How did this Ecuadorean stew, so lush and rich, earn the name “seco,” which in Spanish means “dry”? One theory traces the usage to the early 20th century, when Englishmen working the arid oil fields of Santa Elena, a province on the Pacific Coast, wanted to skip the customary first course of an Ecuadorean meal, soup, and go straight to the second: stew. The locals turned their request for “second” into “seco,” and it stuck.
But the dish existed before the British arrived. And “seco” might as well describe how it is made, cooked down until the liquid nearly disappears and what’s left is a thick velvet that settles in, lining your bones, sealing out the world’s chill.
Recipe: Seco de Pollo (Ecuadorian-Style Chicken Stew)
If language is a series of drifts and echoes, borrowings and migrations, so is food. For Kiera Wright-Ruiz, whose father was born in Ecuador, seco is a cultural inheritance. But her parents separated when she was 5, and he eventually faded to the fringes of her life. She was left with only a vague sense of where he came from, beyond the memory of a bedtime story about the Andean condor, the sky’s largest predator, riding the winds for a hundred miles without ever flapping its wings.
As Wright-Ruiz chronicles in her new cookbook, “My (Half) Latinx Kitchen: Half Recipes, Half Stories, All Latin American,” as a child she was shuttled among homes and spent time in foster care. She felt little connection to her ancestors. (Her mother, an orphan from Seoul raised by white parents in rural Pennsylvania, was more familiar with scrapple than mandu.) But she loved eating seco de pollo, especially at her grandparents’ house in Florida, where her Mexican grandmother cooked her Ecuadorean husband’s favorite dishes with Telemundo always on in the background.
Today Wright-Ruiz lives in Tokyo, but the globe is small enough that she can still find the ingredients for seco. She browns the chicken first, to a golden veneer, then sets it aside. Into the same pot, with the lovely dark bits still clinging to the bottom, she tips a pulverized sofrito of onion, garlic and bell pepper, for a gentle fry.
Traditionally, the chicken was simmered in chicha, an alcoholic beverage of fermented corn, yuca or quinoa, depending on the region, that has been drunk in the Andes for millenniums. But a simple lager will do here, bringing a mellow, malty depth. (In Tokyo, Wright-Ruiz opts for Asahi.) The beer’s trace bitterness is offset by tomatoes and naranjilla, also known as lulo, a small indigenous fruit that’s lime-sour and oozily tart like a pineapple.
Another adaptation, because this is how we keep traditions alive far from home: In Ecuador, cooks would add a sauté of achiote (annatto), a seed from the rainforest that brings a musky sweetness and stains of color from goldenrod to rust, but Wright-Ruiz sees no shame in relying on store-bought sazón, which melds achiote and cumin, a spice that goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, one old world meeting another.
As Wright-Ruiz worked on her cookbook, she worried what her father might think “of how I navigated my life without him,” she writes. But he died before she could finish. Some years ago, she made a pilgrimage to his hometown, Guayaquil, the muggy port city that her grandfather, a former wrestler (known as the Indomitable) and cop, left in 1969, with her father, still a child, following a while after. She will never fully know what it was, that life.
Seco is a trick to make even the toughest meat yield, to coax lusciousness out of less-than-perfect ingredients. Submerged in broken-down tomatoes, naranjilla and beer, the chicken lounges, loosens, relents. At the very end, there’s a splash of vinegar to snap everything into focus and cilantro by the fistful, clean and bright.
“Give it the time it needs,” Wright-Ruiz says. “You don’t want to rush.”
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