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“One of my greatest moments in my life as a cook,” recalls the chef and food writer Arturo Féliz-Camilo, was a moment when his mother-in-law, his wife’s aunt, and other family were standing around a huge pot. They were preparing sancocho, a complex stew that is one of the Dominican Republic’s unofficial national dishes.

“They ask me, ‘Something’s missing. We don’t know what it is,’” he remembers. They knew he cooked, but he hadn’t yet proved himself to the family.

So he tasted the stew. It was indeed missing something, and he was surprised that his in-laws couldn’t pick up on it. “I think it’s missing a little bit of salt,” he said. “And they all looked at each other, like, ‘No.’ And they added a little bit of salt, and boom—that was it. So from there, I’m admitted to the family.”

In the Dominican Republic, sancocho is a communal affair. It’s a rich, orange-hued concoction of root vegetables, meats, plantains, bananas, citrus, and Dominican herbs. The layered stew takes a village to cook—and to eat, too. Delicious and warming, doled out at birthday parties, Christmas, and on rainy days, it’s absolutely worth the effort.

Countries all over Latin America eat soups or stews that they call “sancocho.” But Dominican cooks—biased or not—say theirs is the best. It’s a charismatic dish indeed. Pumpkin-colored, with chunks of corn and sausage floating above the surface, it screams abundance. As the broth boils, the root vegetables release starch, and the meats give off collagen, so that the stew has a thick, velvety texture that Feliz-Camilo compares to that of a lobster bisque. And the taste is surprisingly fresh and floral for such a hearty stew, flavored by sweet squash, cilantro, oregano, culantro—a cousin of cilantro with a fresh, bracing taste—and bitter orange, a sour citrus with roots in the Moorish conquest of Spain.

Sancocho is popular in many Latin American countries. Rodolfo Pimentel

Making such a layered dish is no easy task. “It’s something that you normally make with other people,” says Brenda Espinal, owner of the Dominican restaurant Perico Ripiao in Kissimmee, Florida.

Part of the reason that it’s so labor-intensive is that it’s usually prepared in huge quantities. The pot that Feliz-Camilo’s in-laws were fussing over was around four feet wide and two feet tall, he estimates. It’s normal for people to cook sancocho for hundreds of people and invite their entire neighborhood to eat, he says.

A bowl of sancocho can bring about a wave of nostalgia for Dominicans in the U.S. “It feels like going back home every time I try it,” says Espinal. “It’s very typical of the Dominican Republic, especially on rainy days or a family gathering.”

At Perico Ripiao, Espinal makes a sancocho that hews close to tradition. It’s one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes; her staff prepare around seventy servings at a time in a 60-liter pot, and often have to make three batches in one weekend.

This medley of root vegetables, along with the other ingredients, and the technique used to make it, reflect the branching rivers of history that feed into Dominican cuisine. “Dominican culture is a very Creole kind of culture,” says Feliz-Camilo, who has authored a series of books on Dominican cuisine. “The most well known three sources of Dominican culture are the Spanish, the African—mostly Western African—and the Taíno.”

The Taíno are an indigenous people who had a thriving civilization on Hispaniola before the landing of Columbus. After the conquistadors arrived, they brutally exploited the Taíno, forcing them to work in gold mines, and decimated the population through violence and disease. To replace their dwindling labor force, they imported enslaved West Africans to work in newly established sugarcane plantations. Over the centuries, Europeans, Africans, and Taíno intermingled in the Dominican Republic along with other immigrants, forming the Dominican culture that exists today.

It’s difficult to say where exactly the tradition of simmering a potpourri of roots, meats, and other vegetables into a delicious stew comes from. “It is one of those dishes that exists in every single culture. It’s that pot where people put whatever is available,” Feliz-Camilo says. “It’s probably true that the Western Africans and the Spanish had something, some version of it.”

Brightly colored auyama squash gives sancocho its signature color. RoRo

The Dominican-American writer Nelly A. Rosario connects sancocho to “the ancestral African custom of always keeping a pot of soup, as gift and welcome to any visitor.” She also points to a “bleaker, commonly held belief” that the tradition was borne out of enslaved people’s need to boil for long hours the meat scraps they were afforded by plantation masters.

