19
We return to Pelayo and advance a few
years until the early 70. In the kitchen of
the restaurant comes Fernando Martín,
who later became one of the most Asturian cuisine revered chefs. He recovered
and adapted the cachopo recipe. What it
was served at the table weighed 1.5 kilograms, was stuffed with prosciutto, ham,
cheese and asparagus, and served with a
IN 1971, THE BOOK TYPICAL
DISHES FROM ASTURIAS
INCLUDES A CACHOPO’S RECIPE
FOR THE FIRST TIME
sauce made of chicken and rabbit. Those
who tasted that pottage say that was spectacular. It did not take too long to become known for its size. And so was as the
cachopo was introduced in contemporary
restoration. The comparison is readymade:
Pelayo in where the reconquest of Asturian cooking began.
Pedro Morán, Casa Gerardo’s chef and president of the Association for Promoting
the Asturian cuisine, says that his restaurant started offering cachopo in 1975 “stuffed with ham and cheese, and a large size
to share.” Back in the seventies the plate
was no more a single serving. And, furthermore, it was a high class cuisine proposal, what we can see by looking at the
menus of that time, where it costs the same eating a cachopo than best fish.
And the recipe starts to become popular,
appearing in cookbooks. In 1971 María
Luisa García publishes Typical dishes from
Asturias, and includes a cachopo recipe,
described as a “very thin and elongated”
and stuffed with ham, asparagus, mushrooms and bell pepper steaks. No cheese. A few years later, in 1981, Magdalena
Alperi mentioned cachopo in The Asturian cuisine guide: “It is a very popular dish
in Asturias in recent years. It began to be
served in the popular Oviedo’s restaurant
Pelayo but had already found its place in
Oviedo, Asturias and elsewhere”.
There wre a some years where cachopo
was still present in the Asturian cuisine,
but without highlighting. There are small booms as the one described by Pedro
Suárez, Casa Pedro owner, which has been
open since 29 years ago in Oviedo. “In the
late nineties business started to fail and
it occurred to me to cook the largest and
with more chese cachopo.” That corporate
decision was a success and the popularity
of the recipe led him to serve up to 200 cachopos a week. “And there was a few years
of downturn, but now, for two or three
years ago, I see that many tourists come
out to eat cachopo”.
At what point is the cachopo?
We have already read earlier in this report
the case of a restaurant and a butcher who
have experienced firsthand the cachopo
boom . The question is why now?
The sage Paco Ignacio Taibo I, in 1981, in
his Breviario de la fabada, accu rately described that “the fabada needed the union
of circumstances such as prosperity, the
bourgeois spirit, the possibility of a bed for
a nap and the assurance that life is protected within the four walls.” Economic and
social situation that occurred in Asturias
in the early years of the twentieth century.
The fabada was consolidated as well as a
typical regional dish thanks to the emer-
CA
CHO
CACHOPO IS THE ADAPTATION
OF OUR MICRO-ECONOMIES
TO OUR DINNING OUT
HABITS
gence of the bourgeoisie. In cachopo has
happened exactly the opposite: it became
popular, it was consolidated in gastronomy
at the dawn of an economic crisis in which
we are immersed, in which restoration
habits have changed. It collects what customers of eateries, cider and restaurants
now claim: it is cheap, has a good value,
with a considerable size and promotes social interaction among people. The dish
has expanded and few restaurant menus
can resist it. Cachopo as adapting our micro-economies to our dinning out habits
Méndez Riestra includes another factor