Chanfaina

Chanfaina is a traditional offal-and-blood stew of the Argentine northwest, a Creole-Andean dish with roots in Spanish medieval cooking and pre-Columbian indigenous traditions. It is made by simmering lamb or chicken giblets (liver, heart, gizzard) with onion, garlic, cumin and paprika, then thickening the stew with bread and fresh blood, producing a dark, intensely savoury, iron-rich dish. It is a peasant dish, born of the necessity to waste nothing from a slaughtered animal, and it belongs to the same family as the French civet, the Spanish chanfaina and the British black pudding. Eaten with bread or rice in Salta, Tucumán and Catamarca, it is one of the most ancient food traditions still alive in Argentina.

A dark, dense, iron-rich stew of tender giblets in a glossy blood-and-bread sauce, the cumin and paprika warm, the flavour deep and primal. Eaten with bread to soak it up, a taste of the old highlands.

The technique is a giblet braise thickened with blood and bread. Giblets (liver, heart, gizzard) are cleaned and simmered in water until tender, then cut into pieces. Onion and garlic are fried, cumin and paprika added, the giblets and their cooking liquid returned, and the stew simmered. Stale bread is torn and stirred in to thicken, and fresh blood is added at the end, cooking gently for 5 minutes until it sets into a dark, glossy sauce. The blood must be fresh and stirred continuously as it cooks to prevent clotting into lumps. The bread and blood together give the characteristic dark, dense, glossy texture, and the iron-rich flavour is unmistakable.