Jigote: a Cuban dish that you must taste…

Some readers have asked us to dedicate some post to Cuban food. To do this, we asked one of our collaborators of Cuban ancestry to do us the favor of sharing a recipe with us. For the above, he called the big guns and his grand mother, Doña Olga Hernández, shared with us an old family recipe, from Santiago de Cuba, with a slightly strange name: Jigote.

The ingredients to prepare the jigote are:

• 1 medium hen 
• 4 boiled eggs
  1 or 2 sprigs of parsley
  2 liters of water
  1 or 2 coriander leaf
  1/8 teaspoon of sweet pepper
  1 minced sweet pepper
  1 teaspoon of salt (well-filled)
  2 or 3 crushed garlic cloves
  2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil
  Roasted oregano to your taste

Preparation:

1. Place the already cleaned and washed hen  to cook in boiling water with oregano and pepper. Cook until a broth.
2. When the hen its cooked and the broth ready, remove and bone it, separating the breast and leaving it inside the broth to maintain a spongy texture.
3. In a separate pan put the tablespoons of oil to fry. Pre-heat the oil a little and then add the chopped sweet pepper, along with the crushed garlic cloves, and the cut parsley.
4. Fry for a couple of minutes and remove from the fire.
5. Remove the breast from the broth and strain the chicken broth, placing it back in the fire.
6.  Add the fried contents —sofrito— we had reserved in the pan, into the broth. We also add the cilantro leaf and salt to your taste.
7. Finally add the meat of the breast well chopped or grounded. Let cook for about ten – fifteen minutes watching the level of the broth to finally we remove from the fire.
8. Serve the Jigote soup adding to the dish pieces of toasted or fried bread and the  hard-boiled eggs chopped.

There are many differences between the culinary traditions of Santiago de Cuba, —Cuba in general— and Havana. Although there is a common history, the eastern Cuba regions have received a greater influence from the Caribbean, due to the smuggling days of pirates, making their cuisine peculiar and unique, enriched by centuries of immigration from neighboring islands  such as Dominicana and Haiti, before the Revolution.

Doña Olga Hernandez is an 84 year old mom, grandmother, great grandmother and AMAZING cook!

The Yucatan Times
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