"Grape, Olive, Pig"

[fiefoe]

Matt Goulding's paean to good Spanish food feels like it was written for a distant, brighter age.

• The Spaniards brought tomatoes and chocolate and chilies to the Old World, sugar and wheat and smallpox to the New World. They forged one of the world’s first fusion cuisines—not fusion as a six-letter word, but a cuisine of confluence, where the slow tide of Phoenicians and Romans, Jews and Moors and Catholics washing over the Iberian Peninsula gently but resolutely shaped its character.
• Mediterranean formula: beautiful local ingredients, impeccable technique, and a ravenous appetite for all manners of flora and fauna. The Spaniards suck the brains from shrimp heads, crunch sardine spines like potato chips, throw elaborate wine-soaked parties to celebrate spring onions.
• There are, I’ve long believed, similarities between the two countries and their approaches to food: the embrace of single ingredients done as well as possible, the love of tradition, the mania for great seafood.
• A pack of sisters who brave the elements to scrape gooseneck barnacles from the cracks and crevices of the Galician coast. A band of fishermen off the coast of Cádiz who maintain the world’s oldest fish hunt. And in the sunbaked mountains near Granada, in the cave community of Fuente Nueva, my wife’s eighty-seven-year-old great uncle, Chacho Federo, the last of a dying breed of Andalusian shepherds.
• a mixture of technical innovation, whimsy, and concentrations of outrageous flavor and texture that moved me deeply over twenty-two courses and four hours. A single giant shrimp broken down into seven different aquatic expressions; an earth-shattering beef tartare covered in crunchy pommes soufflé and tiny pellets of mustard ice cream;
• We rolled the gnocchi together, drank cava, ate vanilla gelato with coarse sea salt and emerald olive oil—one of those nights that lives on a loop in your head.
• Every great ancient city needs a powerful origin story; Barcelona’s starts with Hercules. Four hundred years before the founding of Rome, on the hunt for the Golden Fleece with Jason and the Argonauts, our hero loses one of his nine ships to the rough seas and begins a desperate search to recover it. He finds it washed up on the shores of Catalunya, and Hercules and his crew are so taken by the area’s beauty that they build a city and name it after the ninth ship: Barca Nona.
• The statue commemorating the Italian explorer at the base of La Rambla today is marked by two historical curiosities: the first being that he stands pointing southeast across the sea, away from America; the second that the statue celebrates the very voyage that was a deathblow to the Mediterranean trade routes that gave Barcelona its importance.
• It wasn’t just leftist sympathizers Franco snuffed out; he intended to blast Catalan culture out of existence. If your parents named you Jordi at birth, you were now Jorge;
• With the death of Franco in 1975 came the uncorking of Catalan culture as the region embraced its language, history, and cuisine with the intensity of a nation rediscovering itself.
• It’s hard to think of a city that wears its charms more conspicuously than Barcelona. They’re all there for you to absorb, one by one, mountain and sea, wide, majestic avenues and tiny, lonely backstreets, oil-slicked shoebox bars and opulent eateries of innovation.
• the elaborate dinner parties where four or five languages stitched the night together. Laura became an avatar for all that my life was missing in America.
• regrouped. I rented another apartment, the eighth in three months,
• Catalans embrace nuanced combinations like pollastre amb escamarlans: chicken braised with crayfish in a mole-like mix of nuts, aromatics, and dark chocolate, underlining a region-wide penchant to play sweet against savory, mar against muntanya.
• escalibada, a salad of ember-roasted onions, peppers, and eggplant; and samfaina, a ratatouille-like vegetable stew, at the peak of summer; and in the last gasps of winter, the legendary calçotadas: spirited fiestas of charred spring onions dipped in romesco
• In the same way Gaudí approached the construction of Sagrada Familia as a sequence of problems to be solved—how to support the massive spires, how to make the facade drip like candle wax—Ferran asked difficult, at times absurd questions, then set about answering them: Can we deliver the essence of a sauce without its cloaking heaviness? (Yes, with CO2 canisters.) How can we make this olive taste more like an olive? (By dipping concentrated olive juice into calcium alginate to form a sphere.)
