A few days away from savoring a Canarian Sancocho… A local tradition at Easter

With our sights set on Easter that brings us this month of April, the countdown begins to return to enjoying that unique traditional cuisine for these dates and thinking that nowadays very little is cooked on a daily basis.

My mother begins to buy that salted fish, those fresh potatoes… She looked for palm pepper in the market and she let the tomatoes that they bring from their town ripen… suddenly several events began to take place that will lead us to enjoy various typical dishes in this traditional cuisine of ours.

Do you know what a mojotomate is? Tollo in sauce, fish onions, chickpea and spinach stew, sancocho or in desserts, torrijas, flour pancakes, pumpkin pancakes, banana pancakes, sweet potato pancakes, frangollo, roasted milk , sweet potato buns (La Palma), donuts… those dishes are essential in our cousin!

But today we are talking about the sancocho and its history.

At the end of the XIX century, the fish in our land was fished and sold what we needed every day, we did not have too much of it and we were unaware of fishing conservation techniques. But like any evolution, salting techniques began to appear. From there you begin to have knowledge to start the Sancocho.

In a few years this dish was introduced into the diet of Gran Canarians and they normally ate it when going to work in the morning. It was adapting to each zone of the island and to the agrarian wealth that each zone had; In the south it was more common to find this recipe with conger eel or grouper, potatoes or sweet potato and in the north it was more common with sea bass or grouper.

It is noted that this recipe appears from the hand of the Portuguese, when they arrived with their cod culture and here what they found was grouper, sea bass… they adapted their knowledge to the ingredients that we had here.

Now this recipe stays for the days of Easter, especially Good Friday: “Today it’s Canarian sancocho time!”

That’s what my mother says… the table is set and on it you find a gofio pellet, which normally has banana or sugar, desalted and boiled grouper, potatoes, sweet potatoes and not to mention the mojo (red or green, it doesn’t matter, but at home it was always red).

Do you dare to cook the Canarian sancocho?

Any typical recipe for these days in your family?