Variations · 7/10

Variation · period techniques

Old-style deconstructed panellada

Meat and eggs, yellow chickpeas and golden onion, each in its own pot, with only what the period had. On Saturday it all goes onto one platter, with bread and crisp sheets of dough.

  • 6 servings
  • 3 h prep
  • 20 h in the oven

You'll need

The meat

  • 1 kg boneless mutton or beef (shoulder or chuck)
  • 1 tbsp salt and 1 l cold water, to draw out the blood
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 small onion, grated
  • 2 cm fresh ginger, grated
  • 6 eggs in their shells, washed
  • 400–550 ml boiling water
  • 2 tsp fine salt, level (12 g)

The yellow chickpeas

  • 300 g dried chickpeas (or 650 g cooked, with 150 ml of their liquid)
  • 80 saffron threads, the real thing, not turmeric
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 1½ tsp fine salt

The golden onions

  • 3 medium onions (600 g), thinly sliced
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • ½ tsp salt

The spices

  • 1½ tsp black peppercorns
  • 1½ tsp coriander seed
  • 1 tsp cumin seed
  • 2 cm cinnamon stick and 2 cloves
  • ½ tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of saffron (about 10 threads), for the table

The dough

  • For the sheets: 200 g plain flour, 1 tbsp olive oil, ½ tsp salt and about 100 ml water
  • For the seal: 250 g plain flour and about 150 ml water

For the table

  • 6 slices of day-old wheat bread, or 6 beijus
  • 40 g unsalted cashews, or almonds
  • A handful of mint and coriander, leaves only
  • 2 lemons or limes, halved
  • Juquiraí: 4 small dried chillies (cumari or malagueta) and 1 tbsp coarse salt
  • Orange or lemon leaves, washed and unsprayed, if you have them

How to make it

  1. Thursday, the chickpeas. Soak the 300 g of dried chickpeas in plenty of water for 8–12 hours. Drain, cover with fresh water and simmer gently, without salt, for 1–2 hours, until they crush easily between your fingers. Keep them in the fridge in their cooking liquid.The work divides like this: Thursday, about 45 minutes; Friday, about 2 hours; Saturday, half an hour.
  2. Thursday, the crisp sheets. Mix the sheet flour, olive oil and salt, then add the water a little at a time until you have a firm, smooth dough. Knead 3–4 minutes and rest it 30 minutes, covered. With the oven at 220 °C, roll the dough very thin, 1 mm, cut rounds of about 12 cm and prick them with a fork. Bake on ungreased trays for 4–7 minutes, until dry and spotted gold.No hot oven: a dry frying pan, 1–2 minutes a side, like a beiju.
  3. The bread, the nuts and the juquiraí. In the still-hot oven, toast the bread for 5–8 minutes. In a dry pan, toast the nuts for 4–5 minutes and chop them roughly. Then, with a window open, toast the chillies for 30–60 seconds and pound them with the coarse salt in a mortar. Once everything is cool, keep it in a tightly closed tin, and the juquiraí in a jar.Cashews already roasted: just 1 minute. Juquiraí keeps for months.
  4. Friday, about 3 hours before sundown, the meat. Trim off the hard fat and silverskin and cut the meat into 3 cm pieces. Soak them for 30 minutes in the litre of cold water with the tablespoon of salt. Drain, rinse in clean water and pat very dry with a cloth.This is a short version of the old way of drawing out the blood, and it gives a cleaner taste. The full method, with coarse salt, is in the rich panellada.
  5. While the meat soaks, the spices. Toast the pepper, coriander, cumin, cinnamon stick and cloves in a dry pan for 1–2 minutes and pound them to a coarse powder. Sieve half: the fine powder, about 1 tsp, goes into a small jar with the ground cinnamon and the pinch of saffron, crumbled. That is the table spice. The rest goes in the meat.Ground cumin? Add it after toasting the rest.
  6. The saffron, the seal dough and the oven. Crumble about 60 saffron threads into 3 tbsp warm water. The other 20 go into 2 tbsp water in a small covered cup, in the fridge until Saturday. Mix the seal flour with the water into a firm dough that doesn't stick to your hands, and cover it. Turn the oven on to 110–120 °C.
  7. The browned meat. In a wide frying pan, heat the 2 tbsp olive oil over high heat and brown the meat in two batches, 8–10 minutes in all. Set the eggs in their shells on the bottom of an ovenproof 2½–3 litre clay pot and put the meat on top, with the grated onion, the ginger, the coarse spices and the 12 g of salt.
  8. Seal it and into the oven straight away. Pour 400 ml boiling water into the hot pan, scrape up the bottom and add it to the pot. At first the liquid comes about halfway up the meat, which gives off juice overnight; if it doesn't cover the eggs, add up to 150 ml more boiling water. Roll a finger-thick rope of dough, press it around the rim, set the lid on top and push down to seal. Into the oven straight away.Season lightly: nothing goes on the fire on Saturday, and the juquiraí puts the salt right at the table.
  9. The onions, on their own. In the same pan, wiped dry, warm the 4 tbsp olive oil over low heat, add the onions and salt, cover and let them sweat for 10 minutes. Uncover and cook 15–20 minutes more, stirring now and then, until golden but not brown: they darken overnight. Move the onions with all their oil to a small ½–¾ litre pot.
  10. The pounded chickpeas. While the onions cook, warm the chickpeas in their liquid and drain them, keeping 150 ml. Set aside 150 g of whole ones and pound the rest in a mortar, a little at a time, with the saffron water, the olive oil, the salt and the saved liquid, to a smooth yellow paste, softer than you want it: it firms up overnight. Stir in the whole chickpeas and spoon it all into an oiled 1½ litre pot.In a food processor: 1–2 minutes. Canned chickpeas, already salted: only ½ tsp salt.
  11. Seal the other two and lower the oven. Seal both pots the same way and put them in the oven no more than about 45 minutes after the meat: side by side or on two racks, the meat on the lower one. Turn the oven down to 100–110 °C; for such a long night, 100 °C is better. Everything is in before sundown and stays until Saturday at noon.Use an oven thermometer: at low settings, home dials are often off. No clay pots? Ovenproof bowls and plates, sealed the same way.
  12. Saturday at noon, open the pots. Take the pots out of the oven, break the seals with the tip of a knife and lift the lids. The ropes come out hard and pale and go in the bin: the dough you eat is the crisp sheets. With a slotted spoon, move the meat into an oiled bowl, press it lightly and turn it out onto the middle of a large platter. Lift the eggs from the bottom of the pot, peel them holding them in a cloth and halve them: the whites come out tan and the yolks soft.
  13. The broth and the paste. Tip the meat pot, holding it with a cloth, and pour the broth slowly into a bowl, leaving the bits behind: about 500–600 ml. Wait 5 minutes and spoon off the fat that rises. In a jug, whisk 4 tbsp of the paste with about 400 ml of the broth, added a little at a time. Beat the rest of the broth and 1 tbsp of the onion oil into the remaining paste. Divide the saffron you kept between the jug and the paste: both turn bright yellow.The crust at the edges of the paste can go in or come off.
  14. Build the platter. On the citrus leaves, if you have them, put the bread on one side and the chickpeas on the other. Spread the onions over the meat with just 1–2 tbsp of their oil; the rest goes over the chickpeas and bread. Eggs around, the table spice, the herbs, the nuts and a few crisp sheets. At the table, pour the broth over the bread and break the other sheets over it. Alongside: the rest of the broth in bowls, the lemons, and the juquiraí in a salt cellar.On plates, like the Infanta's alfitete: sheets below, the meat and a spoonful of broth on top.
The story behind it
“… nos dittos sabbados jantavão sempre huã iguaria que nunca comiam nos outros dias da semana, a qual iguaria era amarella, a qual deziam as dittas suas filhas mais moças que se fazia com grãos pisados, e a carne picada e adubos.”Joanna Fernandes, 1593 · Denunciações de Pernambuco, p. 31

