoma
Illustration
- Time
- 4 hours
As tradition built it
Pashofa
From the Chickasaw Nation's own recipe. About 4 hours total.
Ingredients
- 1lb cracked corn, pearl hominy
- 1lb fresh lean pork, a meaty backbone cut is traditional
- 2 quarts water
- to taste salt, added individually at the table, not during cooking
Method
- Bring the water to the boil.
- Add the corn and cook slowly, stirring often.
- When the corn is about half done, add the pork.
- Continue cooking until both meat and corn are tender and soft, roughly 4 hours total. No salt is added during cooking; it is salted individually at the table.
- Serve traditionally with carved wooden or horn paddles and spoons at large communal gatherings and ceremonies.
What a modern chef changes
Precision on the pork, restraint everywhere else
Method
- Cook the pork sous vide to a precise, still-yielding doneness well before the corn is ready.
- Flake the pork through the finished pashofa only at the very end, rather than letting four hours of open simmering render it to a uniform softness that loses the meat's own texture.
- Toast the cracked corn briefly in a dry pan before it goes into the pot, a real, controllable way of deepening the corn's own flavour that the long simmer alone does not draw out.
- Serve, as tradition already does, with a carved horn spoon rather than a factory one: the dish's own restraint, water, corn, pork, salt only at table, is already the elevation.