• (Four of the top six restaurants on the 2015 list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are captained by Bulli alums.)
• In a stretch of three blocks along Avinguda del Parallel, he has created a restaurant row for the ages: Hoja Santa (modern Mexican), Pakta (Peruvian-Japanese), Bodega 1900 (classic Spanish), and Tickets, the mothership, a modernist tapas wonderland serving some of the most delicious, thought-provoking food on the planet.
• a plate arrived divided into a ying-yang configuration: on one side, hazelnut puree topped with osetra caviar; on the other, a dark osetra puree topped with shiny orbs of hazelnut caviar—to this day one of the most brilliant and delicious dishes I’ve eaten.
• Two of Spain’s most famous soups combined in a single ivory bowl: gazpacho and ajoblanco, the former as a light clarified granita, the latter an intense emulsification of almonds, garlic, and olive oil. Deconstruction.
• A shallow crystal bowl covered with a thin layer of ice and scattered with matcha tea powder and raw sugar, meant to be cracked like a frozen pond in the winter. Art imitating life.
• the range of feelings he pulled out of us that night. Like a hallucinogenic experience, we cycled through stages of nervous energy and quiet contemplation, inexplicable nostalgia and intense, childlike joy. If I really look back at my romantic life, it can be boiled down to one simple objective: to find the best dining partner possible.
• a lovely Catalan-Andalusian with eyes like oceans, a heart of melted butter,
• the northern coast combines Spain’s most stunning landscape with its greatest cuisine. A plodding road trip from the pintxo bars of San Sebastián and Bilbao through the cider houses of Cantabria and Asturias and into the seafood palaces of Galicia will give you a taste of it all.
• Tomato bread (pa amb tomàquet in Catalan): As the national dish of Catalunya, you’ll find tomato bread on every restaurant menu and every family table across the region. Small, juicy tomatoes grown expressly for this sell at market stands across the region.
• The processing is quick and exacting: First, the pig is scalded in hot water, then spun in what looks like an industrial dryer to loosen all the hair from its skin. It passes through flames next to burn off any remaining hairs before arriving to the series of butchers who will take the animal apart piece by piece:
• the hind legs move up to the salt room, where they are buried in coarse salt for two weeks before spending the next three years curing ever so slowly into jamón ibérico de bellota,
• Easy to raise, easy to feed, easy to kill, and easy to butcher, with a pitch-perfect balance of fat and protein: cure it, smoke it, braise it, sear it—the variety of tastes and textures you can tease from pork is unrivaled in the animal kingdom.
• As some of history’s greatest civilizations—the Romans and Gauls, the Celts and the Chinese—knew, pork reaches its fullest potential only when salt enters the equation. The first records of salted meat stretch back three thousand years to China, where industrious eaters worked out a crude version of what would become Jinhua ham.
• pork and pork fat became the official flavor of the Reconquista, galvanizing the Catholics during their brutal seven-century-long expulsion of the Moors. During the ensuing Inquisition—when those lucky enough to survive could either convert or leave the country—conspicuous consumption of pork became a way for Jews and Muslims to demonstrate allegiance to their new religion.
• the most noble part of the pig in Spain has always been the leg, a symphony of skin and sinew, protein and intramuscular marbling, held together by two bones that lend an elegant shape and a sturdy structure for hanging and, later, for ceremonious carving.
• The breed of pig, a descendant of wild boar, is known for its uncanny ability to filter fat through its muscles. Raised on a diet of grass and cereal grains from birth, the most prized ibérico pigs spend the final months of their lives roaming freely in the countryside, fattening up on the fallen acorns that give the meat its intense flavor and sweet deposits of fat.
• In 2005, after a decade of denials and disappointments, Fermín became the first company to sell jamón ibérico in the United States.
• Suddenly, wineskins and herbal liquors materialized and our hangovers were painted over with fresh coats of intoxication.