Feliz-Camilo thinks that the most likely origin of the stew is in the cuisine of the Spanish Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Africa, and a major source of immigration to the Dominican Republic. Spanish cooks make a dish called olla podrida, or “rotten pot,” a slow-cooked stew of beans and meat.

Whatever the origin of the stewing technique, the dish’s ingredients reflect the kaleidoscope of cultures on the island. The Taíno contributed yuca, yautia, corn, peppers, and the crucial auyama squash that gives the dish its orange color. West Africans contributed yams, plantains, and bananas. And Europeans contributed meats, garlic, onions, and herbs.

If you’re looking to make your own sancocho, it’s best to follow a few basic guidelines Espinal emphasizes that one should make the stew with help. “I would say if you’re beginning, don’t overcomplicate yourself,” says Feliz-Camilo. There are many varieties of sancocho—beginners should go for a simple one.

On some level, sancocho is meant to be flexible: It’s a time-worn version of throwing a bunch of ingredients together in a pot to feed many mouths. But in order to be considered sancocho, a stew needs to follow a few key specifications. Sancocho needs to contain yuca, plantain, and auyama squash—although in the absence of auyama, kabocha is a good substitute. And according to Feliz-Camilo, it can’t include overly sweet tubers, like sweet potatoes, and you shouldn’t add seafood.

Feliz-Camilo’s other piece of advice is to seek the counsel of someone who knows the dish.

He speaks like someone who has learned to defer to his elders in the kitchen. He once judged a sancocho contest between Dominican cooks. None blew him away. “It was like, they’re okay, some were good, but I think my mother-in-law’s sancocho was probably better than all of those,” he said. “That’s on record.”

Cory Woosley / Atlas Obscura

Sancocho

Adapted with permission from Perico Ripiao

Ingredients

• 1½ lb cubed beef for soup
• *2 lb chicken, cut in pieces *
• *1½ lb smoked pork ribs or smoked neck bones *
• *1½ lb pork feet, cleaned and cut *
• *1½ lb fresh pork ribs *
• 1½ lb longaniza (Dominican sausage)
• ½ cup powdered chicken bouillon
• ½ oz ground Dominican oregano
• ½ cup garlic paste
• Juice of 2 bitter oranges (if unavailable, look for bottled bitter orange juice, also called “naranja agria” in Spanish)
• *1 yellow onion, chopped *
• *1 cubanelle pepper (or ají gustoso) *
• *½ celery stalk *
• *1 bunch fresh culantro, chopped *
• 1 bunch cilantro, finely chopped (reserve for garnish)
• 1½ lb auyama or kabocha squash, peeled & cut in large chunks
• *1½ lb cassava, peeled, deveined, & cut into chunks *
• *1½ lb white or yellow yautia (a narrow root vegetable with tough, hairy exterior), peeled and cut in chunks *
• *1½ lb ñame (white yam variety), peeled & cut into chunks (note: use gloves while peeling ñame, because its flesh can be irritating to the skin) *
• *3 green cooking bananas, peeled & halved *
• 3 green plantains – 1 whole (for blending), 2 cut into one-inch wide wheels
• *2 carrots – 1 whole (for blending), 1 cut in chunks *
• 2 ears of corn, cut into two-to-three-wide wheels

Instructions

1. Cook the base: Place pork feet and smoked pork meats in a large pot with 5 liters water, onion, culantro, celery, and peppers. Season with garlic, bouillon, oregano, bitter orange, salt, and pepper. Simmer 1 to 1½ hour, until meats begin to soften..
2. Add beef, pork ribs, chicken, and longaniza along with 2 whole carrots, 2 whole plantains, and squash chunks. Simmer until carrots, plantains, squash, and celery are soft. Remove carrots, plantains, celery, and squash to a food processor or a blender. Add some broth and puree. Return purée to the pot to thicken the stew.
3. Stir in cassava, yam, ñame, bananas, plantain wheels, carrot chunks, and corn. Cook on medium heat until vegetables are tender and the broth is rich, 30 to 45 minutes.
4. Taste; add more salt, pepper, or bouillon if needed. Skim off excess oil.
5. Stir in chopped cilantro just before serving. Serve hot with white rice, avocado, and bitter orange or lime wedges, and Dominican hot sauce if desired.