Potatoes and peppers from the hungry years in Cádiz: five ingredients, 30 minutes of simmering and a potato you break by hand, not cut

In Cádiz and Jerez de la Frontera there is an expression anyone in the Balkans would nod along to straight away - "poor people's cooking". That is what they call the cheap food of the hard years, and one of the best-known dishes in that repertoire is papas a la cochambrosa: potatoes with peppers, tomato, onion and garlic. Five main ingredients, zero meat.

The dish was born after the Spanish Civil War, in the forties and early fifties, when food was handed out on ration coupons. It goes by a pile of names - papas en verbena, a la cachonda, en escándalo, a lo pobre, and in Sanlúcar papas al pimiento. The joke in the name was a way of laughing at hardship, not a sign that anything was wrong with the food. In the Balkans we would call a dish like this "posno", the food of fasting days - and that is exactly what it is: no meat, fish or cured meats, the recipe is fully vegan.

Ingredients for four: 800 grams of potatoes, one onion, one green Italian-type pepper, half a red pepper, two cloves of garlic, one tomato, two bay leaves, 40 ml of olive oil, salt, and enough water to cover the potatoes.

Method. Slice the garlic thinly. Remove the stems and seeds from the peppers and cut them into medium squares, along with the onion and tomato. Put 40 ml of olive oil (about three tablespoons) and the garlic in a pot and fry on low heat until it starts to turn golden. Add the rest of the vegetables, a little salt and the bay leaves and sauté for a few minutes on medium heat, taking care that the vegetables do not start to stew.

Here is the trick. Peel the potatoes, but do not cut them with a knife - break them by hand into uneven chunks. The recipe says the potato should crack. The broken surface releases more starch, and the starch thickens the broth. Put the potatoes in the pot, pour in enough water to cover them, put the lid on and turn up the heat. When it boils, turn down to medium-low and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the potatoes are soft. Do not stir with a spoon - just shake the pot from time to time, and check the salt at the end.

If you want it more filling, crack a few eggs over the dish at the end and let them set. Leftovers keep in the fridge and reheat well, but do not freeze it - the potato loses its texture. Poor people's cooking, it turns out, is often the smartest cooking there is.