• you will find the entire history of Spain within the perimeter of a paella pan. Olive oil, the golden film that forms the base of every paella, adding depth and a gentle sheen to the bed of grains, is the story of a hungry ancient Rome, expanding its empire across Iberia, one olive tree at a time. Tomato, the heart of the sofrito that lends color and a savory-sweet baseline to a proper paella, is the story of Spain’s own vision of empire and conquest, and the unexpected treasures it pillaged from the New World. And the heart of paella—the rice, saffron, and vegetables that fill out the pan—speak of seven hundred years of Moorish rule leaving a footprint on the Iberian Peninsula
• A kitchen without rice is like a pretty girl with one eye. Those are the words of Confucius, born and raised in the world’s first and largest rice culture.
• when Christian monarchs reclaimed Spain from its Arabic occupiers, rice became a symbol of a past most of the country wanted to shed. More than a symbolic concern, Spaniards blamed the grain for cases of malaria and yellow fever that decimated the Mediterranean population.
• Her day begins at 7:00 a.m., when she fries the rabbit in olive oil with a bit of tomato to form the sofrito, then she adds water and the snails and boils the mix for fifteen minutes before leaving it to rest until lunchtime. “Stock is always better when it’s rested; that gives it time for the flavor to develop.”
• ARROZ DEL AUTOR Fancy rice dishes served in small portions at Spain’s white-label restaurants. Distinguished by the intensity of the stocks and the esoteric proteins—pigeon, sea cucumber—used to form their foundation.
• One of the most popular recipes of the postwar years was written by Ignasi Domènech, called tortilla de patatas sin patatas ni huevos: potato omelet without potatoes or eggs. Domènech advised his countrymen to use a slurry of flour and water to mimic the egg, and discarded orange peels to approximate the texture of potato.
• Today, the Basque Country is among the most Michelin-dense regions in the world, but every galaxy starts with a single star, and the Basque’s first constellation belonged to Luis, who earned one in 1975 for his restaurant Gurutze-Berri.
• that by adding olive oil in a slow, steady stream to a pan of cooked salt cod, swirling the pan in gentle circles, the fat will emulsify with the fish’s natural collagen, forming a smooth sauce—pilpil—that is to Basques what hollandaise is to the French; that a squid’s body (once carefully de-inked) can be cut into thin, ivory strips that look like rice noodles but taste purely of the ocean;
• Somewhere shortly after my first paid writing gig, the food world exploded. The first decade of the new millennium saw a tidal wave of unprecedented interest that infiltrated every level of the culinary world. Chefs became the new rock stars, complete with tattoos and groupies. A new class of television and print media emerged to feed the growing appetites of the food-obsessed
• Six thousand episodes, eight thousand recipes, and fifty-five books later, Arguiñano is one of the most influential chefs on the planet, responsible for inspiring the daily creations of countless home cooks. Karlos shows me around the studio where he films all episodes of Karlos Arguiñano en Tu Cocina.
• First, guisantes lágrima, teardrop spring peas studded with slices of raw wild mushrooms and a veil of acorn-fed jamón. The tiny peas pop like caviar against the roof of my mouth, releasing little depth charges of spring across the palate.
• You always make it with the skin side down with a pinch of salt. In just a minute the gelatin will start to release.” I ask them why you never find kokotxas outside of the Basque country. “Let’s hope it stays that way,” says Luis, growing increasingly animated with the wine. “We don’t want the price to go up. It’s like jamón. If the Americans ever find out about true Spanish ham, there won’t be any left for us.”
• Of all the rare, exceptional seafood pulled from the waters of northern Spain, baby eels may be the most revered. Born near Bermuda, they make the long, slow migration to Northern Spain in search of freshwater rivers along the Basque coast.
• jamón. In Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a sun-bleached city known best for its Manzanilla and the horse races on its beaches, you will find the finest fried dish in all of Spain, the tortillita de camarones, a lacy amoeba of tiny shrimp and olive-oil-crisped batter served in bars and freidurías around the region, but nowhere better than Casa Balbino. And if you make it to Vejer de la Frontera, a staircase of whitewashed houses and serpentine streets and quiet plazas of cinematic beauty, you risk never leaving.
• And an entire culture of pastries and sweets developed in the convents of the province, nuns long a major driver of Spain’s traditional food culture. The flan-like tocino del cielo, one of Spain’s most enduring desserts, came about as a way for the nuns to use the egg yolks from sherry producers, who only needed the whites to clarify their wine.
