In Mexico and here in southern California Christmas and the holiday season means
it's time to make pozole, a beloved stew of hominy and meat like pork, chicken, beef
or during the Aztec empire human flesh.
So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we make pozole this time on Tasting History.
So I like to do historic recipes on this channel and I wanted to find an old recipe for pozole but
it turns out that because this recipe has mostly been passed down orally through the years
finding an old recipe in all of my old cookbooks proved fruitless. Don't put fruit in your in your pozole,
but there are many many kinds of pozole.
The three most common represent the colors of the Mexican flag.
Red and green pozole use different colored chilies and ingredients to achieve their color
while white pozole often foregoes chili as an ingredient altogether,
and they use all different kinds of meat too. Most use either pork or chicken or beef, but some use turkey or sardines and shrimp.
Now I did find one historic description that lays out what this dish would have been like
in pre-conquest Aztec Mexico, but after reading it I was hesitant to make it at home.
"First they cooked the maize, which was going to be served with the human flesh,
and they put a little of the meat on the maize, they mixed no chile either with the cooked stuff or with the meat, only salt."
This meat was eaten by him who made the banquet and his relations."
I wasn't going to cook that. No chilies, no salt, that sounds bland. :/
So at a loss for an historic recipe I turned to my mother-in-law who has a recipe for pozole
passed down through the generations straight from her grandmother to her.
Now my mother-in-law is from Mexico so I heard this recipe
in Spanish and while I did need help with the translation I was pretty impressed with myself
at how well I kept up and how far my Spanish has come along since I started learning it
about a year ago with our sponsor Babbel.
Babbel is the language app that I've been using to learn Spanish over the past year
and I love it because all of the lessons are put together by actual
language teachers rather than just an algorithm.
And they're nice and short. They're about 10 minutes each so you can fit them in even if you have a really busy schedule like I do.
Personally I like the podcasts and the games which help lock in what I've learned during the lessons.
I also love that you don't just learn the typical vocabulary, you also learn a little bit about the
culture the slang and about the food and drink of the countries where this language is spoken.
So I was able to understand my mother-in-law when she said things like 'corta la cebolla en mitad'
(cut the onion in half)
or if you just want to learn another language for your own edification
or as part of your New Year's resolution then sign up for Babbel using my link in the description to
get 65% off of your subscription plus it comes with a 20-day money-back guarantee.
Though I know you'll love it, just as I know you'll love my mother-in-law's pozole.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: 10 cups or about 3 kilograms of hominy.
They come in these huge cans, so one huge can.
Also make sure to rinse your harmony after it comes out of the can.
2 to 3 pounds or about 1 kilogram of pork shoulder or leg cut into one inch pieces.
Then you want something with bones that's really going to add flavor like pork neck or even trotters.
That's their little feet.
2 tablespoons of salt, a bulb of garlic divided in two, one onion cut in half,
15 to 20 guajillo chilis.
You can also add other chilies especially if you want it hotter.
2 teaspoons cumin, 1 tablespoon dried Mexican oregano, and then either a cup or 235 milliliters of chicken stock, or
if you really want a better flavor 2-3 tablespoons of Knorr chicken bouillon seasoning.
It's easier, it's actually better than using chicken stock and it's been around for over 100 years.
Now before you make this it is imperative that you are in a good mood because they say
that whatever mood you are in while you're making it goes into the pozole and that will transfer to whoever is eating it.
So make sure to smile and then soak your chilies for 1 to 2 hours.
If they won't stay submerged set something heavy on them to keep them down.
While they soak get about 6 to 8 quarts of water boiling, and then add in the salt,
half of the garlic and both halves of the onion.
Now you don't want to chop these up or press the garlic because you want- you want to get all of the flavor
but you don't want little pieces of this in your final product, so just leave them whole.
It's real easy.
Then carefully add the pork and bring it back to a boil for 1 hour.
