cooking.nytimes.com

Picadillo is one of the great dishes of the Cuban diaspora: a soft, fragrant stew of ground beef and tomatoes, with raisins added for sweetness and olives for salt. Versions of it exist across the Caribbean and into Latin America. This one, based loosely on a recipe that Nitza Villapol published in her cookbook “Cocina Criolla,” in 1954, and helped immeasurably by the advice of the Cuban American food writer Betty Cortina, combines ground beef with intensely seasoned dried Spanish chorizo in a sofrito of onions, garlic and tomatoes, and scents it with red-wine vinegar, cinnamon and cumin, along with bay leaves and pinches of ground cloves and nutmeg. “Everyone who is of Cuban descent has a recipe for it,” Ms. Cortina said, “and each one of those is the most authentic. It’s a comfort food, probably the most consummate example of one in Cuban cuisine.”