Back in the outdoor kitchen, Arminda once again climbed up on her stool. She poured the chile into the meat broth, added the entire tub of vegetables, and threw in some mint from her garden. Using a mortar and pestle that had been her great-grandmother’s, she pounded peppercorns and cumin and in they went. A few more branches went onto the fire, and then, suddenly, it was over. We were done, and I hadn’t even seen the cornudos being made.
Thus far, only eyes, memory, and experience had been used to measure out this dish, or so it appeared to me. Back in town, I nursed a few doubts about this churipo. Wouldn’t all these vegetables have different cooking times? I was sure the zucchini would fall apart by the time the potatoes were done. And what about that meat? Would it be seasoned further or was that it? It all seemed so casual and in its way, rather effortless, but really, how was this stew going to come together? The word itself suggests something thick, but this one seemed thin and brothy.
When we arrived at the fiesta, like any good hostess, Arminda didn’t look in the least as if she had been cooking over a hot fire just hours ago. She was beautifully arrayed in her Purepechan costume and beaming a warm welcome. She urged me towards the churipo. One of the ladies ladled the red broth into a white bowl with black designs that had been made especially for the meal. She pulled a piece of meat, more bone than flesh, out of the same pot it had been in earlier and slipped it into the bowl where it joined the vegetables and a single cornudo.
I took a taste. The stew wasn’t particularly spicy. In fact, there was no tingle and burn at all. It was just warm with the chile, not hot. Nor was it strongly seasoned. Instead, it was soft and subtle. Should it have been more heavily spiced, or was it just as it should be? I didn’t know. But it was one of the prettiest bowls of food I’d seen—startling and simple, the red chile, the white-and-black design, the floating vegetables, and the twin islands of bone and cornudo. No speckles of herbs or drizzles of cream marred this dish. Rather, it was clean, bold, and rather geometric with the round potatoes and the pyramid of masa. As food goes, I would describe it as a calm dish, maybe even a contemplative one that reflected its preparation—measured solely by instinct, unhurried, not worried over, and somehow just right.
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