Abruzzese Shepherd's Mutton Stew | Pecora alla Callara
Pecora alla callara is named after the pot, and that is the whole point of it. The callara is the wide copper cauldron the Abruzzese shepherds carried with them, hung over a wood fire on open ground, and the stew that takes its name is adult sheep cooked in it for hours with tomato, wine, hot chilli and wild herbs until the meat gives way.
Adult sheep, pecora rather than agnello, has a strong flavour and a great deal of connective tissue, and no quick method will tame either. Long wet cooking with acidity does both at once: the wine and the tomato break down the collagen and soften the ovine note that puts people off, while the chilli and the bay stand up to what remains instead of hiding it.
The method below follows the open fire original closely: the same vinegar blanch on older animals, the same rendered pork fat, the same very long simmer with almost nothing added.
Yield: 6 generous servings. Prep: 35 minutes. Blanch: 20 minutes. Cook: 3 hours 30 minutes. Rest: 30 minutes. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: secondo. Region: Abruzzo, the high plains of L'Aquila.
The Story
The dish belongs to the transumanza, the seasonal movement of flocks that shaped Abruzzo for two thousand years. Shepherds took their sheep down the drovers' roads, the tratturi, from the summer pastures of the Gran Sasso to the winter grazing of the Tavoliere in Puglia, and walked back up in spring. Everything they cooked with travelled on a mule, which is why one copper cauldron did all the work and the recipe has so few ingredients.
The meat came from the animals that had stopped earning their keep: ewes past breeding age, sheep too old to give good wool or milk. That is pecora, an animal of four or five years and often more, with dark dense muscle and a flavour nothing like spring lamb. Nobody chose it for tenderness, and the method grew up around the problem it presented.
You can still eat it as it was made. Villages across the province of L'Aquila hold summer sagre where a callara of a hundred litres sits over a wood fire from dawn, stirred with a wooden paddle by men who take it in shifts, and the stew is ladled into bowls with bread until it runs out. The tomato is a late arrival, added only in the nineteenth century: before that the sheep went in with wine, vinegar, lard and herbs alone.
Ingredients
For the mutton
Bone in mutton shoulder and leg, cut into large chunks, 4 lb (1.8 kg)
White wine vinegar, 1/2 cup (120 ml), for the blanch
Coarse sea salt, 1 tbsp (18 g), for the blanch
Bay leaves, 3, for the blanch
For the cooking fat and the soffritto
Lard, strutto, 2 oz (55 g)
Extra virgin olive oil, 3 tbsp (45 ml)
Yellow onion, large, sliced, 1
Garlic cloves, crushed, 4
For the braise
Dry red wine, 2 cups (480 ml)
Peeled plum tomatoes, crushed by hand, 28 oz (795 g)
Tomato paste, 1 tbsp (16 g)
Dried hot chilli peppers, peperoncino, split, 2
Rosemary sprigs, 2
Sage leaves, 6
Bay leaves, 2
Fine sea salt, 2 tsp (12 g)
Freshly ground black pepper, 1 tsp (2 g)
Hot water, 1 to 2 cups (240 to 480 ml), as needed
For finishing and serving
Flat leaf parsley, chopped, 3 tbsp (10 g)
Extra virgin olive oil, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Country bread, pane casareccio, 8 thick slices
Preparation
Step 1
Butcher and salt the meat. Ask for bone in shoulder and leg of adult sheep, cut into chunks of about 2 1/2 inches (6 cm) with the bones left in, since their marrow and collagen are most of the body the sauce will have. Trim the hard fat to a thin layer but leave the intramuscular fat and sinew. Salt lightly and rest 30 minutes.
Step 2
Blanch with vinegar. Cover the meat with cold water, add the vinegar, coarse salt and three bay leaves, and bring it slowly to a boil. Skim the grey foam, then boil 10 to 15 minutes. Drain, discard the water and bay, and rinse each piece under warm water. On an older animal this removes the compounds behind the sharpest part of the ovine smell. Dry on cloth: wet meat will not brown.
Step 3
Render the fat and cook the soffritto. Melt the lard with the olive oil in a heavy pot of at least 6 quarts (5.5 litres), copper if you have it and cast iron if you do not. The lard is not interchangeable with olive oil: pork fat carries the herbs and coats the mutton. Cook the onion and garlic gently 10 to 12 minutes until pale gold, then lift them out.
Step 4
Brown the mutton in batches. Raise the heat until the fat shimmers and lay in as many pieces as fit without touching, in three or four batches. Leave each batch alone 3 to 4 minutes a side and turn only once a deep crust has set. A crowded pot steams the meat instead. Return everything to the pot.
Step 5
Deglaze with the red wine. Pour it in all at once and scrape the base until everything stuck to it has lifted. Boil hard 4 to 5 minutes, until the raw alcohol smell has gone and the volume has dropped by a third. Unreduced wine leaves a sour metallic edge that simmering will not remove.