And you can't just leave it for an hour, it's very high maintenance. It starts to get this like greasy scum on top,
and you have to skim that off and you have to check on it every 10 minutes or so because the scum will come back.
Now when the hour starts to close in take the chilies out of the water and let them drain.
Do not squeeze the chilies trying to get the water out because they will burst and squeeze
spicy chili juice in your eye. Rookie mistake, I'd never do that.
But once the chilis are drained take off the stem and remove all of the seeds.
Then take the chilies and put them into a blender along with the rest of the garlic,
and a bit of the water that they soaked in about a cup.
Then blend until smooth.
Then pass the blended chilies through a sieve so that you have a nice smooth sauce.
Then when the pork is boiled for about an hour pour the sauce into the pot,
along with the oregano, the chicken bouillon, and the cumin.
Then stir everything together and let it boil for about 30 minutes
or until the meat is nice and tender. It really should be able to just fall apart.
At that point give it a taste and if you need to add a little bit more salt or seasonings go ahead and do so.
You can also add a little bit more water if the level has gone down too much but then add the hominy
and stir it all together. Now hominy is a specific kind of corn that has already gone through
the laborious and amazing process of nixtamalization.
So it's actually already been cooked once,
so it only needs in about another 30 minutes to fully cook.
Also if you want to see me go through this laborious process of mixtimalization
I will put a link to the video that I did last year on tamales
and I'll put it at the end of this video as well. It is quite the process but it was fun to do, once.
Now with 30 minutes to go that should be plenty of time to make sure that you are
subscribed to Tasting History as we look at a rather dark chapter of food history.
Now before we delve into this history, a light warning. It is a little graphic,
not super but a little graphic. So if you don't feel comfortable hearing about human sacrifice
and cannibalism this is where you get off the bus
but if you are still here let's do it.
So pozole which comes from the Nahuatl word 'pozolli' referred to the foam that was created when cooking hominy,
or it may have referred to the foamy look that hominy actually has.
And it was eaten as a staple of the diet probably mixed with herbs and chilies and maybe some meat.
But the form of the dish that gets recorded in the histories of the Aztecs
was eaten only on ceremonial occasions that included the sacrifice of blood.
Now the sacrifice was often rather small.
It usually came in the form of the Aztecs themselves piercing their ears or their tongue and letting a few drops of blood out which granted
in a time before antibiotics was rather dangerous.
These minor blood lettings were often to give strength to the sun god Hutizilopochtli.
It was imperative to keep the sun doing what it does going up and down each day,
and giving over a little blood was the way to make that go.
Now Hutizilopochtli had an interesting origin story because when his mother was pregnant with him
his other siblings decided that they wanted to kill her, but before they could he came out of her womb
fully armored with weapons and ran most of them off and killed his sister cutting off her head,
and rolling her down a mountain.
Rather fitting that he was also a god of war.
Now with this rather violent childhood and the fact that he needed a constant supply of human blood
to keep the sun going up and down which was how he staved off the end of the world,
it makes sense that during his festival they would try to reenact the killing of his sister with a little human sacrifice.
And really there were two ways in which this was done. First was to reenact his birthday battle
with warriors that had been captured in actual battle.
"They slew the captives by battling with them-
these being tied by the waist with a rope which passed through the socket of a round stone as of a mill...
and four warriors came against him with swords and shields, and one by one they exchanged sword blows with him
until they vanquished him."
Seems a little unsportsmanlike but I suppose a fair fight isn't really the point.
Now the other way that the myth was reenacted was done on a much larger scale.
Archaeologists point to thousands of people being sacrificed
in a very short period of time just during one festival.
They were mostly captives of war and slaves
that would be taken to the top of a great pyramid in the capital of the empire Tenochtitlan.
The pyramid was meant to represent the mountain where Hutizilopochtli was born.
The captives would be held down on a sacrificial stone by five priests
"...and then came the priest who was to kill him.
And he struck him with a flint knife held in both hands... between the breasts.
