I can’t imagine that anyone ever visits Chile’s Secano Interior—Maule, Itata, and Bío Bío—without eating the vegetable stew porotos granados; probably several times in the summer when the principal ingredients, borlotti beans (aka cargamanto, cranberry beans, or Roman beans), maize kernels, and squash, are harvested. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. Like so many rustic, country dishes, its simplicity, its umbilical chord-like connection to the land through its native ingredients, and its timelessness make it unfailingly satisfying.
In common with other simple, country dishes the world over, there is little documentary history for porotos granados; nor is there the archeological evidence of a dish such as curanto (the subject of a previous At the Table column). There’s a recipe in a Chilean cookery book of 1911, La Negrita Doddy: Nuevo Libro de Cocina by Lawe, which was based on the recipe book of Julio Grauffé, the chef of the Jockey Club of Paris, but recipes of this sort were almost always passed on by word of mouth, not in books until later in the 20th century.
Nonetheless, porotos granados almost certainly goes way back. The Mapuche people in Chile are known to have been growing and eating beans, maize, and squash for thousands of years and the harvests of the three overlap—although I should add here that some versions of the dish are based on beans and maize alone and squash is not included.
There is greater clarity about the name of the dish, although some
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
