Decline and Fall

Besides perfume and cars there are multiple adverts on Spanish telly for food. Particularly for fast food or franchised food chains - Foster's Hollywood, KFC, Domino's - or for quick to eat food - Casa Tarradellas pizzas, Yatekomo noodles. Now I'm not a discerning diner. I was a big fan of Spam, I like crabsticks and I still buy el Pozo meat products despite seeing the stomach turning documentary on TV. But I have to say that the adverts are putting me off a bit. The food is all so shiny and bathed in red or yellow sauce of dubious parentage. Eating with hands squidged over with sauce appears to be a positive thing.

I have a Spanish pal who is very set in his ways. From what I can tell he eats a lot of very traditional Pinoso food. If it's not local then, whether it's at home in a restaurant, he sticks to the tried and tested - grilled meat, stews, rice dishes and the like. I usually meet this friend around 12.30 so, a long hour later, I'm saying goodbye because I have to get home to finish preparing lunch. He occasionally asks what I'm cooking, Chicken and coconut curry I say, or cassoulet or even turkey fajitas and he looks at me as though I'm talking gobbledygook not just remembering what a cook book tells me.

I was telling this friend that we'd had a bit of a disappointment with a restaurant we'd gone to. We'd had some friends visiting who have a house on the coast. We'd planned to go to a local restaurant that does very traditional Pinoso food. Escalivada, pipirrana, fried cheese with tomato jam, bread with ali-oli and grated tomato, local cold sausages and the like to start. The main dish would usually be rice with rabbit and snails (the local paella), a rabbit stew or the big meatballs in broth. As the meal grinds to its inevitable conclusion, after the pudding, they give you mistela, the sweet wine, and perusas, the air filled cakes. Unfortunately the restaurant had a wedding reception that day, no room for us. We chose another restaurant, one we'd meant to try for ages. It was fine. It did lots of straightforward things like Russian salad, broken eggs, croquettes, prawns in garlic, patatas bravas blah, blah as starters. Mains were lots of varieties of fish, pork and beef served grilled or fried and there were also various rice/paella dishes. Nothing wrong with it. Absolutely fine. Eaten and forgotten.

So, back to my friend. I'm telling him about this. He says but surely the traditional food would be nothing new to your visiting friends if they have a house here in the province. I tell him that, on the coast there is plenty of food but that it's, generally, international. In fact I tell him here in Pinoso most of the restaurants serve food that would be equally at home in Brussels, Milwaukee or Nuneaton. He doesn't agree. He says it's easy to get paella on the coast. I know, from past conversations, that he goes to the same handful of restaurants time after time because that's where he can get what he's looking for. A self fulfilling prophecy. I try to explain what I mean. He's thinking of paella made individually, to order. He's not thinking about the stuff that served up in individual portions, microwaved hot as necessary, sold to tourists as the dish before the pork chop and chips.

Not that long ago the set meals, the menús, started with a choice of something like soup (fish, garlic, onion and seafood were favourites), possibly some pasta, maybe a stew like lentejas or cocido, maybe some boiled or grilled veg. The second dish, main course if you prefer, would be meat or fish, a pork chop, a chicken fillet, sardines, a piece of hake, maybe kidneys. The pudding would be ice cream, flan or fruit of the day. The food was hardly haut cuisine but it was something with identifiable ingredients. You could have coffee instead of pudding of course. The red wine was so rough it came with gaseosa (sugary, fizzy water) to make it palatable. White wine was a rarity and beer was beer - that's fizzy lager. The quality wasn't good but it was honest sort of stuff using cheap but straightforward ingredients cooked by someone who was a cook - it often involved using up yesterday's leftovers.

Nowadays the roots of the set meals are still the same but the choice is different. It's difficult to explain in a way but the style has changed, it's less honest. In the past the menú came with cheap ingredients - the cheap cuts of meat, only veg in season or something produced or hunted locally. Nowadays the ingredients are cheap because they are cheapened versions of what would once have been decent quality food - farmed, steroid fed, fish, chicken bred with oversize breasts and veg grown under artificial lighting in huge plastic greenhouses. The food is still rooted in Spain but it's not really Spanish. It's a bit like getting bangers and mash at the local pub in the UK with the sausages made with mechanically separated meat and potato out of a packet. Here it might be rice served with bits of pepper, chorizo and chicken.

