The Galician Theory of Chaos: Caldo Gallego
Autumn with our Berger Picard. Salina. This rare breed is one of the oldest of French sheep dogs. Twelve years ago, Susanne found Salina after she was abandoned in the Barrio de la Fortuna, south of Madrid, where sheep herds could still be found. She loved this adventure in the chestnut woods of Lugo, herding all the people from mushroom to mushroom. Leading a pack of dogs around Paderne — a village so small it’s referred to as an aldea.
Friday evening we got off the Hi-way to Santiago de Compostela, in the Northern Spanish province of Lugo, just after dark, onto a well designed two lane road. We drove on into a light rain looking for the turnoff to Paderne, but went too far and parked across from a gas station built adjacent to a monestery. I was reminded of the photographs of Burk Uzzle. He’d look and look until he found the loose lug-nut; that odd bit that makes you laugh when you get it. But you have to not only look, but see. This loose nut was there just starring back at us. The ancient stone wall and the cheap metal structures from the 1960's. But right there. It’s like seeing a gas station two feet from the National Cathedral, or a McDonald’s up the steps of the Supreme Court. Chema, our “imposter” Galician navagator went to the bar to ask for directions. Go straight ahead, turn down the hill… We drove around endless curves, stopping again for directions. Friday night on the way to the bar, he had three words of advice. Habla poca por se lluve. They talk little to keep the rain out of their mouths. Another hour and the signs seemed to be repeating themselves. Even if Paderne was on Google maps, we had no signal. We came to a fork in the road and Chema disappeared up a narrow road to the sound of a barking dog. This looked like it was the before picture of a crime scene. Lit by a street lamp out of central casting of a movie from the 1940's. I went over emergency plans in my mind; slam it into reverse and floor it. Susanne and I waited as the tension grew. A large red-orange fluffy dog came by heading up the hill after Chema, but when he saw us, turned and ran; a dog too mythically beautiful to be a dog. As though a wolf was crossed with a fox. A big red-orange wolf. Chema came back indicating an unmarked road, just past, at the bridge. The occasional lights of the vilages and aldeas we passsed disappeared as the rain increased. At the top of the mountain, we had three forward choices and one back. We stopped and I got out looking for indications from the faded sigh as the others checked their phones for a signal. Just then a car pulled up and I ran to stop them. They were also going to Paderne and had precise directions. We followed.
“The rhythm of falling chestnuts was interrupted by the arrival of a wheelbarrow”
The rhythm of falling chestnuts was interrupted by the arrival of a wheelbarrow at the door of the construction across the way from our perch on the terrace outside the Casa Chaos with a load of berza. I dashed into the kitchen of the Casa Chaos and got the largest heirloom tomato I’d brought from my garden in Madrid — boldly announcing my intention to trade it for berza. The wheelbarrow operator was having nothing of it. With a cautious laugh he said, “you got to talk to the boss.”
A caldo Gallego requires these vegetables you've never heard of and they just don't translate very well into English. The recipe doesn’t either. Berza, Col, and Grelos are their Peter, Paul, and Mary. It’s the music. The tender care and feeding of their pigs. Ask Azucena. We found her sitting on a three legged stool in front of a giant cauldron planted into a wood-fired brick oven. She feeds into the cauldron bertha, cabbage, chestnuts and who knows what else. She says: I feed them well, because I eat them. The Casa Chaos is not some kind of avant-garde artistic movement, but the ancestral estate of the Chaos family, currently presided over by Xuso Choas.
“Tienes que hablar con la jefa.”
I’d seen the woman Susanne and I’d met this morning gathering chestnuts by the road constantly moving in and out, pushing this and carrying that from the cluster of buildings made of thick black slate and adobe. I went around to the front and asked a friendly old man where I could find the “jefa”. He pointed to a cluster of women in front of the barn door of our lodging. Although many traditional houses in Galicia have a stable under the house, the stable of the Casa Chaos was on the same level as the living quarters — winding around the steep hillside and extending out and down to form a building of considerable dimension. I burst into the crowd and began extolling the virtues of my home grown tomato; it’s source in that great Baker Creek seed catalog; its importation to Spain. In summation: nowhere in Spain, nor Europe are you likely to find a tomato so excellent; they grow two and a half meters high and produce many kilos of this wonderful fruit; your neighbors will be envious.
