Cooking With

Frankie Rose

 

This year Frankie Rose is touring with her new solo album Herein Wild, but in 2014 she’ll be putting out a record with her new band, Beverly. The touring life is quite convenient for Miss Rose, as she says she isn’t much of a foodie – until we move on to the Mexican cooking traditions that run through her family, that is. Then she starts waxing lyrical about making piles of pork tamales for Christmas with her family, eating juicy carnitas and whacking a piñata for every childhood birthday she can remember.

 

by Zofia Ciechowska, image by Carlijn Potma, and photos shot by Christopher Schreck in Brooklyn

 

I’ll make a huge pot of soup in the winter and live off it for a week. The one I make most often is pozole, which is a hearty Mexican soup. The recipe has been passed down in my family from my Mexican grandmother. We eat pozole on special holidays, like New Year’s. It’s made with beef sweetbreads, ancho chillies and hominy. Mexican cooking in my family is like storytelling or folklore, I learned it from my mother and she learned it from hers. We never write it down, it’s a skill that is passed down from generation to generation.

 

 
 

Frankie Rose’s Pozole

 

Ingredients

 110g ancho chillies, deseeded
1 tin white hominy, drained and rinsed
1.4kg beef sweetbreads
8 cloves of garlic
3 bay leaves
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbsp Mexican oregano
salt and pepper 

Garnish

1/2 of a small white cabbage, thinly sliced
1 bunch of coriander
1/2 white onion, chopped
2 avocados, sliced
4 limes, quartered
10 red radishes, slice
6 tortillas 

 

How to make Frankie Rose’s Pozole:

• In a pot, lightly roast your chilli pods. When they are soft, put them in a pot with 3 cups of boiling water and cover for 15-20 mins.

•In a separate pot, bring another 5.5 litres of water to the boil.

• In a deep frying pan, heat some olive oil and add the salted pork sweetbreads and fry until brown. Towards the end, add 4 cloves of chopped garlic and stir well.

• Add the meat to the large pot of boiling water. Add the hominy, bay leaves, cumin, oregano and salt to taste. Simmer and cook for a further 15 minutes.

• In a blender, mix the chillies, 2.5 cups of the liquid they were in, a teaspoon of salt and 4 cloves of garlic. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

• Now add the red sauce to the stockpot. Keep the pot partially covered and let it cook on a low heat for about 3 hours, or until the pork is very tender. Add salt and pepper to taste. The soup should be quite thin when it’s finished; you may need to add more water as it cooks.

• Serve your pozole in a bowl, garnished with your veggies and with some toasted tortillas.

 

Frankie Rose returns to OT301, Amsterdam on 18 December. This time around she’s supported by Beginners. The show is free for Subbacultcha! members.