organpg The Lusciousness of a Long-Simmered Chicken Stew

How did this Ecuadorean stew, so lush and rich, earn the name “seco,” which in Spanish means “dry”? One theory traces the usage to the early 20th century, when Englishmen working the arid oil fields of Santa Elena, a province on the Pacific Coast, wanted to skip the customary first course of an Ecuadorean meal, soup, and go straight to the second: stew. The locals turned their request for “second” into “seco,” and it stuck.

But the dish existed before the British arrived. And “seco” might as well describe how it is made, cooked down until the liquid nearly disappears and what’s left is a thick velvet that settles in, lining your bones, sealing out the world’s chill.

Recipe: Seco de Pollo (Ecuadorian-Style Chicken Stew)

If language is a series of drifts and echoes, borrowings and migrations, so is food. For Kiera Wright-Ruiz, whose father was born in Ecuador,66br casino seco is a cultural inheritance. But her parents separated when she was 5, and he eventually faded to the fringes of her life. She was left with only a vague sense of where he came from, beyond the memory of a bedtime story about the Andean condor, the sky’s largest predator, riding the winds for a hundred miles without ever flapping its wings.

As Wright-Ruiz chronicles in her new cookbook, “My (Half) Latinx Kitchen: Half Recipes, Half Stories, All Latin American,” as a child she was shuttled among homes and spent time in foster care. She felt little connection to her ancestors. (Her mother, an orphan from Seoul raised by white parents in rural Pennsylvania, was more familiar with scrapple than mandu.) But she loved eating seco de pollo, especially at her grandparents’ house in Florida, where her Mexican grandmother cooked her Ecuadorean husband’s favorite dishes with Telemundo always on in the background.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

After disguising their theft by spreading the money between several cryptocurrency exchanges and mixing services, the authorities said, the men went on their spending spree.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.organpg