A walk on the southern side: aji de gallina

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Don’t worry about the photo, I’ve got a bunch of them and one is bound to be focused better.

This is not aji de gallina as my favorite Peruvian used to make it for us. This is not even as genuine an effort as I could make in the United States. This is aji de gallina the way a person can make it in Italy if she is fortunate enough to have Texan friends who carry chilli peppers to her in their luggage. Someone who lives in Torino, Milano, Roma, and maybe other big, international cities of Italy may be able to buy chillis of all types– perhaps even the gorgeous yellow aji amarillo pepper. People who live in charming backwaters cannot.

The real thing is pink and feminine and complex and delicious with a fire that warms the tongue and never burns it. My Italian version is different every time I make it depending on which peppers I use and the color is not the pastel the aji pepper gives, but a robust autumny and coppery red.

I like a change once in a while. I adore cooking, writing about and eating Italian food, but inside lurks that American girl who always asked “Where is Chinatown in this city?” whenever she went to a new place. For a summer garden lunch in July, I indulged that lurker and Barb Skinner, who came to lunch, must have felt the same, because she asked me to post this recipe. It has taken all this time to have the occasion to make it again so I could photograph it. And here it is.

Aji de Gallina

Serves about 6

1 4-pound chicken, an old hen if you can buy one
4 slices of plain white bread without crusts
1/2 cup of oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 teaspoons minced garlic
3-6 dried chili peppers soaked in boiling chicken broth to soften them, the amount depending on how hot they are and how spicy you want your aji to be
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1/2 pound (200 g) chopped walnuts or other nutmeats
4 ounces (100 g) grated Parmesan cheese
about ½ liter of milk
6 yellow potatoes, cooked and halved
Black olives and hardboiled eggs, for garnish
Boiled rice

Cook the chicken by simmering in a tall pot with a carrot, an onion, a leg of celery, salt and water to cover it all. If it is a young chicken it won’t take very long, but if it is a hen you should leave it to cook by itself for 2 –4 hours, or until it is tender. Remove the chicken from the pot keeping the broth. Remove the meat from the bone and skin and cut into pieces.

Soak the chilis in the chicken broth. Soak the bread in milk to cover.

Heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the onion, garlic and softened chili peppers until golden. Use a stick blender or a food processor to make this into a smooth paste. Add the milk-soaked bread. Add enough of the chili-broth to make a cream. Cook over low heat, stirring, for 10 minutes and then add the chopped nuts, grated cheese and cut chicken. Simmer, stirring, adding more milk as necessary to make the sauce the consistency of heavy cream. Taste and correct for salt.

Using bread to thicken a sauce means that it can become very thick and sticky, so watch and stir carefully toward the end of the cooking.

Arrange chunks of cooked potato on a platter, then pile rice over that. Pour the aji over the rice and garnish with olives and wedges of boiled egg.

Now I know you are thinking you don’t really need to use both potatoes and rice under this aji. You’re wrong. It was my first occasion eating this that broke through what I thought I knew about food and made me want to learn and go to culinary school. Until I ate this, I thought rice and potatoes didn’t have much flavor. Eaten together they reveal what there is of the other and you discover that they in truth have strong flavors. It was that watershed experience that helped me understand that most good ingredients are perfect within themselves and properly respected can create art in the mouth without smothering sauces and piling on multiple flavors. It was not much of a leap to the day when eg made fun of me for saying a cucumber is sugary. To me it is, but she’ll still laugh her head off if you say it.