Paying the premium

When I went to the hole in the wall to get some cash there was a turrón stall in my way. Turrón is a sweet confectionery, associated with the Spanish Christmas, made with almonds, oil, and sugar. In the average supermarket a 250g bar of turrón will cost about 2.50€, most supermarkets carry something slightly better at, maybe 10€ a bar, but most steer away from the handcrafted product because it is breathtakingly expensive. There are all sorts of varieties of turrón, but the traditional ones are the hard and brittle Alicante variety and the soft, oozing oil Jijona style. The varieties of turrón, with chocolate or fruit are really for people who don't like turrón; they aren't much to do with turrón and are trading on the name.

The chances are that if you have some turrón this Christmas, it will be ordinary production line stuff. You might like it; you might not; but it's unlikely to send you into paroxysms of delight. The same is probably true of the majority of foodstuffs that Spaniards tend to rave about and which they buy in truckloads at this time of year. 

For instance angulas, or baby eels, are another Christmas delicacy. I had a quick Google and you can get fresh ones at 118€ per 100g. If that's a little steep the alternative is something called gulas which are made from ground fish reconstituted to look like elvers. A packet of gulas costs a bit less than 3€. This is lumpfish roe as against caviar territory. 

Miguel Angel Revilla, four times president of Cantabria, and well known character, used to always present quality, expensive, anchovies from Cantabria on his official visits. The anchovies I buy for my sandwiches come in triple packs for less than 3€.

It's similar with prawns—what we Britons call prawns. I don't think I'll ever understand the differences in quality when buying the right and wrong type of prawns. Whether gambas blancas, gambas rojas, gambones, carabineros or langostinos are the best and whether the ones from Denia are better than those from Huelva or Garrucha. Not knowing can cost you dear. Six of the better variety in an ordinary restaurant cost me 48€. It still smarts and that was six or seven years ago now.

Faced with such price variations the majority of us tend to plump for something with an everyday cost or, maybe, we push out the boat and buy the next step up. Then, when we taste it, we wonder what all the fuss was about. The problem is that we've bought run-of-the-mill. Spaniards wax lyrical about their air-cured ham. It can be spectacular but you have to be willing to pay for the quality, acorn fed, variety and eat it sliced wafer thin. The ham that most of us get most of the time—in a ham sandwich or as a slice of ham on our breakfast toast—can be anything between average and chewing bacon.

The point I'm trying, so long windedly, to make is that Spaniards often enthuse about certain food products that you may find uninspirational. There are lots of classic dishes, firm Spanish favourites, that often seem very commonplace. Croquetas are a good example; lots have the consistency of wallpaper paste, are served semi heated and taste of nothing much but, if you strike lucky or know where to go they are exceedingly good. Paella is another dish where the difference between a made to order paella cooked with care and the proper ingredients has nothing in common with the bright yellow rice served as part of a set meal in a tourist restaurant. 

Lots of these foods are rolled out at Christmas - mantecados and polvorones, peladillas, roscones, turrón, angulas, gooseneck barnacles (percebes) while other, all-year-round favourites, get a special outing at Christmas—prawns, croquetas, ham, roast lamb, and around here even broth with meatballs (variously named pelotas, relleno or even faseguras). If you get the opportunity go for the quality stuff - it's usually worth the stretch.

Classics at Christmas

In January 2006, when I started this blog, anything I wrote about things Spanish was new. With the passing years repetition crept in. Nowadays I often repeat things. I have almost no alternative. My only hope is that new readers will think the regurgitated topics are new.

I was playing with the idea of writing, yet another, Christmas piece, then I considered the number of seasonal entries I've written over the years. Thinking economy of effort and suchlike I decided to do a BBC and to trot out the old stuff again as though it were classic. I have to say that even just tagging up the entries bored me after a while. I hope they don't bore you right from the start and whatever number you plough through, before surrendering, you find something informative or amusing or, at least, readable.  

Click on the link to get to the older post. Sorry about all the repetition over the years and please remember that what was true in the past may have changed slightly over time.

