Not raising a glass but it is a toast

A couple of weeks ago we went over to Extremadura. It's a while since we've been there and it's a nice part of the world. Easy to get to too. No planes, no passports, no luggage restrictions. Just tank up the motor and point it in the right direction.

We took the scenic route. We stopped over for the night in Andalucia, in Córdoba, before heading on to Zafra, Mérida, Cáceres, Trujillo and Plasencia. It's a while since we've been so far from home in Spain and it reminded me of something I already knew, but often forget, those small but significant regional differences.

Toast for breakfast. Usual, traditional, commonplace all over Spain. Near to home toast is, usually, half of a smallish breadstick or baguette. Just the half, media or, if you want the whole thing entera. The most basic version comes dry and you self add the oil and salt. The next step up, pricewise, is to add a layer of grated tomato (in Catalonia they usually rub the tomato directly into the bread). Richer people add serrano, cured, ham and even cheese. In trendy spots they offer avocado too. 

In Andalucia the differences from home are subtle. There is a tendency to flat slices of bread though "burger bun" molletes are also pretty common. Bread apart, the routine with oil and grated tomato is much of a muchness. Pork dripping, with or without paprika, wasn't on offer. In Sevilla and Cádiz it would have been. The next day, in Zafra, now into Extremadura, the tomato looked completely different. It had been mashed up with garlic and oil and then blitzed with one of those hand blenders. To be honest it looked a bit unpleasant. Our cats have been known to produce something with a similar colour scheme and texture. Fortunately I'd chosen to be radically local and I'd asked for the local paté, cachuela. Adding pork products to toast is big in Extremadura because of the fame of the local, cured ham - it's often quoted as the best in Spain. Maggie was stoic as she chewed on her toast with tomato. Next morning she wondered if they might have the Madrid (and ever so English) variant of butter and jam. In Madrid, where Maggie lived years ago, butter and jam was the norm. Usually in Madrid the bread has the same colour and consistency as a slice of Mother's Pride but three times as thick. Extremadura offered sliced bread too but from far less industrial looking loaves. In Trujillo they even offered brown bread. I wonder if there's a doctorate in this?  Varieties of toast on the Iberian Peninsula.

about this thing of trying the local variant I should mention my consternation in not noticing something in Córdoba before I ordered. When in Rome and all that. There lots of people were having pitufos for breakfast. I've only ever used the word pitufo to describe what we Brits call Smurfs but in Córdoba a toasted sandwiches with oil, cooked ham and cheese is a pitufo. I understand that they're more typical of Malaga. 

Now moving on to croquetas...

Coffee break

One of the worst films I've ever seen in Spanish, and I've seen some shockers, is called Balada triste de trompeta by the director Álex de la Iglesia. There is one good scene in it though. The protagonists have just finished their meal. The waiter asks if anyone wants coffee and every one of the fifteen or so people around the table specifies a different type of coffee.

This is not the Starbucks/Costa/Nero thing. No big coffees served in everything from bucket sized mugs to drinking through a hole in a plastic topped, hand scorching, paper cup. No expensive buns either. No this is just common or garden coffee in a common or garden bar or restaurant.

It's one of those things I'd stop noticing but we were on holiday in Andalucia last week and I, we, noticed this very specific ordering because of the accent - the Andalucians have a way of swallowing letters - and because, as good holidaymakers, we were gawping around us.

From time to time people still ask about instant coffee, more  accurately what most do is stress that they don't want their decaff from a sachet but from the coffee machine. I suspect this is because when decaff first came on the market it was generally available in bars as one dose sachets of instant Nescafé.

Most Spanish bar coffee comes out of one of those hissing machines that pass boiling water through the grounds. If I have to name them I tend to say Gaggia or espresso machines. It's interesting that both forms are Italian. I suppose, as in so many things, the Italians marketed much better, much earlier, than the Spanish or the French and, hence, the generic name is the Italian one. So the English speaking world asks for caffè latte, caffè espresso or cappuccino even when the names are given an English language twist as in "Can I have a skinny latte, please?"

Spanish coffee has three basic types: solo for the thimbleful of thick coffee, cortado for a short coffee with a touch of milk and con leche for the milkier coffees. Some of the Italian names are also used in Spain. Americano, for instance, is what you'd usually ask for if you wanted espresso/solo watered down with hot water. The more traditional Spanish name is solo largo, a long solo. Occasionally, some waiter will feign ignorance of things Italian.

