#escudella

People from Sant Salvador de Toló (small village in the High Pyrenees, Catalonia) celebrating their town's traditional "guixa" meal, as part of the Carnival holidays. Video posted by Associació La Campaneta.

We have talked before about how communal meals are a common element in Catalan traditional festivities. This is another case.

In many towns around Catalonia, during Carnival week they host "escudellades" (meeting to make and eat escudella soup). A variant of this is what you see in the video. In some villages of the Pallars area, such as Salvador de Toló and Isona, on Tuesday of Carnival week there is the tradition of all the town coming together to make a "guixa". The "guixa" is a local soup recipe (similar to escudella) that is made with broth, noodles, pork, chickpeas, pumpkin, rice, and beans.

The ingredients for the "guixa" are gathered on the previous Saturday, when a float parades through the town with all the children dressed up in their Carnival costumes, stopping in every house to ask for some ingredients. People in the houses contribute by donating some of the ingredients or some money that will be used to buy ingredients that are missing or other expenses caused by the party.

As with any celebration that happens as part of Carnival week, the point is to have fun, joke around, and be satirical about power. In the video, you can see some people dressed up as Guardia Civil (Spanish military police) and as members of Catholic religious orders, the people that during the rest of the year you're "not supposed" to make fun of. But, as we say in Catalan, per Carnaval tot s'hi val: for Carnival everything is allowed.

No hi ha res millor per passar el fred i celebrar Nadal que un bon plat d'escudella i carn d'olla!  Coneixes la recepta? 👉http://ow.ly/8sR430n1FjR Què vagi de gust!!

Ingredients:

- Two or three medium sized potatoes

- A jar of chickpeas (about 250g I think)

- Half a cabbage and 3 carrots

- A bone of beef and a ham bone

- 1/4 chicken and a decently sized piece of beef

-  A black botifarra (catalan sausage) and about 200g of non-smoked bacon

- 400g soup noodles (Galets, Tiburones, or whatever the heck you can find)

- One or two meatballs (made with ground meat, egg, garlic and parsley) - [Personally I skip this ingredient because: 1) I’m weird and don’t like it much, 2) preparing them it’s too much of a hassle]

- There’s those awesome “Soup preparation pack of veggies” that include celery, turnip and leek. Those are golden. And adding onion is also a good choice.

Preparation:

- Soak the chickpeas overnight if necessary (if you buy them dried, that’s it)

- Put the bones and all the meat except the botifarra  in a big ass pot. Add water up to three quartes of the pot’s capacity. Put it at maximum heat.

- Once it starts to boil, defoam the top layer to get rid of the excess of fat (otherwise the flavour is too strong and might upset your stomach). Lower the temperature and let it boil for about two hours.

- Add all the vegetables (let the potatoes whole, just peeled). Let it boil for another hour. If the liquid level goes down too much, add some more water.

- *At this point, if you really want to, you can use that time to prepare the meatballs (pilota).*

- At this point some people retire the meat and vegetables from the pot and put them already in serving trays, and others let it all in the pot and keep adding more and more ingredients like mad. Your choice. However, you’ll have to retire everything solid at the end, so you aren’t really skipping work.

- Put the botifarra in the pot, and the pasta (some people might opt to boil the pasta in a separate pot). If you have them, this is the moment to add the meatballs/pilota as well. It will need another 15-20 minutes of boiling. 

- Once this is all done, it’s time to put all the meat in one serving tray and all the vegetables in other. Only the soup (wiht the pasta, usually) should remain in the pot. If you chose to boil the pasta separately, add them to the soup once it’s been cleaned of solids.

- All done, at last! Now you just have to bring it to the table.

Alright, so like I said at the beginning, there’s different ways to eat this:

A) Eat everything separately: first the soup, then the meat, then the vegetables. Or any order you want. This is called Escudella i carn d’olla (escudella and pot meat)

B) Eat the soup, and then the meat and vegetables all together. (A variant of the previous).

C) Eat it all together, putting meat and veggies into the soup. This is my favourite way of eating it and it’s called Escudella barrejada (mixed escudella).

I'm a fan!

For a few years now, ramen (Japanese noodle soup) has taken over Barcelona (Catalonia's capital city). It's a very good soup, I have liked it ever since I first tried it, precisely because it reminded me of our escudella (Catalan noodle soup that can go with different kinds of meat, vegetables, and chickpeas).

Now, the chef Jordi Vilà has created the first escudella to take away, a "street escudella". The chef says he will still cook it the traditional way that our mothers and grandmothers have always done, but with a modern take-away format, served in a biodegradable pot. It's sold in his shop Va de Cuina (carrer Comte Borrell, 54, Barcelona).

The broth brews for more than 15 hours, with chicken, pork, lard (all meat used is ecological), cabbage, chickpeas, turnip, parsnip, carrot, potato, onion, and —of course!— pilota (a delicious kind of meatball made of mixed minced meat and parsley). An individual ration (400 ml) costs 7.73€, and a big pot of 700 ml costs 12.80€, not bad at all for Barcelona prices.

Cooking sopa de galets. Video by dailycatalan on Instagram. You can find the recipe in English in the link.

Some people stuff the galet itself like in the video, other people have these meatballs mixed in the soup with the galets.

Escudella, a popular winter soup from Catalan cuisine.

Source: Visit Andorra:

In winter, escudella is one of the most traditional Andorran dishes. It is a Catalan stew made from seasonal vegetables, meats and local sausages.

In the olden days, escudella was served either with the broth and vegetables first and then the meat, or all together. It was an everyday dish that was often prepared with whatever could be found in the pantry. In times when supplies were scarce it was made with rice, vegetables and hardly any meat. But on important occasions and major celebrations they would add more flavourful cuts of meat like bacon or homemade sausage, pieces of ham, chicken or lamb, and cooked pasta shells.

This escudella with pasta shells, meats and more vegetables is the version of it that traditionally we eat on Christmas Day, as we’ve posted before. The version in the photo above is how it can be eaten on an ordinary day.

Recipe under the cut.

On the festivity of Sant Antoni Abat (Saint Anthony), in Andorra it’s traditional to make escudella (a traditional Catalan soup) and serve it to the whole neighbourhood or town. Despite the winter cold, people gather to celebrate the day with a bowl of hot soup.

Community meals are often a central element in Catalan festivities. In the Catalan language, a community gathering to eat a meal together is named the dish+ada (for example, a festivity to eat calçots is a calçotada, one to eat xató is a xatonada, one to eat botifarra is a botifarrada, to drink hot chocolate it’s a xocolatada, etc), so this celebration is called an escudellada, in this case the escudellada de Sant Antoni.

Similar events to Andorra’s escudellades are done in parts of Catalonia’s Pyrenee region, the biggest of which is the calderada in la Seu d’Urgell, also on the day of Sant Antoni.

Soup called escudella i carn d’olla in Catalonia and putxero i pilotes or caldo i pilotes in the Valencian Country.