With Jason Grow
“When the Posole came out, it was Christmas time.”
An ardent, even obsessive cook, Jason Grow works as a professional portrait photographer to keep masa harina in the cupboard. He recently spent time teaching me how to make Posole, pork and hominy stew, which we video taped for the paper.
Jason Grow, lives with his wife and three daughters in Gloucester, far from the dry landscapes of California and New Mexico where he grew up making homemade tortillas on a “behomoth” of an old wooden tortilla press. For Jason, even on Cape Ann, a big pot of Posole on the stove, the kitchen smelling like chile and cumin, still means cold weather and Christmas. “It’s the quintessential winter comfort stew if you’ve got New Mexico in your soul,” he said.
Somehow, ancient Mesoamericans understood that corn needed to be treated with lime, or calcium hydroxide, a process called nixtamalization, for it to be a nutritious dinner staple, ritualistic or not. With burned native plants or burned mussel shells, Aztecs treated corn to make hominy, whole treated corn kernels, and its dried, ground form, masa harina. (Masa de maize is dough made from freshly ground hominy.) Nixtamalization makes available the free niacin that untreated maize lacks, along with essential amino acids, calcium, and possibly B vitamins. Cultures that inherited the corn stalk without the nixtamalization knowledge, like the American south, suffered from nutrient deficient diseases like Pellagra.
The white hominy pearls give Posole its luscious toothsome character, but a background of roasted chiles sends this dish squarely to the chile stands of Hatch, New Mexico, chile capitol of the world. This is a meal that reminds you of the culinary magic of chiles, their ability to expand taste in every direction, starting at hot, pointing to smokey, roasted, bright, sweet, and hot all over again.
Although tamed here by the hominy and pork, the complex palette of roasted chilis in posole is both fresh and profound; it collects the elements into a unique and deeply pleasurable taste that makes Posole’s ritual-worthy qualities - for Christmas or anything else - absolute.