What do you want, she asked, a little perplexed with all that excitement over a tomato. Berza! Come with me, she said as I followed her down the road and up a steep slope lined with stairs of slate to her vegetable garden. She cut the berza; two big heads of white cabbage; and an ear of corn; then shutting the path with a pallet, which served as a gate, when she added: “but it doesn't keep the wild boars out.” When we got to her buildings, she beckoned me through a door and then through another where Ham was curing, hung from the ceiling. She went first for the “unto”, a rendered, cured pork fat and unhooked the bony end of a cured ham. I walked back to our terrace with the product of my trade to considerable disbelief; 14 kilos of produce for a tomato.
Full of enthusiasm, we walked down to Adriana’s restaurant to arrange for tomorrows lunch. It’s said that you never know if a Galician is going up or down. We don’t have caldo Gallego tomorrow. We don’t have Stewed wild boar. We don’t have stewed free-range hen. Adriana was taking issue of our friend Chema’s menu requests for our Sunday lunch. She appealed to the women in our group for understanding: “I’ll serve you what I feel like, and you’ll be happy with that,” to which all the women agreed. But Chema, from Leon, a neighboring province to Lugo, but raised in Galicia and who considers himself more Gallego than Leonese, wasn’t quite finished with this negotiation. How did you find that dog with such a long tail, he asked. In her increasingly sassy, saucy, sarcastic voice Adriana shot back: I only like those with a long tail, which sounds altogether more sexy in Gallego(solo me gusto los rabos longos). I asked her if she could tell me how to make Caldo Gallego. If you want my recipe, come by in the morning. What time I asked. After a thoughtful pause, she said nine and smiled. Back at the Casa Chaos, I unloaded the Caldo Gallego fixings MariSol had traded for the tomato: A kilo of unto; half a meter of cured Galician ham bone; two kilos of berza; 3 kilos of white cabbage.
Sunday began with an occasional skirmish on the forest floor, becoming a low-level conflict as the temperature rose; heating the spiny cover of the chestnut until it shoots out and often straight down. If you get in the way, with no protective clothing, you can get a nice red welt. As the others searched for chantrels and boletus, I lay on my back on a pile of chestnut logs and gazed up at the glorious canopy 30 meters above. This mid-October day was unusually hot. Yesterday’s overcast color palate — a hallucination of purples, and blues, reds and grey-black stone dripping in water, I’d never seen. But today’s sunshine transformed all those to ocre and yellow announcing a panorama of Autumn to cause jealousy in New England. We’d drive a little more and stop and walk around until we arrived at a little hillside town with a terrace in the sun. Although Sunday’s were made for a well drawn beer on a sunny terrace in the mountains, I was anxious to learn what Adriana had cooked up.
On the way down the hill to Adriana’s, I saw Marcelino coming out of the stable under his house with his burro. Our dog Salina, a sheep dog from Picardia, took a dangerous interest in the burro’s hind quarters. Dogs run free in Paderne, and never seem to fight, although there is the occasional show of force. Salina often get’s nervous in the presence of other dogs, but was calm, because most were male. She paraded up and down the catacombed streets with her sniffing entourage in tow.
La Prix-Fixe de la Casa Caselo
Slow food. Home made. From Scratch. This 14 Euro Prix-Fixe menu of Caldo Gallago; empanada; free range chicken; stewed wild boar; roasted and stewed chestnuts can not be described by thoses terms of art, because the boar was hunted and shot by her husband; the chicken fed by her mother; the chestnuts gathered under the trees her great grandfather planted and roasted in the woodfired oven her father in law built. Everything on the table they raised, gathered, picked and baked, stewed, soaked and seasoned and distilled.
Adriana serves her Caldo Gallego, after hors d’oeuvres of thinly sliced Galician ham. Yet this cured ham is different than the Iberian Jamon that is fed acorns; all of which are better than the procutto, whose process the Italians stole from the Spanish many empires ago. Wafer thin transparent chicharrones or Roxois in Gallego; Empanada of grelos baked in the wood-fired oven. Chorizo.
After a lengthy sobra mesa, that wonderful habit of lingering over a few bottles of blueberry moonshine, we moved outside into the unusually bright warm afternoon next to the Tejo tree in the small Plaza. Xusa began where he had left off the night before, explaining the significance of this tree. In classic literary fashion, his monologue began with love; procreation; and sex — the riposte, but not the last, of a 48 hours in his world; this is the tree, from which is derived the phrase tirar las tejos, meaning: let’s fuck! But continuing in the literary modality; when the Romans invaded our lands two meninia ago, we build walls on the mountain over there. But after four years of seige, we had no choice. The Romans thought: no entregre, pero entegra. Our people were having none of it. The sap of the Tejo is poisionous. They extracted the sap and distilled it. When the Romans broke through the walls, they only found bodies. He took a sip from the wild blueberry moonshine.
A bake in our oven often starts with 1 clay pot, but never ends with only one.