And into the gash which he made, he thrust his hand and tore from the victim his heart;
and then he offered it to the sun and cast it into a gourd vessel.
They started the body rolling down the pyramid steps. It came to rest upon a small square below.
There some old men... carried it to their tribal temple, where they dismembered it and divided it up in order to eat it."
So there was a bit of a leap there from human sacrifice to eating said sacrifice.
Now the Dominican Friar Diego Durán in a surprisingly even-handed description
says that it was done as a sort of communion with the god as they ate what the god would eat.
And it was done with "Reverence ritual and fastidiousness- as if it was something from heaven."
And one reason this might be is actually because of another Aztec god,
Xipe Totec which means Our Lord the Flayed One.
Supposedly he fed early humans by flaying himself and then letting them eat his flesh
which is actually a common trope in many religions.
And here it likely represented the way that corn and other seeds shed their outer skin before becoming edible.
A symbolism probably lost on those captives who had to participate in the reenactment which Bernardino de Sahagún described.
"They were killed by the priests of the temple... they flayed them all...
the body was cut up, and a thigh sent to Mochtecuzoma for him to eat, the rest being distributed to other chieftains or relatives,
who went to eat it in the house of the man who had captured the victim.
They cooked that meat with corn and gave each one a piece of it with its broth in a bowl with the cooked corn;
they called that stew tlacatlaolli; after the meal followed general drunkenness."
That tlacatlaolli which literally means husked corn of men was pozole with human meat.
And it was not something that was eaten often or by the majority of the population.
It was only eaten as part of these religious ceremonies
and even then in small quantities and only by the priests and the ruling class.
But these stories from eyewitnesses were then manipulated into stories of mass cannibalism
that were used as justification back in Spain for the conquest of New Spain and the Caribbean.
Most of the civilizations of which
didn't practice cannibalism at all. It was very much trying to paint everyone with the same brush.
But with the conquest came the abolition of this type of pozole, but the dish lived on mostly with
a new ingredient that had been brought over from Europe, pig or pork.
Just like in the pozole that should be ready to take off the stove.
So once the hominy is cooked for 30 minutes it is ready to eat but
don't eat it all because the flavors really develop in the second and third day so
keep it in the fridge and give it a couple days and then try it again it's gonna be even better.
But whether you eat in a few days or now you can't forget the toppings.
Really pozole is just a canvas on which toppings go.
More common additions are radish, onion, cabbage, avocado,
a squeeze of lime, a little oregano and of course tortilla chips.
And here we are a more modern version of the Aztec classic pozole.
So I have my chip but i'm going to use a spoon so I can get-
try to get as many of the ingredients as possible. Definitely want to get the meat and the hominy though.
Let's go.
It's just-
It's like a hug.
You can definitely add more chilies to it either before cooking it or as a topping.
I love the flavor of the chilis which you get in spades,
but you don't get too too much of the spice. That's really up to you.
What I really love is not only the combination of all of the flavors,
but the textures, the meat is so soft it just falls apart. The hominy has this like give
you kind of gotta bite into it but then it just softens once you do,
and you've got the crunch of the chips and the radish and the cabbage along with the zest of the lime.
It's really like just all the flavors and all the textures that there are combined in one bowl,
and it's just- it's perfect for- I mean it's perfect for any time. For any celebration that's usually when it's made
but it's really nice for a little bit of cold weather.
So like I said there are so many versions of this dish that you can really do almost anything you want to it to to make it your own.
What you don't want to do is do what John Steinbeck the author would do
when he wanted to make pozole. See he loved the dish but if he couldn't find it and had to make it himself
he said that he would just follow his friend Jack Wagner's [ Rachael R's ;) ] recipe which called for
"A can of chili and a can of hominy."
Don't do that. Do sign up for Babbel at the link down in the description
and follow me on Instagram and Twitter and if you haven't seen it already
here's that video to tamales another wonderful Christmas Mexican recipe
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
I'm going to finish some of this pozole but I'm saving most of it for a couple days from now.