Step 6
Add the tomato and settle the simmer. Stir in the tomatoes, tomato paste, split chillies, rosemary, sage, bay, salt and pepper, with just enough hot water to bring the liquid two thirds of the way up the meat. Never cover it completely. Boil, then drop the heat to a lazy bubble every second or two, around 190F (88C), and set the lid ajar. Cook 3 to 3 1/2 hours, stirring from the bottom every 20 minutes.
Step 7
Test, skim and rest. It is ready when a fork twisted in the largest piece meets no resistance and the meat parts from the bone on its own: an old animal can take four hours. Lift the lid for the last 20 minutes if the sauce needs tightening. Off the heat, stand 30 minutes, skim the clear fat, taste for salt and heat, and stir in the parsley and raw olive oil.
Plating
At a sagra the callara is the serving vessel and there is no plating at all. At home the honest equivalent is a wide shallow bowl, warmed, with the pot brought to the table. Give each person two or three pieces with the bones still in them and spoon the sauce over rather than around. Serve it at about 150F (65C), hot enough that the fat stays liquid, since below that it sets and the sauce goes dull on the tongue.
Grill the bread over a flame or dry in a hot pan until marked and still soft inside, and lay a slice in the bowl. Bread is not a garnish here, it is the second half of the dish. Scatter the parsley last, a pinch per bowl, and no grated cheese, which fights the chilli. For a contorno, boiled bitter greens with oil and lemon, or plain roast potatoes.
Professional Technique
The callara is copper, and copper is what dictates how this stew is cooked. Copper conducts heat roughly twenty times better than stainless steel and five times better than cast iron, which over an uneven wood fire is an advantage and a trap at once. The advantage is that the whole base sits at one temperature, with no hot ring above the flame. The trap is that the base answers the fire instantly, so anything resting on it scorches within seconds. That is why the men at a sagra never stop working the wooden paddle across the bottom: a tomato stew with sugars in it and three hours to go will stick and burn on copper long before it would in iron, and burnt tomato taints the whole pot.
Copper also reacts with what is in it. Tomato, wine and vinegar are acidic enough to dissolve copper off a bare surface, which puts metal into the food and a metallic taste with it. The traditional callara is therefore stagnata, lined inside with tin, and tinning was a trade with its own travelling craftsmen, the stagnini, who recoated worn cauldrons village by village. A callara whose tin has worn through to the pink copper is retired, and modern copper pans are steel lined for the same reason.
The third technique is the acid, used twice. The vinegar in the blanching water works on the surface and strips out the branched chain fatty acids behind the characteristic smell of adult sheep, which is why the blanch is standard on pecora and pointless on lamb. The wine works from the inside over hours, its acidity lowering the temperature at which collagen converts to gelatin. The chilli and the bay are the counterweight: capsaicin and the eucalyptol in bay occupy the same part of the palate as the residual ovine note, so rather than masking it they crowd it. That is why a callara stew tastes of sheep without tasting rank.
Texture and Moisture Control
Everything here depends on collagen becoming gelatin, and that conversion has a temperature window rather than a finish line. It begins around 160F (71C) and runs fastest between 180F and 195F (82C and 90C). Hold the pot there and the connective tissue in an old ewe dissolves into the sauce over three hours, giving it a sticky body no reduction would produce. Let it boil and the fibres contract hard and squeeze out their water, leaving dry stringy meat in a thin liquid. Read the surface: a bubble every second or two is right, a steady churn is not.
The Maillard browning at the start is a flavour step, not a sealing step: nothing seals meat, the crust dissolves into the sauce within the first hour, and what it leaves behind are roasted aromatic compounds simmering cannot create.
Moisture is controlled by keeping the meat partly out of the liquid. With the top third of each piece above the surface and the lid ajar, that part cooks in steam while the sauce below concentrates, and evaporation keeps the pot off a boil. Add water hot, in small amounts, and only when the meat is exposed: a generous top up at hour two means a watery sauce at hour three.
The rest at the end finishes the stew. Off the heat the gelatin sets slightly and the meat reabsorbs liquid it gave up, so thirty minutes makes the pieces noticeably more succulent, and it lets the fat rise clear. Stop skimming while a thin film remains, because a completely defatted callara tastes lean and wrong.
Professional Mise en Place
This is a long unattended cook with two busy stretches, the blanch and the browning. Set it up so neither is interrupted.
