Guisado de Pollo

There’s a Mexican chicken stew made by three generations of my family and countless more in the Mexican family of the woman who taught us how to cook it when we lived in Saltillo. I have several versions; that of my adopted Abuela; the one taught to my mother by Maria, my abuela’s daughter; the version cooked by my mother when we returned to the UK with what she had; and the one I cook now with what I have. My daughter has her own version. No other Guisado de Pollo exists like that of my Abuela or Maria. There are none like mine, my mother’s or my daughter’s. All of these chicken stews represent a particular culture at a particular time and their traditions are deeply personal and arbitrary because of this.

I was given a guitarrón when I started at the Colegio Saltillense in Saltillo. Mine had a child-sized fat cedarwood body, a shorter neck, and thin metal strings instead of the (more usual) combination of thicker nylon and steel ones. Tiny pink and yellow pompoms were woven into its bridge. It was not dissimilar in style to the exquisite guitarróns handmade by artisans in the small city of Paracho de Verduzco in Michoacán, high in the Sierra Madres. Despite its miniaturisation, I could barely be seen behind its belly.

Some months after my own journey back to the UK, the guitarrón returned inside a shipping crate. In the meantime, I had been using an ugly brown guitar belonging to my comprehensive’s music department, but its wider nylon strings felt like a blunt-edged tool. I gave up playing.

As a kid, I was told to shred the chicken until its strands were as ‘fine as the strings of a guitar’. Abuela told me this, and I remember it every time I make guisado de Pollo- or Mexican chicken as it has come to be known by my family. I’m not sure which kind of guitar strings she meant, though. In Mexico, western-style guitars exist alongside the Vihuela, Bajo Quinto, and Requinto. The guitarrón of mariachi has heavy-gauge strings, with the high three being nylon and wound metal confined to the lower three. There is no other sound like it. This is a guitar with a deep belly and a large appetite for joy, defiance, melancholia and passion, so much so that there is usually only one of its kind in a mariachi band. Its backbone is both indigenous and foreign. The Requinto is high and bright. My English guitar strings were soft and rounded. Its body was narrow.

I don’t shred my chicken anymore, but I still cook it on the bone like I was taught and serve it off (although I can be lazy about this). The picked-over bones are put back in the pot because the “skeleton flavours the flesh”: we’d covet the crevasses of the neck and spine whose bones had been stewed into softness and where flecks of chillies hid to catch you out. For the rest of his life, I fought my father for the bones; we’d think nothing of stealing them from each other’s plates. We’d hover. Things frequently got tetchy. My mother hated this one thing my father and I had in common.

Our old clay plates had gnawed edges, as did our water mugs. That was my fault. I had to buy new ones. I still have that old impulse but no longer have the implacable teeth of a child; you can see from the plate in the image that I have allowed myself just a few tiny bites. The gnawed edges are porous; their scent is a portal. This plate of stew tells of what is in me and what was — and is — in front of me.

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I was prompted to write this after watching GBBO’s Mexican episode, which was a racist mess from start to finish, causing hurt and humiliation. People feel wounded by it. There is a way of celebrating Mexican food culture, but this was not it. Mallika Basu has written an excellent rebuttal in her newsletter here.