• the Phoenicians developed elaborate net traps and positioned men on top of towers along the coastline to spot the incoming schools. Later, the same technique would spread elsewhere in the Mediterranean—to Portugal, Morocco, Sicily. The Romans continued the tuna-hunting traditions popularized by the Phoenicians. They still made salt-cured fish, but placed even greater importance on the oil extracted from tuna’s fermented flesh, skin, and innards, called garum, one of the world’s first fish sauces.
• There is only so much value in canned tuna and fish soap: In 1933, a 150-kilogram tuna was worth about 150 pesetas, roughly half a cent per pound. The Japanese changed all of that. Sushi culture took shape in the Meiji era,
• He sees a house on stilts, a flock of sheep, an iron pot of beans bubbling over an open fire. He sees a hissing ocean instead of a silent sea, apple orchards in place of rolling vineyards, a cool platinum mist instead of a thousand splendid suns. ASTURIAS, THE NORTHERN KINGDOM, THE SPAIN BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION.
• consumed. It is to be absorbed in one swift gulp, the better for savoring the aromas teased out by the elevated pouring. A glass of cider left idly on the table is not just an insult to the servers, but also a social faux pas that will immediately brand you as an outsider to anyone within splashing distance.
• In 722, in the wake of this impossible victory, the Kingdom of Asturias was officially established, with Pelayo as its first king. For seven hundred years, Asturias remained the only part of Spain not to fall under Moorish rule.
• It takes a deft hand to follow up a plate of braised leeks bathed in pine nut butter and caviar with a naked filet of red mullet, or a plate of poached cod throat in an emerald broth of thistle and plankton with a single albóndiga crafted from grandma’s recipe,
• The cave doesn’t come without its challenges—that is, even beyond the extraordinary expenditure of time and energy it takes to haul thousands of pounds of cheese up and down the mountain each year. “A fox came down here once and tipped the entire production over.
• Crunchy salt-cod skin: fish and chips. Late-spring vegetables—raw, pickled, boiled—with melting cylinders of bone marrow: beauty and the beast. Pigeon and sardine: surf and turf under a weather advisory. Strawberry mousse and kimchi puree: a Craigslist Missed Connections played out on the plate: I saw you that one time in the refrigerator section of Grand Asia and thought we should hang out.
• But Susana and Isabel González are not just a couple of women. They are percebeiras, hunters and gatherers of the gooseneck barnacle of the Spanish Atlantic. Tucked into the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, Galicia has long been shorthand for Spanish seafood supremacy,
• In a country where people are willing to invest an imprudent percentage of their income on ocean treasure—Catalonian red shrimp, Asturian spider crabs, Cantabrian anchovies—percebes can fetch up to two hundred euros per kilo, nearly half of which is inedible,
• Eduardo, one of Bayona’s most famous percebeiros, a man known for his bravery in tough conditions, his intuition, and for a rare skill among the percebes hunters of his day: He knew how to swim. “There was one rock along the coastline that was known to be covered with the best barnacles in the area,” says Isabel. “No one could get to it—nobody except my dad.
• For as long as barnacle sales have been regulated by the government, women and men have been treated differently: For many years, men were allowed a quota of five kilograms of percebes per day, while women were allowed just three.
• Low tide today is 11:19, meaning we’re in the danger zone, the thirty minutes before the ocean bottoms out, when the swells are most savage.
• if one dish represents a centralized Spain, a Spain connected by history, culture, and circumstance, it is cocido. Cocido started off as a Jewish dish dating back to the Middle Ages, known then as olla podrida—a collection of meat, beans, and vegetables gathered in a clay pot on Friday nights and left to simmer in the embers of the fire for eating on the Sabbath. When Catholics reclaimed the country, pork went into the pot, an edible litmus of sorts to test your allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor.
• Madrid’s other most iconic dish: callos, tripe simmered into submission with aromatics and chunks of chorizo and blood sausage, a potent bowl of texture and substance that dates back to the late sixteenth century. Both cocido and callos have been humble cuisine for most of their history—of cuts sold cheap and worked long and slow until they give up the ghost and take on some other incarnation.