Equipment and tools
Heavy pot of 6 quarts (5.5 litres) or more, lined copper or cast iron
Second large pot for the blanch, plus a colander
Long wooden spoon or paddle reaching the base of the pot
Slotted spoon, ladle for skimming, cloths for drying
Probe thermometer, to set the simmer the first few times
Prepared ahead
Meat blanched, rinsed and dried, up to 1 day ahead, kept cold
Onion sliced and garlic crushed, held separately on the day
Tomatoes crushed by hand into a bowl, never in a blender
Whole stew cooked 1 day ahead, which improves it
Kettle of hot water ready before the simmer begins
Service setup
Stew held at a bare simmer or reheated to 150F (65C)
Bowls warmed, since the stew loses temperature fast in a cold one
Bread sliced and grilled in the final ten minutes
Parsley chopped and raw olive oil measured, stirred in off the heat
Chef Tips
Order the meat a week ahead and say pecora, not agnello. Adult sheep is not a shelf product and a butcher will need notice, but it is what the dish is made of, and mature goat or castrato are closer to it than lamb. With lamb shoulder the recipe finishes in ninety minutes and tastes of nothing in particular.
Skip the blanch only if you know the animal. If the butcher says the sheep was under two years old and the meat is mild, believe him. Anything older goes through the vinegar water. Smell the raw meat: if it is strong in the kitchen, it will be stronger in the pot.
Cook it the day before you eat it. Every braise improves overnight but this one more than most, because the chilli heat spreads evenly through the sauce and the fat sets into a disc you can lift off whole.
Taste the chilli at the end rather than the beginning. Dried peperoncino varies enormously and three hours in liquid extracts a great deal of it, so two pods that seemed mild can finish the stew genuinely hot. Leave them whole so you can pull them out, and if it has gone too far, a spoonful of the skimmed fat dulls it faster than sugar.
Common Mistakes
Using lamb instead of adult sheep. The blanch, the three hour simmer and the chilli all exist to handle meat that lamb is not. Lamb shoulder overcooks to mush in the same pot and the stew loses the savoury depth the dish exists for.
Letting the pot boil. A rolling boil drives water out of the fibres faster than the collagen can turn to gelatin, so the meat comes out dry and stringy. Set the heat for a bubble every second or two.
Browning in one crowded batch. Filling the pot drops the temperature of the fat, so the meat releases its juices and steams instead of browning, and the roasted flavour that carries the stew never develops.
Cooking it in unlined copper. Tomato, wine and vinegar dissolve copper off a bare surface, which puts metal into the food. Use lined copper or cast iron.
Skipping the vinegar blanch on an old animal. It is the one step that reliably removes the sharpest part of the ovine smell, and no quantity of herbs, wine or chilli does the same job later.
Wine Pairing
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOC: The regional answer and the wine poured at every sagra where the cauldron is in use. Its dark plum fruit and soft ripe tannin have the grip to cut the lard and the gelatin in the sauce without drying the palate, and its acidity sits close to the tomato rather than fighting it.
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Colline Teramane DOCG: The Teramo hills version, with longer ageing and firmer tannic structure, for a stew cooked a day ahead and reduced hard, where that tannin holds its shape against concentrated fat instead of being swallowed by it.
Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo DOC: The same grape bled off early as a deep rosato, and a clever match for the chilli. Served at 54F (12C) its cool sour cherry acidity resets a palate that capsaicin has heated, which a structured red cannot do, and it still has the fruit weight for braised mutton.
Tintilia del Molise DOC Rosso: Molise is the other end of the drovers' roads and Tintilia grew on those uplands alongside the flocks. Dark, high in natural acidity, peppery and dried herb scented, its spiced austerity reads as an extension of the rosemary, bay and peperoncino in the pot.
Cesanese del Piglio DOCG: The Lazio red that handles chilli heat better than most central Italian bottles, thanks to moderate alcohol and fine grained tannin that does not amplify the burn, with a sour cherry and black pepper character that picks up the tomato and the split pods directly.
Storage & Reheating
This is one of the few dishes that is better the next day and better again the day after, so cook more than you need. Cool it uncovered within two hours, then refrigerate it in its sauce, sealed, for up to 4 days. Leave the fat layer in place while it is stored, because it seals the surface and keeps the meat from drying, and lift it off as a single disc before reheating.
It freezes well for up to 3 months, on the bone and covered in sauce, in portion sized containers rather than one block. Thaw it overnight in the refrigerator.
Reheat slowly in a covered pot over low heat, stirring from the base, and give it 25 to 30 minutes. Add a splash of hot water if the sauce set too thick overnight, which it will if the gelatin did its work. The meat is already cooked, so the only risk is drying it: never let it boil and never reheat it uncovered.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 6 servings, meat and sauce only and not counting the bread:
Calories: 610 kcal
Total Fat: 38 g
Saturated Fat: 15 g
Trans Fat: 0.6 g
Unsaturated Fat: 21 g
Cholesterol: 165 mg
Sodium: 720 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 12 g
Fiber: 3 g
Total Sugars: 7 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 50 g
Lactose: 0 g
Principal micronutrients: iron, zinc, vitamin B12, niacin, selenium, phosphorus, potassium, lycopene
These figures are estimates. The fat varies widely with the age of the animal and drops once the surface fat is skimmed, and most of the salt in the blanching water is discarded.
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