Some bars offer a couple of varieties of beans, maybe torrefacto, which is a coffee bean roasted with sugar, but in most ordinary bars you get what you're given. The plethora of possibilities come, mainly, from the amounts of coffee, water and milk. Most of the varieties don't have a specific name but there are lots of possibilities with the simplest probably being the proportion of coffee grounds to water. Some people complicate that a tad by specifying water temperature and, when the weather is warmer, it's very common for people to pour their coffee over ice. Next you might start adding milk: milk can be hot or cold, it can have varying amounts of fat or be lactose free and some people ask for a sort of milk that isn't really milk - the stuff made from soya or sawdust. People even specify the vessel; lots of people seem to prefer coffee in glasses rather than cups and the details of the glass design can become very specific. The only other variable I can think of is the sugar. White sugar in little sachets on the saucer is the default but asking for saccharin is common enough. I think I've only ever heard foreigners ask for brown sugar.

So, back in Andalucia, made special by that letter consuming accent. "Ponme un nubla'o, descafeina'o de maquina, con leche sin lactosa y en vaso, porfa" (Can I have a cloudy, decaff with lactose free milk in a glass please). Splendid.

Lola sings

I presume that Spaniards know what Coplas sound like. I don't really. No, let's be honest I don't at all. I know it's a sort of poetic metre and, having Googled it, I now know that the copla is a form with four verses and four lines in each verse. Coplas have a musical form too. Again, remembering that I am probably wrong, think of an overwrought Spanish waily sort of song and you probably have it. On the other hand you may be thinking of something a bit too Flamenco. Andalucia is the part of Spain that supplies nearly all the clichés - the frocks, the hats, the dancing, the horses, the sherry, the bulls etc. and a strong and regularly mimicked accent. I think coplas are Andaluz too.

Not to let detail get in the way of a post there was a big, blousy woman called Lola Flores who was famous for singing coplas. I've half looked at a couple of videos and she does a lot of lifting her dress off the floor and stamping as she sings. Lola was famous for her performances on stage, screen and TV but also for saying what she thought and for not paying her taxes. I heard something on the radio about her today where she was standing up for trans women. Given that she died in 1995 and that her peak years were in the 1970s that must have been a radically brave opinion. 

So Lola is a long dead Spanish icon. She's all over the place at the moment though because of a beer advert. For Cruzcampo an Andalucian beer which I quite like but which has plenty of detractors. Given that it's owned by Heineken, they're probably right. The video is made with a technology called Deepfake which digitally places the face of one person on the body of another and generates moving images. So, in this ad the face of Lola Flores is grafted on to the body, I think, of her daughter Lolita Flores. The daughter does the voice too, but the moving face looks like Lola. 

In the ad Lola goes on about the Andalucian accent, which, as she explains isn't just about how you speak but how you put on makeup or how you dip your bread in fried egg - it's the essence of home, your roots and the importance of being true to yourself. There are lots of side references to Andaluz culture, like the painting that I've used in the heading. It's a stylish, modern ad that basks in Andalucia and features a couple of still slightly undiscovered but hip (if you still say hip) musicians including the band Califato ¾ and a singer a bit Rosalía like called María José Llergo. 

It's a talking point. I've seen newspaper articles about the ad, a slot on the TV news and an academic style interview, on an artsy radio programme, about Lola's lasting influence on popular culture. A soon as I looked on YouTube there are "making of" videos and lots of commentaries on it, as well as the original ad.

Because of the media burble about it I took more interest. I was well pleased that I knew the slightly hip musicians but there were three or four words that I didn't know. Obviously I do now. I thought a couple of them were great. Quejío for instance is a word to describe the "Aayyyy!" sound in Andaluz type songs and the other was Cochinchina which means something miles and miles away. It's based on the French word for the part of Vietnam that France first occupied in the 1860s. Remember the French got kicked out of Vietnam before the USA. How arcane is that?

Maggie says I'm a bit odd at times but I was really pleased how much of Spain I was able to extract from a, finally, inconsequential sixty second TV advert. Nice job Cruzcampo.