Albundigas and Mexican tortillas

Ever since I got my new camera, it's been raining. Yesterday I poured 11 mm out of the rain gauge, and this morning 20 more millimeters had accumulated in there. So that's 31 mm since Saturday — about 1¼ inches. That's a lot for mid-August.

It's soup weather, with temperatures in the 60s. In winter we'd pay good money for weather this "nice" — it's much colder in January, but looking out the window you wouldn't be able to see much difference. This is August, pour l'amour de Dieu ! Oh yeah, there are leaves on the trees, which there aren't in January, but it's that same leaden gray sky.

Sopa de albóndigas
on a chilly August day in the Loire Valley

So when nature gives you soup weather, what do you do? You make soup. After all, the temperature in the house is just 19ºC (that's 66ºF) and no, we don't have air conditioning. It's actually nice to have a pot of soup bubbling on the stove.

A few days ago, I was looking up something up in the Larousse Gastronomique (I do that all the time) — oh yeah, I was looking up andouillette. I opened the book and the first word that jumped out at me was albundigas. What? It's a word I know better with the spelling albóndigas, as in sopa de albóndigas, Mexican meatball soup. I went to the store the next morning and bought meat to make the meatballs.

Consulting the Larousse Gastronomique

It's strange what you find in the Larousse Gastronomique. It would never have occurred to me to look for albóndigas soup in the classic French cookbook, which was first published in 1938, I believe, and updated in 1967 (that's the edition I have).

The recipe looks pretty good. It says to use 250 grams (about half a pound) of beef, veal, or pork fillet. Sauté some onions and garlic, sprinkle on some flour as a thickener, and then grind the meat and mix it with the cooked onions and garlic. When you grind the meat, also run three green peppers (it says piments verts), some cilantro or marjoram, some thyme, and some breadcrumbs through the meat grinder and mix all that in too. Add an egg and a little broth to moisten the stuffing and put it in a pastry bag.

Squeeze out little dumplings of the meat stuffing, cutting them off with a knife and dropping them into boiling consommé to cook. The Larousse calls them quenelles and says to poach them in the consommé until they are done. Then, at the last minute, peel, seed, and chop three fresh tomatoes, cook them lightly in a pan with butter, and add them to the soup with the meat quenelles. That sounds like a mild but refined French version of albóndigas soup (unless those piments verts are really hot peppers).

Brawley, California — 17 February 2001

I know sopa de albóndigas from the time I spent down in the desert in Southern California, south of Palm Springs, visiting friends. There is a restaurant in the town of Brawley, in the Imperial Valley south of the Salton Sea, called Brownie's Diner. It's only a few dozen miles from the Mexican border, and a lot of the people who live and work in Brawley, El Centro, and the other Imperial Valley towns are Mexicans who work in the fields and local businesses.

Brownie's Diner in Brawley, California — 17 February 2002.
No, I don't know the people in the picture, and we were
not riding motorcycles that day. But a lot of people were.

I remember the albóndigas soup at Brownie's as a light broth with some tomato in it but full of chunks of carrots, onions, and celery along with the delicious meatballs. I can't remember if the meatballs were made with rice or not — that seems to be the classic style — or if they included mint leaves among the herbs that flavored them — that seems to be classic too. Here's a recipe for sopa de albóndigas that is supposed to be the real thing.

Making masa harina tortillas with the tortilla press

So I made albóndigas soup yesterday and Walt made corn tortillas. We have a tortilla press, thanks to our friends Chris and Tony, who hauled it to Paris from San Francisco last April. You know these are good friends when they are willing to carry something so heavy in their bags all the way across a continent and an ocean. Merci, merci, merci. Or should I say grácias, grácias, grácias?

Authentic corn tortillas

For the albóndigas I used about 600 grams of lean beef stew meat and 200 grams of pork lardons — plain (nature), not salted or smoked — which is chunks of pork side meat. I flavored the meatballs with fresh oregano and parsley, some chili powder, a good pinch of cumin, and of course onions and garlic. I didn't put rice in them, but breadcrumbs, and a couple of eggs.

Albóndigas, or Mexican-style meatballs

Making the broth for the soup was an exercise in cleaning out the freezer. I had a pint of plain chicken stock, a pint of water I had cooked swiss chard in, a pint some something labeled "spinach broth," and a pint of liquid I squeezed out of roasted zucchini pulp. I added a can of chopped tomatoes and their juice, and some chili powder, cumin, and hot paprika. That made a big pot of broth to poach the meatballs in.

Broth, tomatoes, vegetables, and meatballs

Walt says what I made resembled couscous broth more than the sopa de albóndigas he remembers. I did put in more tomato than was called for in the recipes, but I had a whole big can and wanted to use all of it. I also put in a squirt of the North African hot red-pepper paste called harissa. The vegetables are carrots, onions, zucchini, green beans, and swiss chard.

Because it resembles couscous broth, today we're going to eat some more of it but with couscous grain instead of tortillas. And we took a couple of North African merguez (lamb) sausages out of the freezer to grill and serve with it.