Christmas begins The Christmas lottery

They think it's all over This one's about how the dates of Christmas are not the same as in the UK

Eating at Christmas A self explanatory title I think

And some lemons for the prawns This one is about differences between UK and Spanish Christmases

17 million Spaniards or 63% of the population earn less than 1,000€ gross per month and 4,422,359 are out of work. This is one of the blogs that has the largest number of hits. I suspect it's for the title which has almost nothing to do with the content. There's a bit about what a Christmassy day the 5th January is 

Bring me pine logs hither Mention of our venerable Christmas tree. in fact we replaced it for this 2023 Christmas

Seasonal snippets All sorts of Christmas things - for once the title is a good reflection of the content

Losing my grip Mainly about a Christmas lottery advert

Rather reassuring The Christmas run up story of years and years ago

Tales of turrón This one doesn't read badly after all this time - obviously enough it's about turrón

Stamping the Christmas cards Just what it says

Underwear, grapes and bubbly New Year's traditions

The goose is getting fat  Those not quite so obvious Christmas things

Drawing to a close  Christmas ends with the Three Kings in Spain

Not a dry eye in the house Christmas concerts and community

Jingle bells  I think it's a bit of a Christmas comparison in two countries

They think it's all over The things that happen in January as part of Christmas. I've even used the title before!

Pale blue dot Christmas lights

Fat chance The Christmas lottery - again

Fattening of geese Christmas cards and British supermarkets

So this is Christmas It seems to be an all embracing article

So this is Christmas

I haven't spent Christmas in the UK for umpteen years, so I may not be as expert on British customs as I think. Nonetheless, unless things have changed drastically, the first tentative signs of Christmas show up in the shops in September. By November the telly is full of Christmas ads full of good cheer, bonhomie and cute robins. Cities, towns and villages start to turn on lights from mid-December and even with online shopping I'm sure that shopping centres, supermarkets and places like restaurants and pubs get busier and busier through December, all building up to the big day. Finally, it's Christmas Day. You do your best to look pleased with the illuminated pullover and the novelty underwear and you console yourself by setting about the mountains of food. Boxing Day you might stay at home to and eat and drink more, or it may be that you have to visit relatives. Maybe, instead, you might thirst for action after so much slouching around and go for a bracing walk or head out to one of those unmissable Boxing Day sales. And that's Christmas really, well the Christmas for those of us who are reasonably financially secure. There's obviously the New Year's Eve stuff to come next week but that's not really Christmas, is it?

Now I've done Spanish Christmases to death in previous blogs but I did think I might be able to do a bit on the organisation and pretend it was something new. Just as I said that I may be wrong about British Christmases I have to remind you that any generalisations I make about Spanish Christmases are generalisations. 

Spaniards have their ways of organising things. That methodology may be better or worse but, usually, it's just different. Think about supermarkets. Being a Briton I might expect the Nutella to be alongside the jam but it isn't, it's with the sweets and chocolate. Think about what you consider to be morning, something that stretches till noon, whereas Spaniards consider that it runs till lunchtime, somewhere around 2pm. Consider how Spaniards often share food in the middle of the table, rather than claiming their own private portions. Consider how there are no continuity announcers on Spanish telly. Nothing but smallish details but things that might surprise someone new to Spain. 

It's a bit the same with Christmas. It starts later in Spain than in the UK, only a bit but definitely later. Even Vigo, where they really go to town on Christmas lights, doesn't switch on till around November 20th. Pundits always say that the starting pistol sounds with the Christmas lottery on the 22nd. Christmas Eve is big, big, big for family eating (I don't mean that literally, there's no turkey equivalent for Spaniards, no default Christmas meal, but it's certainly not family that you eat, no roast brother in law). Christmas Day is another day to eat with the family. Some Spanish families do gift giving on that day but it's still, probably, a minority of families who have Santa delivering gifts on Christmas Eve for Christmas Day. Boxing Day is nothing, well unless you're an Esteban in which case it's your saint's day - like in the song where the snow lays round about, deep and crisp and even. 

New Year's Eve is another family do with eating at home, wearing red underwear, popping twelve grapes and cava drinking all centring around midnight but, in most places, it's a family rather than a public event. That's obviously untrue if you're in the Puerta del Sol, or equivalent, at midnight but, as a general rule, the New Year is seen in at home and, after the campanadas, the older folk sip and nibble on whilst the younger people go out to do a bit of partying. 

