The regional table / Idaho
Basque Chorizo with Beans
The 1905 Boise city directory names a street called Spanish Town, lists a man named Uberuaga keeping furnished rooms on West Idaho, and contains the word Basque exactly zero times.
Boise is a Basque city that took a long time to be called one in print. Polk's Boise City Directory for 1905 is a plain commercial document — streets, names, trades — and it is more useful about this than any later account. Its list of streets and avenues includes an entry between Sixth Street and State Street that reads "SPANISH TOWN, south from 101 W Main." Under Furnished Rooms, among the Larsens and the Palatines and the Cosmopolitans, is "Uberuaga Joseph, 706½ W Idaho", and in the alphabetical pages he appears again as a keeper of furnished rooms. Search the whole volume for the word Basque and you get nothing. The trade is recorded, the street is recorded, the surname is recorded; the people are filed as Spanish or not filed at all.
By the time the Federal Writers' Project published Idaho: A Guide in Word and Picture in 1937, the omission had been corrected loudly: the guide calls the Basques of Boise "the largest, and by far the most significant, colony in Idaho", puts about 7,000 in the state and 1,500 in Boise itself, notes that "On Grove Street is their DeLamar Hotel, a hostelry popular with the colony", and describes the midsummer festival as a genuine Romeria "with Basque food, costumes, dances, and music". It never says what the food was. The word chorizo does not appear in that book once. For that you have to go to the houses themselves, and the Basque Museum and Cultural Center in Boise keeps the record of the one that is still standing: the Cyrus Jacobs house at 607 Grove Street, which the museum says "began being used as a Basque boardinghouse in 1910 and functioned in that capacity until 1969", first rented by the Galdos, Bicandi and Uberuaga families and finally bought by the Uberuagas in 1928 for two thousand dollars. No Boise Basque recipe from that period is reachable in any open archive, and none is invented here; the quantities below were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
White beans, not red. Alubias blancas or plain small white beans make a thinner, paler, more savoury broth than red beans do, and they let the sausage be the loudest thing in the bowl. Red beans fight it. This is the difference between a pot where the beans are the dish and a pot where the chorizo is.
The chorizos go in whole. Slicing sausage into a bean pot at the start gives you sixty cut faces leaking fat and paprika into the liquid, and by the end the coins are grey and spent. Left whole, a chorizo gives the pot its colour slowly through the casing and keeps most of its own texture. You take it out at the end still intact, and it still tastes of itself.
Split and seared at the end. Lift the poached sausages out, halve them the long way, and put the cut faces down in a dry hot pan for ninety seconds. The fat that is left inside renders against the metal, the cut face caramelises, and you get a browned, slightly bitter edge that two hours of simmering can never produce. This is a cook's decision, not an inherited rule, and it is worth making.
Nothing sour until the beans are soft. Acid keeps bean skins tough. Peppers, tomato, wine or vinegar all go in after the beans give way, off the heat, which is late enough to season and too late to set the skins.
