Food festival in Pinoso

We had a couple of pals who moved from Pinoso to the coast. One of the reasons they gave for their move was that the food in Pinoso was a bit boring. Its true that if you're after Mexican or Thai or French cuisine then Pinoso isn't the perfect spot. I suppose it's a matter of taste (sic) but I definitely like the local offer. And you'll know, if you've ever got past the most basic conversation with a local, that food is a safe, and always interesting, conversation in Spain. If Brits talk about weather then the Spanish talk about food.

Every area of Spain has its specialities and every region is quite sure that they have the best food. The one thing that all Spaniards agree on is that Spain has the best food in the world. 

There is something very purist about Spanish food. If you're British, and you eat meat, then your Shepherd's Pie is not quite the same as your mum's or your brother's. You add garlic or tomato or mushrooms and they don't. This doesn't seem to be the same with the Spanish. If the recipe for tortilla de patatas says eggs, potatoes, salt and oil then that's what people think should be in it (there's a debate about whether tortilla de patatas should, or should not, have onion). That's why Jamie Oliver was pilloried for adding chorizo to paella. If he'd avoided the name and said I'm going to make rice and things (arroz con cosas) nobody would have batted an eyelid.

Pinoso is proud of its food. As well as things like the rabbit and snail rice, the rabbit stew, the meatballs in broth, the garlic pancakes and the sausages there is a pride too in some of the local biscuits (the rollitos), cakes and pastries (like perusas, toñas and coca). One of the things that often tickles me is that I'll say to some local that I had a particularly good rice, a paella, in this or that restaurant (in the company of lots of Spaniards) and they say they really should invite me around to try the paella made by their gran/mum/aunt because it's better than anything on offer in the overpriced restaurants.

Anyway, each year Pinoso runs something called the Mostra de la Cuina de Pinos. Well it does when some inconvenient virus doesn't make everything very difficult. It's a showcase for the local food. The idea is clever and simple. A certain number of the local restaurants participate. On the same date the main dishes, and a couple of the starters, are the same in all the restaurants but all mark the difference by adding in extra starters. Each restaurant also gets let off the leash a couple of times during the festival when they offer a tasting menu. The more "popular" dishes, the rabbit stew and the rice with rabbit and snails, get a reprise with two outings each.

The participating restaurants this year are Alfonso, el Timón, la Torre, la Vid and el Poli. There is a bit of a variation in price. Alfonso is charging 40€, la Torre 35€ and the rest 30€. The difference in price may be a reflection of the policy of each of the restaurants but it may also be reflected in the style and number of the "extra" starters. 

The main course on 15th February is gachamiga (the garlic and flour pancake), on the 16th it's fasegures or pelotas (the meatballs) on the 17th it's ajos pinoseros con conejo "picat" which is a rabbit and garlic shoots dish. The gazpacho (the rabbit stew with the "pancake") is on the menu for the 18th and 25th and the rabbit and snail paella on the 19th and 26th. All of the restaurants do their tasting menus on the 20th and 27th.

All of the information is on this link. Be careful if you just Google the event as Pinoso Town Hall hasn't updated its website (how unusual) and they are showing the 2019 menus and prices! If you've not done it before, and the prices don't make you blanch, it's well worth the experience but you'll probably need to book up early as it tends to be pretty popular.

Mostra de la Cuina del Pinós

I don't know if modern, young Britons still eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday but I'm pretty sure that Yorkshire Pudding is alive and well on the Sceptred Isle. As I remember it pancakes and Yorkshires share the same simple mix - eggs, flour, milk. The sort of things that any self respecting house would have had in the larder at almost any time in British history.

A lot of traditional Spanish food has a similar backstory. When we lived in Salamanca pig products were big in the local cuisine, up in Asturias they use the local beans for one of the traditional dishes and all over Spain there are variations on bread crumbs fried up with tiny scraps of meat which, folk tale has it, was a food for shepherds who ended up with a lot of stale bread. Combining the ingredients readily to hand. It works for speciality foods too. Xixona makes turrón, a sort of nougat essential to celebrate Christmas, and turrón comes from combining eggs, honey and almonds all of which abound near Xixona.

Pinoso, like everywhere in Spain, is proud of its food. The star dish, without a shadow of a doubt is the local paella, only a couple of grains of rice thick and whose main ingredients, after rice, are rabbit and snails but flavoured with local, easy to find, products like garlic, thyme and parsley. Even the cooking style, over open fires fuelled with bundles of twigs from pruning the vines, adds those subtle, but essential, tastes.

Second up in local fame is, almost certainly, a rabbit stew served on and with shreds of a thick pancake, made from wheat flour, water and salt, which goes by the name of gazpacho - the same name as the completely different cold Andalucian soup. There are lots of other local foodstuffs from wine and sausage to cakes and biscuits. With an eye on promoting tourism Pinoso has an event to celebrate the local food.

The idea of this event, called the Mostra de la Cuina del Pinós, is that the town's restaurants, five this year, offer the same food on the same day - meatballs on Tuesday, stew on Thursday etc. Every day of the event they also serve the same entrees (slices of sausages and pipirrana). They are allowed to let their imaginations run wild on the four starters and on the puddings. The price has gone up over the years but it's still a very reasonable (given the quantity and the quality) 30€ per head (well except for one restaurant that has broken ranks and is charging 40€).

I'm not going to describe most of the dishes but just for any Spaniards reading the main courses are: Gachamiga, Fassegures del Pinós, Ajos Pinoseros con conejo y "picat", Gazpachos con conejo y caracoles and Arroz con conejo y caracoles. Still time, as I write to book up for a feed.

So we went on Thursday, the Ajos Pinoseros day. We thought we knew what we were getting and we expected a sort of fry up of rabbit and wild garlic. We were completely wrong. The obvious ingredients of what we ate were rabbit and chickpeas served in a shallow dish with a fair bit of gravy or broth that you spooned ali oli into. Ali oli is a thick emulsion that we Brits usually describe as garlic mayonnaise. I really enjoyed it and I thought we'd eaten but, as we downed the cutlery, we were presented with a soup in which floated croutons and pieces of boiled eggs. That was the picat and my guess is that it uses the broth from cooking the rabbit.

Now I know that describing food dishes isn't particularly interesting but why I noticed it was that it was a bit like the cocido that Maria Dolores cooked for us just a little while ago. We thought we knew what we were getting but we were wrong. Still so much to find out and so many calories doing it!