It might be the puddings, the afters, the sweets that most highlight this change. The list of puddings after a Spanish menú del día is, no longer, three or four items. You will be offered any number of possibilities and every single one comes out of a packet that has been in the refrigerated display. More choice, less quality.

It's a real shame that those people chose that day to be married but I'd still like to wish them the happiest of lives together!

Botillo and friends

Last week we went on holiday. We stopped off at a couple of places but our destination was Finisterre, the End of the Earth, in Galicia.

When you travel in Spain, which usually means that you will eat in a restaurant, the choice of food is simple. If you were to travel to Valencia for instance you would probably order paella, if you were to come to Pinoso the paella would be the rabbit and snails variety. Go to Cartagena you might try caldero. In Asturias the first choice would probably be fabada and in Cataluña you might try calçots. Eating the regional food is something that Spaniards do when they visit and it's something we mimic.

We were in Ponferrada, which is still in León but closing in on Galicia. There was something on the set meals list called botillo which turned out to be a reddish ball like thing full of bones, lumps of fatty pork seasoned with paprika all shoved into a gut skin and served with cabbage, potatoes and chickpeas. It is an experience I won't be repeating but the experiment is always worth a shot. 

Now, although she would deny this, Maggie is a bit of a picky eater. She doesn't like fish, she's not at all keen on most veg. and with severe limitations on what sort and style of meat. This can cause problems. For instance Finisterre has a fish dock. This means that its restaurants tend to major in things harvested from the sea. What's more that the offer is quite traditional. There must have been ten or more restaurants in a line and all of them did fritura which is, usually, several varieties of deep fried, and often battered seafood and fish, served by weight. It's a big thing in several Spanish seaside towns. Go to Santa Pola and watch big family groups devour kilos of fried squid and cuttlefish. As well as fritura Finisterre also does barnacles, razor shells, crayfish, lobster, clams, scallops, sea bass, cockles, mussels and so on. Now I wouldn't like to suggest that these restaurants don't have steak or chicken and chips but asking for those things is a bit like ordering egg and chips in a Chinese restaurant. If you're in Finisterre then the expectation is that you will eat fish. We ended up in a pizza and burger place having a conversation about why, using the same basic products, these restaurants choose not to vary their offer and so compete. It's not a huge leap to, for example, clam chowder, seafood pasta, ceviche, curried scallops, crab cakes or scallops with a bean salad. But that's not what Spanish restaurants do. All the eateries offer the same food and the same basic recipes. The repetition of set meals featuring codillo, empanada, pimientos de padrón, lacón con pimentón, callos con garbanzos and churrasco throughout Galicia was almost complete.

Spain is full of great cooks and splendid restaurants but the majority of them, at least the ones within our financial reach, offer cheap and plentiful food as their staple. There are places, lots of them, that offer something more contemporary, more adventurous, but they are nowhere near as ubiquitous as the chop and chips places which is a shame.

Food heresy

People, in general, seem to be very interested in food. Spaniards certainly are. I think I've said before that the first time I ever managed to catch the drift of a conversation in Spanish, when I presumed that the discussion would centre on Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or, perhaps, the novels of Kafka it turned out to be an impassioned debate about the pros and cons of adding peas, or not, to some sort of stew.

Spanish food tends to plainness. Spicy is, generally, not seen as good. Recipes are often traditional and made from the ingredients to hand. It's permissible to argue about whether tortilla de patatas should have onion or not but basically the recipe is eggs, potatoes, oil, salt and nothing else. Woe betide the TV chef who thinks a clove of garlic or a couple capers might spice it up a bit. That's why Jamie Oliver got so much stick about chorizo in paella. Paella and arroz (rice) are interchangeable words in some situations but paella has fixed versions. If you want to cook rice with things in it that's fine - to each their own - but if you want to call it a paella the ingredients are limited and unalterable. The Spanish thinking is that you should not tamper with perfection. That perfection may be in anything; there are strong opinions about everything from black pudding, ham, cheese, cherries and oil through to how to serve suckling pig or what the perfect squid sandwich looks like.