But the heart of Christmas, the bit where everyone says "it's really about the children" is still to come. As January 5th and 6th approach the shopping frenzy heightens, the Royal Pages will be out and about collecting the Christmas lists for the Three Kings ready for the gift giving overnight on the 5th. That's the evening for the cabalgatas, the cavalcades, the town centre parades with their sweet throwing kings and elves, with camels, geese, flocks of goats (all of which are to be banned soon, or they may have already been outlawed, on animal cruelty grounds). One of the staples of the journalists in the crowd is to ask the sweet child with the high pitched voice which is their favourite King - The European one, the Asian one or the African one, all with their different coloured hair and beard (and maybe a boot polish face). Somewhere some city will get into the news for having Queens as well as Kings or some sort of politically correct twist to the event. This later Christmas is good if you're old enough to still give Christmas cards because, if you forgot any Spanish chums, handing over a card anytime up to the 5th won't be seen as being late. And the final, dying gasp of Christmas, the big doughnut shaped cakes on the 6th, the Roscón de Reyes. Oh, and of course the other big Christmas lottery del Niño, to add a certain roundness to it all.

After that, just as in the UK, there only remains the sighing on the bathroom scales and the sobbing as you check your card statement.

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And, if you're a glutton for punishment here are the links to several previous Christmas blogs 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2017a

Roast saddle of venison, tortilla and beans

I'm not much of a cook though I can usually produce something that is, at least, edible. That's not always the case; new recipes tend to turn out badly and, recently, I have had a series of culinary disasters. I did some beef, tomato and olive thing that tasted of salt and nothing else. There was another concoction that I ended up tipping directly into the bin, something with lots of cream and garlic. I'm safer when I cook up the lentils or one of the student favourites (well favourite with the one time students who are now beginning to draw their pensions or die) like spag bol and chilli con carne. Nonetheless my version of kebabs with chorizo is OK and that spaghetti with yoghurt and mushrooms and bacon isn't bad either. My shepherd's pie's perfectly tasty and there are plenty more in my repertoire that, whilst they may not exactly thrill the palette, do, at least, maintain the calorie input without hardship.

The stuff that goes into my meals comes from the shops in the form of veg and pulses and meat and cheese and eggs and stuff like that. The food may come in packets and boxes. It may have been grown under hectares of plastic, sprayed with hideous chemicals, never have felt the soil on its roots or the sun on its seed-pod but it still looks like a carrot, a lettuce or a chickpea. If it's an animal product then I wouldn't like to speculate as to whether the beast spent it's life confined in a tiny feeding station eating high protein feed made from fracked oil or recycled fish. Nonetheless, basically, whatever the food and however it got produced, it would still be recognisable as food to my forebears. The raw material of a meal rather than the finished product.

There have been prepared foods in Spanish supermarket freezers as long as I have lived here and somebody must buy them because they are still on sale. In fact I've noticed that much of the extra space in the newer larger store of a local supermarket has been taken up by new lines of pre-prepared stuff. I still don't see a lot of people buying it though. Usually the stuff on the supermarket belt in front of mine looks much like my stuff except that they have always remembered something that I've forgotten. I think it would be fair to say that most of the Spaniards around here do not buy things that come ready prepared. It's a sweeping generalisation and there are plenty of exceptions from pizzas to ready shaped meatballs. It may well be different in the bigger cities too but I think that most people in most homes still cook their food from scratch rather than heat up something they have bought.

Now I saw an advert on Spanish TV today for C&A. It's the first ad that I've noticed with a Christmas theme. This reminded me that we'll be due our annual trip to the coast to the Overseas Supermarket/Iceland store. It's not that I often wake up thinking of Piccalilli and Bombay mix or Melton Mowbray pies and Quality Street but, confronted with shelves full of products that were staples with me for forty years, there is always lot of gratuitous overspending. We usually go to buy something specific that's either expensive or unavailable locally - gammon, pork and mustard sausages, twiglets - but we nearly always end up buying lots of things that sound great but turn out to be soggy, tasteless or otherwise disappointing. This year I really must remember to say no to the pre-prepared stuff however good the photo on the box looks.

By the way I apologise if I've done this blog before. Checking the blog is a bit like watching the photos, my own photos, that pop up randomly on my laptop as a screen saver. I sometimes find myself watching the slide-show of half remembered photos and thinking that some of them aren't so bad. Then one of the many blurred pictures pops up and my hubris evaporates. When I thought of blogging on pre-prepared versus fresh food I popped some search clues into the blog and I found myself re-reading long forgotten blog posts, sometimes from years ago. I thought they were OK until I bumped into two in a row which were the literary equivalent of those blurred snaps. I gave up, ashamed of my prose and the out of date information. Mind you if I've forgotten the chances are that you have too.