Arroz con Guandú y Coco

Panama's Christmas rice: rice simmered with fresh pigeon peas, coconut milk, and culantro, on every table from Nochebuena to New Year beside ham and roast pork

Origin: Colón, Panama City & the Isthmus, Panama

From the journey of Pigeon Pea.

In Panama the pigeon pea is guandú, and arroz con guandú is the rice of Christmas. The timing is agricultural as much as religious. The plant takes some 250 days to bear, so a crop sown in April is ready to pick in December, and the fresh green peas come to market just as families prepare for Nochebuena. From Christmas Eve to New Year, arroz con guandú is served at nearly every table beside ham, roast pork, and tamales. On the Caribbean coast around Colón it is cooked with coconut. Fresh coconut is grated and squeezed for its milk, and the rice and peas are simmered in it with onion, sweet pepper, and culantro, the broad, serrated herb that Panamanians use in place of coriander. The coconut version belongs to the Afro-Panamanian kitchen of the Atlantic side, whose cooks descend both from the enslaved Africans of the colonial era and from the Antillean workers who came to build the railway and the canal.

Ingredients

  • 400 g fresh or frozen green pigeon peas (guandú)
  • 3 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 0.5 sweet pepper (ají dulce or red bell pepper), finely chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 4 culantro leaves, finely chopped (or 2 tbsp coriander)
  • 400 g long-grain white rice, rinsed
  • 400 ml coconut milk, ideally fresh
  • 300 ml water, plus the cooking water from the peas
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 1 tsp sugar (optional)

Method

  1. Simmer the pigeon peas in salted water for 20 minutes, until just tender. Drain, keeping 200 ml of the cooking water.
  2. Heat the oil in a heavy pot and fry the onion and sweet pepper until soft. Add the garlic and half the culantro and cook for a minute.
  3. Add the peas, the rice, the coconut milk, the water and reserved cooking water, the salt, and the sugar, and bring to the boil.
  4. Boil uncovered until the liquid has sunk just below the rice, then turn the heat to its lowest, cover tightly, and cook for 20 minutes until tender.
  5. Fluff with a fork, scatter over the remaining culantro, and serve.

Notes

Without coconut milk, using water or chicken stock and a little tomato paste, this is the everyday arroz con guandú of the interior. To make coconut milk from fresh coconut, blend grated coconut flesh with hot water and squeeze through a cloth.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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