Given this interest and passion for food the quality of the fare in run of the mill restaurants is really surprising. The menú del día, the daily menú, the set meal, is a Spanish institution. It's becoming less fashionable in big cities but it's still available all over the place. They're cheap enough and they're usually fine. There are (routinely) three courses and the price varies but let's say that they're about 10 or 11€. I can't remember though the last time that I ate a menú that really impressed me. Let me say again that they're fine. Perfectly edible, occasionally imaginative, extremely good value and plentiful. For me a bloke in a restaurant in a restaurant in Elda summed up the usual situation. To the habitual question, from the server, asking if the food had been good the chap avoided the equally inevitable reply and said "normal" which translates as fine, fine in that not wishing to get involved way, fine with the provisos of mass catering, fine in the way that someone with persistent arthritic pain answers the question as to how they are.

The prompt for this post came because we had our first menú for over three months this Sunday, in Santa Pola. The 12€ included a salad which was fine, a bit overcold and lacking in the usual spoonful of tuna top centre. The mushrooms in a such and such sauce sounded great but turned out to be deep fried McCain type jobs. Blindfolded I wouldn't have known what I was eating but they were fine. I had the cachopo as a main which is a dangerous choice - it's basically a battered steak, cheese and ham fritter - they can be quality food and yet so many times they taste like something out of a freezer at Iceland. The watermelon was nearly frozen but fine and the coffee was okey dokey too. Uninspiring, forgettable and perfectly acceptable. I wouldn't ever go back to the eatery out of choice but if that were all there were then, well, fine.

Now lots of people would disagree with me and I plead guilty to being old and grumpy. We have a local Indian restaurant. People keep reporting how good it is both face to face and in the social media. We thought it was average to poor when we first tried it within days of its opening. We listened to the rave reviews and we thought, maybe, they'd needed to get into their stride so we tried again. I thought it was poor. Covid 19 strikes and the restaurant is quick to take advantage of the rules and pushes its takeaway menu. The reviews from Brits are eulogistic. It must be me, I think, so we spend with them again. Terribly boring and rather unpleasant was my critique. Now maybe it's just me. Then again no, because, every now and again we bump into a restaurant, and it's never a menú place, where the nuances of the food are important, a place that reminds me of that conversation about the rightness, or not, of peas in a stew.

The menoo

It's nice to think that people remember me from time to time. This week two old friends sent me the same article they'd both seen in the Guardian about the slow death of the Spanish "menú del día". The piece said that ordinary working Spaniards no longer had time to eat a big meal at lunchtimes, that diners were looking for different sorts of food and that restaurants were no longer able to work on such low profit returns. Actually I wrote about some of this in ปลาออกจากน้ำ  (Thai for fish out of water) when we were in Madrid. So, I partly agree and I'm sure that the Guardian correspondent is right in suggesting that there is a trend away from the traditional three course meal. Nonetheless, away from the big cities, the menú is very definitely alive and well.

Just before we go on something about the pronunciation. Menu, pronounced the English way, is carta in Spanish. Here we're talking about menú, with the accent over the U. This word is pronounced something like menoo, the full phrase is menoo del dear, menú del día and it's a fixed price, set meal.

The menú is, generally, served in restaurants at lunchtime (2pm to 4pm) on working days from Monday to Friday. The price is fixed and it usually includes two savoury courses and then a pudding. It generally comes with a drink - water, wine, beer or pop - and bread. Spanish servers will be surprised if you order a tea or coffee to drink alongside your meal; hot drinks are for afterwards not during. Often, especially on the Mediterranean coast, you'll get a basic salad thrown in too. It's usually an either or between coffee and dessert though sometimes you get both as part of the package. Despite being so ubiquitous it's an unusual style of Spanish meal because each individual orders separately and eats separately. So often, when eating in Spain, the food is ordered to be shared.

There used to be legislation about menus but the Guardian article told me that was changed in 2010 so here are a few of the little tricks and ruses to look out for.

The most common trick, especially for tourists, is that they are drawn in by the fixed price menú advertised on a chalk board or similar outside the restaurant. Once seated the tourists are handed a carta, the a la carte menu. They're a bit unsure if they read the board correctly, it's difficult to ask and so they order from the menu and end up paying more. Usually it's a bit of a con. If you ask for the menú they'll tell you what it is though it may well not be written down anywhere except on that board outside. Sometimes the fact that they don't offer you a menú is not the restaurant being tricky. As I said most fixed meals are available at lunchtime on workdays. Britons often think of the principal meal as being the evening meal. If you turn out in the evening there is unlikely to be a fixed meal available but the advert for the lunchtime meal may still be there. The same at the weekends or on Bank Holidays.

