The following recipe is Nicolasa Pradera


Before the Spanish Civil War, Nicolasa Pradera was the chef of a still celebrated restaurant, Casa Nicolasa, by the market in San Sebastian. This traditional recipe uses both beans and hot pepper.

POCHAS FOR QUAILS, GAME BIRDS, AND OTHER ROASTS

 Recipe Requirements, Notes and Hints

 Put water in a stew pot with both lean and fat pork fatback or ham. [Cook thefatback or ham,] Let the water cool in the pan where the pork fat was cooked, and once cooled, addthe pochas, chopped onions, raw peeled tomatoes, a hot pepper that is between red and green and is also peeled, a peeled, finely minced garlic clove, chopped parsley, a little white pepper, and a few drops of olive oil, and cook it slowly. Season with salt, -Nicolasa Pradera, LA COCINA DE NICOLASA, 1933

 Interest Note

 In Vizcayan Euskera beans are called indibabak, Indian beans. Every Basque region prides itself on its own beans: red, pinto, black, white, or the unripened, soft, greenish white beans that Basques call pochas. Because pochas are picked exactly at the moment they ripen from green to white, Tirso Rodriganez, a Spanish government minister in the 1880s, called them "pubescent beans." In Thdela, in southern Navarra, pochas are served with eel for holidays. In the Alava section of Rioja, they are cooked with lamb tail. But because the optimum time for picking pochas coincides with the fall game bird season, these beans are most commonly associated with quail. An article in a 1967 Basque food journal pointed out that pochas are so highly regarded that the dish is always called "pochas with quails" and never "quail with pochas.".

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