Gallina Pinta Sonorense

Gallina pinta is from Sonora. The northwest. Cattle country, wheat country, the country of mesquite fires and flour tortillas the size of a wagon wheel. There is no chicken in this stew. The name refers to the spotted appearance of the pinto beans floating in the red broth, the pinta in the pot looks like a speckled hen. Sonorense humor is dry like the desert.

The meat is beef, not pork, because Sonora is a beef state. Shank for the marrow and the collagen, oxtail for the depth. The beans are pinto, not black, because we are in the noroeste, not the south. The chile is Anaheim, sometimes called chile California or chile colorado del norte, mild and sweet and red, the chile that grows along the Rio Sonora and the Rio Yaqui. Toast it, soak it, blend it, fry it in lard. Without those four steps the broth tastes like soaked chile water and you will wonder why yours does not taste like the pot at your tia's house in Hermosillo.

The chiltepin is the signature. A wild bird-pepper that grows in the Sonoran sierras and is harvested by hand, families in towns like Baviacora and San Pedro climb the hills every fall to pick them off the bushes. It is small, round, and serious. Ten of them in a pot of stew is plenty. Defenders of the chiltepin will tell you no other chile can replace it, and they are right. The flavor is grassy, sharp, and clean, with a heat that arrives late and leaves quickly.

My mother did not make gallina pinta. She was from Jalisco. I learned this dish from a senora named Dona Eulalia in El Recodo, a ranch town outside Ures, who served it to me out of an olla de peltre on a Saturday morning with sobaqueras she had pressed across her forearm an hour before. She told me the chile must come from the Rio Sonora and the chiltepin must come from her cousin's land, and that everything else is negotiable. I wrote it down. Cada estado, su propia cocina.