Dhe New Year’s Day falls in midsummer in the southern hemisphere, which is usually hot and dry in southern South America. These are ideal prerequisites for curanto, the traditional festive meal with which the New Year is welcomed in the fresh air in Patagonia. The Aguilar family has also invited relatives, relatives and friends, the more people the better, because curanto is much more than just a meal. It’s a collective culinary spectacle.
The family quickly agrees who will take on the role of Curantero, the head chef and master of ceremonies, this year. It will be Eduardo’s oldest nephew. Almost any Argentine can grill meat, but cooking it underground in a kind of natural pressure cooker with vegetables is an art in itself. Eduardo watched Curantos from an early age and later helped out, he knows about fire, earth, air and water. He is often out and about for days on horseback in the wild nature of the Andes to drive in cows, whether in snowy winter or dry summer. He knows which type of wood burns for how long and how hot, with which he can quickly heat water in a tin can for the mate tea in the morning, how to grill a piece of meat juicy even in continuous rain, what danger the almost constantly blowing wind in Patagonia an open fire is about how careful you have to be in the summer months and how important it is to find a spot where the earth is not too dry. Otherwise his fireplace could set the roots of nearby trees on fire underground.
A pyre made from dry branches
The morning begins with collecting fist-sized stones. The first guests arrive, and everyone helps to fish the stones from the river bed or to pick them up along the way. Eduardo decides how big the cooking area should be and starts digging a rectangular, one and a half meter wide and twenty centimeter deep hole in the ground that can be one to several meters long, depending on the number of guests. Fifty guests are expected, so he shovels it six feet long. A kind of funeral pyre made of dry tree branches and stones is set up and set on fire. The wood fire has to be enough for the stones to glow red from the heat. This usually takes two hours. In the meantime, the wagon-wheel-sized leaves of the Nalca plant are collected, on which the food is first laid and then covered with the leaves. Nalca, in English mammoth leaf, is a kind of oversized rhubarb and grows wild in Patagonia, mainly on shady banks.
Stew from the earth: With curanto, everything is cooked together that the market and the slaughterhouse are currently producing.
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Image: Caroline Lang
Whatever the vegetable garden and market is currently producing goes into the earth oven: potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, corn on the cob, onions, zucchini, pumpkins. The bigger the party, the bigger the mountains of meat are: lambs, chickens, ribs of beef, sausages, everything is allowed and desired and is laid out on a large wooden board near the smoking hole in the ground so that it is ready to hand in good time – because later it will be about Seconds.
A little breeze could ruin everything
The pile of wood collapses more and more, the stones glow, and Eduardo alone decides when the right temperature is reached to get the hob ready. With long shovels he and his helpers then distribute the hot stones evenly in the hole in the ground and remove the excess embers. Only the stones serve as a source of heat, additional embers would overheat everything. The men run in sweat, the sun is burning from above, the stones do it with a temperature of three hundred degrees from below. They are working as fast as they can now. Eduardo wets the Nalca leaves with water at lightning speed and places them close together on the hot stones. In no time at all, the brothers and uncles place the meat and the aunts and sisters place the vegetables on it. The order does not matter, the main thing is that it goes quickly. Every move is perfect, there is no time for agreements. As soon as the colorful sea of food lies on the green leaf bed, nimble hands cover everything with more Nalca leaves and sliced potato sacks. Then Eduardo and the men bury the whole thing in no time with earth and press it down. A little breeze and the embers could ignite again, which must be prevented. Now finally the puffing helpers can wipe off their sweat and lift their caps.
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