On Saturdays, this witness said, Branca ate her midday meal earlier than on other days, upstairs, with her daughters, and always the same yellow dish of pounded chickpeas, chopped meat and spices. Here the parts of that dish cook in separate pots. Preparing a part on its own is a period gesture too: in Lisbon, in the house of Inês Lopes, “afogavão primeiro a cebolla no azeite em huã tejella separada”, they first smothered the onion in olive oil in a separate dish, and only then added it to the meat pot (Denunciações, p. 387). Here it stays apart until the table. Eggs that spend the night in the pot until their whites darken are the adafina's huevos haminados (Pérez Alonso, p. 454).

The way it is set out comes from the tables of the time. In the Livro de Cozinha da Infanta D. Maria, boiled chicken goes to the table on slices of bread, under its broth bound with eggs, with hard-boiled eggs around it and cinnamon on top. In the alfitete, thin sheets of dough take the meat and its broth, with cinnamon and sugar on top (Lomba Vicente, p. 21). Throughout the book, cinnamon and saffron are the dishes' “toque final”, their finishing touch (p. 46). In a 13th-century Jewish dish from al-Andalus, the pot is broken, the whole thing turned out onto a dish and covered with mint, pistachios, pine nuts and spices. In the same book, other dishes go to the table on citron leaves.

Brazil gave the rest. In 1587, describing Bahia, Gabriel Soares de Sousa wrote that the manioc wafers called beijus come out “tão delgadas como filhós mouriscas, que se fazem de massa de trigo, mas ficam tão iguaes como obreas”, as thin as the Moorish fritters made of wheat dough, but as even as wafers, and are baked until “muito seccas e torradas”, very dry and crisp (p. 189): that is what the wheat dough becomes here. The cashew “quer arremedar no sabor aos pinhões”, tastes like pine nuts (p. 206), and juquiraí, dried chilli pounded with salt, “entre os brancos se traz no saleiro”, is kept in the salt cellar at the settlers' tables (p. 204).

Splitting the pot in three, keeping the onion apart until the table, the wheat dough as crisp sheets, the chickpeas instead of eggs to bind the broth, and the quantities are our choices. Everything cooks on Friday; on Saturday nothing goes on the fire: it is only opened, set out and served. Leftovers: into the fridge within 2 hours, or 1 hour above 32 °C; the onion in its oil keeps up to 4 days. No pork, no lard. Sources