Another of the standard tourist area dodges is to charge for things that are usually included - like the drinks, the bread or the salad. The server puts them on the table, you eat them and they turn up on the bill. If you read the the menú information it will be there; if the menú listing doesn't mention drinks (bebidas) or bread (pan) then expect to pay extra for them. Even when you know the extras are coming it can sometimes be a nasty surprise. We went in a place opposite the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. We knew the drinks would be extra, we knew that it didn't include the coffee or pudding but it was still a good price for such a tourist mecca and the place looked nice enough. They charged me 6€ for a bottle of beer.

Most menus are not haute cuisine. A pal used to describe the menú choice as chop and chips. Plain and filling would be a kinder description though, every now and again, a menú can be surprisingly good. Even today, around here, there are, very occasionally, dead cheap but perfectly good menus available at around 7€. The majority are in the 9€ to 12€ range. There is often a second group of slightly better looking menus in some eateries  - maybe 15€ to 18€. If the restaurant does offer a fixed menú on Saturday or Sunday expect the prices to be higher; the 12€ menú becoming 15€ and the 15€ menú becoming 20€. Obviously there are price differences with geography. If you're in Benalmadena or Benidorm then the food is likely to be cheaper than in Barcelona or Bilbao.

Still a good way to kill the couple of hours when the streets are deserted.

Parallells where none exist

Sunday and nothing much to do so we went for a bit of a drive around. We went over Zarza way and into the Sierra de la Pila. Maggie suggested a tapas place in Algorrobo for lunch but as we were on single track mountain roads we could either go back via Zarza or round via Fortuna. It was about quarter past three as we rolled into Fortuna so I suggested eating there. Maggie wasn't keen. Fortuna is not her favourite place. A few minutes later we were out of the danger zone and into Baños. Maggie spotted a sign for La Fuente which is a camp site built around a thermal spring.

Now when I think camp sites I think lugging water in big jerry cans, wellis, shower blocks with concrete floors and water that never boils as the flame under the pan dances in the stiff breeze at the door to your, ever so slightly, cramped tent. It's a long time since I've been camping. I presume the experience is very different nowadays but perception and reality are very separate things.

When I worked in Fortuna, I occasionally mentioned camping and camp sites to my English language students. There is a linguistic misunderstanding about the words camping and camp site for Spanish speakers. The problem with my explanation was that for the youngsters of Fortuna their experience of a camp site is not a muddy field with caravan and tent pitches. It is a place with a restaurant where you go for birthday parties and communion meals and where, with suitable weather, you go to use the swimming pool.

La Fuente is a camping, a camp site, but there were no tents. There were hut sized chalets and places to park caravans and motorhomes. There were a lot of motorhomes and lots and lots of them had Dutch and Belgian plates as they so often do. I think there is a sub class of Netherlanders who spend their time sitting outside their motorhomes in Spain. There was bright paintwork, classical Greek style statues and lots of people in bathrobes.

There was also a 12€ menú. Not bad for a Sunday. The look of the  dining room suggested that we were not in for an epicurean feast but there were scores of noisy, constantly moving people so we reckoned it must be OK. We got a table, the waitress scooped up the remains of the previous diners meal in the paper table cloth, Dick Whittington style, and before long we had our drinks, the salad was on the table and the food ordered. The meal was nothing spectacular but we cleared our plates happily enough.

Just like in the UK going for Sunday lunch is a bit of a Spanish ritual. The roast beef and Yorkshire pudding equivalent around here is usually rice with rabbit and snails but at the cheaper end there are lots of chop and chips or fish and chip type set meals - salad, starter, main, pudding, drink, bread and coffee - for between 12 and 15€. Fixed price, set meals aren't so easy to come by on Sundays as they are the rest of the week and they tend to be three or four euros more at the weekend than they are on work days. If you abandon the fixed menu and go for the rice option, or whatever the regional favourite is, then expect it to work out around 25 to 30€ per head.

I was quite taken with the kitschness of la Fuente but, somehow, the photos didn't capture it.