Spanish Cuisine #7: Escudella i carn d'olla

Better late than never. Despite a long-lasting curiosity about this typically Catalan dish, I had never tried it, neither in a restaurant nor in a home-made version. Though it might be said that I am a bit late, as the escudella is one of the favourite Christmas dish, I finally made up my mind and tried my luck. Actually, the most difficult thing has probably been tracking down a good recipe and, secondly, finding an adaptation which were both quite faithful to the original recipe and, at the same time, quite feasible for me.

First of all, it may be worth spending a few lines to introduce to this dish, probably the oldest of the Catalan cuisine. Apparently a recipe most commonly found among the humble classes, it was actually quite popular among all social classes. Actually, to be precise a distinction should be made between carn d'olla and escudella, indicating respectively the ingredients which make up the dish and the soup resulting from their preparation. Anyway, shall we call the dish escudella, at least for the moment. Typically a recipe to be prepared in winter time, it used to be eaten with bread as well.

Now, the original recipe of the escudella i carn d'olla is quite complicated, mainly because it takes quite a lot of time to prepare all the ingredients.

Ingredients: 500 g of veal meat, chicken meat, a piece of raw ham, 1 butifarra blanca (Catalan sausage), 1 butifarra negra (Catalan sausage), 1 piece of chorizo (Catalan sausage), 1 pilota (great meatball), half a cauliflower, 2 carrots, 3 potatoes, 1 turnip, 3 pieces of celery, 100 gr of beans, one clove of garlic, one onion.

Time for preparation: 180 minutes

Difficulty: Medium

Basically, the preparation consists in 5 steps:

• The broth: put the chicken meat, the veal meat and the raw ham in a wide pot, leaving them to cook on low heat in order to obtain a savory broth. This operation may took about 90 minutes.
• The pilota: a big meatball which will be finally cut into various slices and delivered, requires the same preparation of an usual meatball, though with considerably higher doses. Add beaten eggs to minced meat, in order to create a ball, finally rolling into grated bread (and, if needed, flour, to make it more compact).
• The stew: when the broth is ready, add the pilota and the washed and sliced vegetables and leave it all on a low heat for about 30 minutes.
• The carn d'olla: add the other kinds of meats, namely various kinds of Catalan sausages (botifarra blanca and negra, chorizo), and leave the pot on the heat for about 30 additional minutes.
• The escudella: Once finished the preparation of the carn d'olla, take the meat and the vegetables out of the broth, which will be used to prepare a soup with a small-sized kind of pasta (such as fideos).

Therefore, this is apparently the original version of escudella and carn d'olla, usually served as first and second course on Christmas day. With regards to the Christmas tradition, a picturesque explanation to put the ingredients in connection with the Christian religion. The various kinds of meat (pork, chicken, lamb, veal), indeed, would stand for the 4 evangelists, while the 7 different vegetables (beans, potatoes, turnip, cauliflower, carrot, celery, onion) used would be associated to the 7 Sacraments. Leaving aside such imaginative traditions, it is worth adding that in recent years a modern version of the dish has been gaining a foothold. The so-called escudella de Nadal, indeed, features a different kind of pasta, called galets, to be used instead of fideos. Moreover, the pilota is not added to the broth in the first phase of the preparation, but rather used as a filling for the galets which will be finally cooked in the soup.

As for myself, the original version of the soup was obviously quite prohibitive, both for reasons of time and abundance of ingredients. As a reasult, I opted for a reduced version, featuring some of the main ingredients and much quicker to prepare. Sparing time by using precooked beans, I only had to cut carrots, onions and chorizo into slices, finally putting them in a pot with a bit of broth, adding a little of water if needed. In this way, it took about 20 minutes to obtain a really savoury dish, which was probably halfway between the escudella and carn d'olla. At any rate, it was a really nice way to heat up a cold winter evening!

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