• that there were no kitchens in the Alhambra, that the concept of clandestine restaurants was born in Madrid during the time of Cervantes.
• Everything is meant to be interactive, expansive, genre-bending, but the food falls short—underseasoned, mismatched flavors, a puzzling progression of dishes. Bonet’s creative drive is hugely admirable, but the shortcomings reflect a larger problem in post-Bulli Spain, one where the rabid search for culinary innovation often outweighs the objective to serve paying customers delicious food in a comfortable setting. You can only eat so many spherified tortillas and deconstructed patatas bravas before you pine for the real thing. Ferran and Albert Adrià’s pioneering work at El Bulli freed Spanish chefs from the shackles of tradition and the formalities of haute cuisine, but it also created an arms race of innovation that doesn’t always make for great dining.
• a dinner which he has called “the cheapest life-changing experience anyone can have.” This type of attitude has long threatened certain unhinged strains of Spanish gastronomy. Serving seafood on top of an iPad with a loop of the ocean playing isn’t innovative; piping in music of rustling leaves while you eat some autumnal composition doesn’t make the squash soufflé taste more like squash. You can’t eat smoke and mirrors.
• And right before we are about to devour our creations, we are instructed to pass our plates to the left. The whole room sighs in unison.
• To make migas de harina the proper way, you must first build a fire. When you have a glowing bed of embers, fill a pan—black iron, wide-mouthed, and heavy-bottomed like a wok—with water and place it over the fire. Once little bubbles break the surface, season the water with salt—a fistful should do—then add the flour: a kilo for every liter you have boiling. The primary technique for migas is stirring, which you do with a long metal spatula without pause until the pan is removed from the fire. At first, the union of liquid and solid forms a large, shapeless mass—a lumpy primordial stew—but after a few minutes carving long, swooping arcs through the sludge, the mass will begin to multiply, from two pieces to four to sixteen to sixty-four to god knows how many—a single-cell organism splitting over and over again. Life takes shape. Soon the stirring becomes slashing as you use the sharp edge of the spatula to chop the dough into increasingly smaller pieces. Run the instrument against the hot belly of the pan, scraping and rolling to give the migas equal share of the cooking surface. Now you are ready to add the fourth and final ingredient: olive oil, boiling yellow like the desert sun outside. Ladle it in spoon by spoon and don’t be shy: this is what makes migas go down easier. Fold and slash, fold and slash, working the dough from shaggy clumps to rough spheres to hot pebbles of toasted grain.
• as the war’s most sinister residue began to dissipate, they transformed a loose confederation of caves and casas into a vibrant community. At its peak in the 1950s, 1,200 people lived in Fuente Nueva, the village so dense that families of ten or twelve would pack into a single cave.
• It takes a village to kill a pig. Someone to wrangle the hog from the pen, four more to pin it down to a metal table, another to plunge the knife through the base of its neck until it pierces the heart, one to catch and stir the warm blood as it pours from the body, another to break the animal down into a dozen primal cuts, two more to scrub the viscera and flush the intestines, plus a team of three or more to grind, season, stuff, boil, and hang the flesh until every last piece of the pig is in the early stages of preservation.
• like when Chacho sifts through his homegrown tobacco with a handmade sieve, or spends hours weaving clothes and implements from esparto, the straw that has long held this community together. The first paved road came here in 1999;
• also the dance of the desert: the sear of the sun, the burn of the wind, the fangs of the winter; the silent nights with stone pillows; the soul-stretching solitude, the bone-chattering boredom, the days without distraction from yourself; the impermanence of the mission: knowing that everything will come to a certain end once enough grass and grain disappear, only to be lived again once it regrows. The constant reminder of your place in the circle.
• The Spanish have a saying: pueblo pequeño, infierno grande. The smaller the town, the bigger the hell. Even in the most tragic details, though, you find a measure of magic realism: Miguel riding his bike for hours to buy ice after his wife’s miscarriage; the neighbor burying her pot of honey to keep it from the Fascists’ sticky fingers;