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dine in WITH Mary Welp Cooking With Cola This recipe for the hearty Spanish stew estofado calls for beer and more than a splash of Pepsi, as dictated by Dona Lucky. 58 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.13 O ver the so-called winter break, which in my house adds up to men and animals continually waiting for the next full meal followed by the next round of snacks, I did manage to read one odd and hypnotic little novel. In Te Polish Boxer, which neither hails from Poland nor tells the story of a boxer, Eduardo Halfon writes about a fctional character named Eduardo Halfon, a Guatemalan writing teacher who travels across the mountains of the Central American country in search of the most brilliant student he's ever taught. Te student, Juan Kalel, has mysteriously dropped out of college and disappeared. Along the way in his quest, Eduardo ends up in the village of Tecpan, in a restaurant owned and run by a very short woman dressed in black, improbably named Dona Lucky. She asks him, "You don't want something to eat, muchacho? Some pork rinds or a little estofado, maybe?" When our narrator says no thank you, Dona Lucky insists, posing the question, "You know estofado is the local dish in Tecpan?" Eduardo answers that no, he did not know; then, to be polite, asks how it is made. She tells him that it's made with four diferent meats: pig, chicken, cow and goat. "You cook it in a big pot until the meat falls apart, with some thyme and laurel and orange juice and vinegar and a splash of beer and a splash of Pepsi." She then smiles, and Eduardo cannot tell whether she is joking. She wasn't joking. I immediately remembered having seen the word "estofado" in an old cookbook I'd bought after my frst trip to the Yucatan. It's called False Tongues and Sunday Bread, a title almost as misleading as Te Pol- ish Boxer, especially when you take into account that it was compiled by a guy with perhaps the most Anglicized name imaginable: Copeland Marks. I will spare you the details of the many ways in which the term "estofado," across various media in the art world, concerns layering. Let's keep it simple and say that, in culinary terms, it means stew. Just as the narrator wondered if Dona Lucky's enigmatic smile implied that she was messing with him about ingredients, we might wonder whether it meant she was pulling his leg over the fact that at least 150 diferent locales across the Spanish-speaking world claim estofado as their regional dish. Some of them do indeed contain beer and cola as key ingredients. I might add that if Eduardo Halfon had spent any time at all in hair salons across the world, he'd no doubt have come across the notion of tenderizing meat via the use of various soft drinks. In salons, both clients and stylists are always talking recipes. Always. And most of them involve soft drinks. But for now, I am sticking with the recipe provided by Copeland Marks. In False Tongues and Sunday Bread, he says that his estofado comes from San Pedro Ayampuc, approximately 40 miles from Tecpan, so it's defnitely big in the region. During festa time, kitchens across the village keep huge clay or steel vats of it simmering all day long. Te end result is meat that is so tender it barely needs to be chewed. It's not unlike the texture of the lechon asado served in certain Cuban restaurants around town. In honor of Halfon's novel as well as multiple other recipes I found online (and, of course, hair salons the world over), I have added beer and cola into the mix.