The Stew Takes an Hour, and Fifteen Minutes in a Pressure Cooker: Andalusian Potatoes With Cuttlefish

The Spanish presenter and comedian Paz Padilla has a saying she inherited from her mother: "Potatoes with cuttlefish, food for madmen." It rhymes in Spanish, and behind the joke stands one of those dishes every coastal kitchen has in some version - cheap, humble, and better the next day.

The dish is a thick stew of potatoes and cuttlefish, popular in western Andalusia, particularly in the provinces of Cadiz and Huelva. This is food that came out of fishing houses - from a kitchen used to pulling dinner out of what the sea gave and what was in the pantry. Every household makes it slightly differently, which is the best indicator that the dish is genuinely domestic rather than a chef's recipe.

The step that settles everything

Traditionally this stew demands time - at least an hour. The reason is not stubbornness but chemistry: the cuttlefish has to soften, the potatoes have to release their starch, and the light base of onion, pepper and tomato has to break down until the sauce thickens by itself. Rush it and you get potato in water with pieces of rubber.

Padilla solves that with a pressure cooker and packs the whole thing into around fifteen minutes. That is not cheating - pressure does what long simmering does, only faster. But the order stays fixed: the cuttlefish goes in before the potatoes, never the other way round.

Ingredients

One onion, one green pepper, one tomato, one kilogram of potatoes, 700 grams of cleaned and chopped cuttlefish (squid works too), paprika, a bay leaf, 100 millilitres of white wine, salt, black peppercorns and olive oil.

Method

Peel and chop the onion; remove the stalk and seeds from the green pepper and chop that too. Wash the tomato, dry it and cut it into small cubes.

Put olive oil in the pressure cooker and fry the onion. Add the green pepper, the tomato and one bay leaf and fry them together. Then the cuttlefish goes in, along with salt, black peppercorns, paprika and the white wine - and all of it is fried well.

Close the cooker with the valve. When it starts to spin and release steam, lower the heat and leave it to cook for around ten minutes. Carefully remove the valve, open the cooker and add the peeled and chopped potatoes. Pour in water, put the lid and valve back on and cook for another five minutes.

Let it cool a little before opening. And if you have the patience - leave the stew for a few hours. That is when it is the real thing.

If it sounds familiar, you are not alone. Cuttlefish instead of meat, potato holding the stew together, one pepper and one tomato for the base - that is logic every kitchen in this part of the world recognises. The only difference is that there it is the sea, and here it is rivers and fields. The dish is the same: whatever there is, simmered long, and enough for the whole family.