Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Just because UK food prices are their highest in more than a decade doesn’t mean that we can’t eat well. In fact, in some ways, it might mean just the opposite.

Here’s how: we all know that necessity is the mother of something, be it outright invention or the simply act of taking chances, as a quick search of Google will assure Mark Twain once apparently said; and when it comes to the kitchen that something is prized as culinary inspiration.

For most, if not all, of the world’s great culinary achievements – those techniques that transform ingredients into dishes that speak to our hearts as much as to our stomachs – were born of a necessary kind of culinary inspiration. From salting to smoking to pickling to stewing and offal to sausages to bean curd to…you get the picture…necessity has given us some of our most popular dishes and culinary techniques to help us see out the lean weeks and wait for the happy return of opulence and excess and imported non-seasonal fruits and vegetables.

So, in the spirit of the credit crunch, put down the ready-meal, unplug the microwave, and learn to re-embrace one-pot dinners and the hasty return of leftovers, as ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you its Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

And, sure it might cost more than a fiver (No offense Jamie; I’m sure shopping for spaghetti with you is very rewarding.), but it’ll definitely last a couple of meals.

Pork is a staple of the Spanish and Latin American diet, which dates back at least to the reconquista of Al-Andalus in 1492 — the year ol’ Cristóbal Colón went sailing to India and landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island divided by the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The history of this dish isn’t that old, but it’s close. In Spanish, the words Olla Podrida literally refer to a rotten pot of meat. But names can be deceiving — especially when it comes to foodstuffs — because this dish is anything but rotten.

Cooked in a large earthenware pot, the loin of pork is slow-cooked for a couple of hours in a mix of water, roughly chopped onions, cut bulbs of garlic, and a touch of salt and pepper. Later, the pork is removed and the remaining water and ingredients discarded. In the same pot, mustard seeds, paprika, and cumin are heated in olive oil with onion. The pork loin is shredded and returned to the pot, along with a simple vegetable or wine stock, followed by red kidney beans, cannellini beans, and calasparra rice. Once the stock has evaporated, the pot is removed from the heat, re-seasoned and served on warm corn tortillas to become Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

A bottle of the 2006 Val do Sosego Albariño (12.5%), from Rias Baixas in Spain, available at Oddbins for £8.49, makes a wondrous pairing to this white-meat stew, its mix of apples and pears complimenting the pork as well as the corn tortilla. Pork and apples, like apples and maize are excellent pairing partners; and although there is a tad more of a floral sense on the nose and woodiness in the mouth than I would have liked, it remains light and well-balanced with a crispness that helps further perpetuate the sense of apple. That gives it a score of 8.3, based on the complicated but 100%-accurate ratings system outlined on InterWined.com’s Ratings page. Thing is, it was so close to 8.6.

(As most readers will know, InterWined’s rating system is somewhat arbitrary and largely tongue-in-cheek.)

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Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine that exceeds its normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal, prepared following the instructions of some the Internet’s best food blogs.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of Danielle of Habeas Brûlée and the intriguingly titled Crypto-Jewish Brazilian Yellow Stew, the inspiration for which she explains in her post came from the book A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews, by David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson.

At first thought, cooking meats with fruit might seem rather unorthodox in the English-speaking world — like fusion cuisine. Yet, it is a long-standing tradition across most of Asia, the South Pacific, Africa, Latin America, and large parts of continental Europe. After all, who hasn’t heard of such classic fruit and meat pairings as melon and prosciutto or Duck l’Orange?

In contrast to those familiar staples Danielle’s Brazilian Yellow stew is simultaneously classic and modern, steeped as it is in the history of Iberia, the Spanish Inquisition, the Jewish Diaspora and the popular tropical fruits of South America.

And it’s the marriage of old and new that makes the dish so refreshingly light and flavourful. This isn’t the heavy winter stews of InterWined’s youth.

Paired with Danielle’s Crypto-Jewish Brazilian Yellow Stew was the 2005 Pazo Señorans Albariño from Philglas & Swiggot at £11.99 and widely available in the US for around $20. (At Philglas & Swiggot, the 2001 Pazo retails for £26.99.)

Like Danielle’s stew, Albariño is an old wine made new again by the popularity of its dry, sometimes Riesling-like, flavour and crisp fruity nose. While the precise history of the grape seems hard to confirm, its production has reputedly increased five-fold since the 1990s with winemakers exporting the grape for the first time to California, where a handful of winemakers such as Cambiata now produce American Albariño.

With a light straw colour, the 2005 Pazo Señorans smells of stone-fruit, maybe even faint watermelon, and grass. Its slightly acidic flavour instantly highlights the ripeness of the stew’s mango. A treat.

Danielle’s Recipe in Full

Crypto-Jewish Brazilian Yellow Stew

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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First up: the 2006 Burgáns Albariño from Rias Baixas in Galicia, bought for under $12. (It currently sells from Oddbins in the UK for £8.99.)

A native and little-planted grape in Galicia, it was not until the Spanish government awarded it with its own D.O. or Denominación de Origen in 1986 (a classification similar to the French appellation) that production began to rapidly increase along with name recognition. Now, it has emerged as the grape of 2007, earning coverage in most wine-related media outlets for its crisp taste and seemingly endless versatility, as InterWined highlighted in two recent posts and as its readers and contributors have mentioned in the comments.

While the 2006 Burgáns isn’t the best Albariño that InterWined has ever tasted (that honour probably goes to the bottle served at Back to Basics in London), it’s a very good wine. Yellow in colour and apple in flavour, it was Appletiser with the bubbles (meant as compliment, by the way). For those unfamiliar with the UK Sparkling Fruit Drink, don’t think cider, but rather the crisp, sometimes slightly syrupy flavour one gets when biting into a really ripe apple from a farmer’s market. Think summer; think sun; think serve with almost anything: 8.2.

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InterWined recently received a series of private messages from the United States asking for some wine-buying guidance.
In response, InterWined recommended some wines from a Houston wine retailer called Specs — mainly white wine such as Albariño from Spain and Riesling from the Mosel and Rhine in Germany. These wines are great served slightly chilled and very versatile with food.

Here’s a recommendation for those hot summer picnics:

Get a bottle of Beringer Sauvignon Blanc 2006 (or similar California Sauvignon Blanc), £7 at Tesco, and widely available in the US. Pour a glassful into a tall tumbler over ice and sip through a straw. California Sauvignon Blanc is often filled with melon and citrus, but does not have a very enjoyable aroma in this price range, so it’s best to ‘keep it real’. But don’t go adding strawberries or lime wedges…it’s not a cocktail.

Simply pour the California Sauvignon Blanc over ice and sip…simple, refreshing, enjoyable and relaxing.

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