Yuca gnocchi with green lamb ragù $23.95) at Taranta (210 Hanover Street, Boston, 617.720.0052)
I’ve long considered José Duarte’s take on Italian dumplings to be an exemplar of culinary inspiration, as utterly luscious as they are truly novel. Less fluffy than the potato-based standard, yuca gnocchi are velvety, with a slight but satisfying chew. The gravyrich lamb ragù, meanwhile, smacks just hard enough of chilies, while shaved parmesan adds its usual salt tang. Together, it all tastes like something you’d be eating in your mountainside cottage after a long day of goat-herding.
As it turns out, Duarte’s Peruvian model for the dish usually includes goat. Seco de carne, says Duarte, is made by
first marinating, then braising, the chosen meat in chicha de jora — a fermented corn beverage — with cilantro, garlic, onions, and two types of chili pepper: aji amarillo and aji rocoto. The resulting stew is generally served with boiled yuca. Duarte recalls the evening he whipped some up for an employee meal: “I started smashing the yuca with my fork against my plate and mixing it with the stew and meat, and that’s when the idea got in my head.” Well, I remember mixing vanilla ice cream with ketchup in the grade-school lunchroom to see how that went down. We can’t all be so gastronomically astute.
— RUTH TOBIAS
PHOTO BY KELLY DAVIDSON