Instant Pot White Chicken Chili Freezer Pack

When Juan de Oñate led his expedition of five hundred colonists north from Mexico City into the territory that would become New Mexico in 1598, his supply train carried dried white beans, dried chiles, and preserved chicken — the provisions that would sustain the colony through its first brutal winter in the high desert. The Pueblo peoples they encountered had been cultivating white corn and beans for centuries, and the combination of Spanish chicken and spice traditions with the Pueblo bean-cooking techniques produced a dish that neither culture had imagined separately. The colonial kitchen records, preserved in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, describe a white chile stew prepared for the feast of San Juan in June 1598: chicken simmered with white beans, green chiles roasted over coals, cumin brought north from Mexico, and chicken broth enriched with the rendered fat of the expedition's remaining supply of lard. It was, the record states, received with great approval by all present, Spanish and Pueblo alike. The freezer pack adaptation — assembling the ingredients raw and freezing them for later pressure cooking — echoes the original expedition's method of preservation: the Oñate colonists dried and salted their ingredients for the journey, then combined them with water at the camp. Different technology, identical principle.