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.

And just how do you get to be extra virgin?

I find it vaguely amusing how the Italians seem to get there first. Here the tiny strong black coffee is called a solo but buy one in Teignmouth in Devon or Alberona in Foggia and it'll be an espresso. Expensive British coffees have Italian names. Another example is Spanish ham, the Jamón Serrano. Commonplace here but, when I want to describe it to visiting Britons, I find that I need to describe it as Parma ham so they know what I'm talking about. Spaniards by the way call the British floppy boiled ham York Ham - jamón York.

Spaniards are often particularly narked about oil. Oil in Spain means olive oil. The default is olive oil. If, for some strange reason, you want another type of oil then you have to be specific - corn oil, sesame oil etc. Even if the Mediterranean Diet is besieged on all sides by hamburgers, pizzas and kebabs the oil is still an essential part of the Spanish diet. Obviously enough it's easy to buy Spanish oil here but it's not difficult to buy Italian oil. What upsets Spaniards is that they believe, and it's true, that lots of the oil sold as Italian is actually produced in Spain. Spain produces about 45% of the World's olive oil and Italy about 20% but, again, Italian oil has a much better reputation than Spanish oil so the Italians can sell more than they produce. To meet demand the Italians buy olive oil from other places and bottle it up as Italian. I should say that the saffron producers of Novelda do much the same with product from Iran but I'm Spanish nowadays so we'll have none of that disloyalty.

We have an oil mill, an almazara, in our village, in Culebrón. From sometime in November through to as late as January lots of local producers, from Britons and Dutch residents with baskets of a few kilos of olive through to local farmers with trailer-loads of fruit, queue up to sell their olives to the mill. Watching the process it all looks very straightforward. Onto conveyors, through presses and into bottles. The oil from Culebrón isn't sold in nice bottles with nice labels. It's sold in big five litre plastic bottles with a very basic label. The last time I looked it wasn't even labelled as extra virgin (that's the one that's just cold pressed fruit) and I'm sure it would be if it were so there must be either second press or processed oil added. It is, though, a good product at a very reasonable price.

I haven't really noticed the price recently but, over the years, we've paid between 13€ and 20€ for five litres of Culebrón oil.  The price goes up or down each year dependant on the quality and abundance of the crop. What always amazes me when we pop over to the bodega to get a few bottles of wine is that other people are buying the oil in industrial quantities. I presume that some of it is for restaurants and the like but Spanish cooks do use a lot of oil. All you need to do is to watch any cookery programme or go to get a cheap meal (which will be dripping with the stuff) to see how.

There's a newer oil mill inside the Pinoso boundaries called Casa de la Arsenia out Caballusa way. Their marketing strategy is completely different to Culebron's. They do sell oil in mid sized two litre containers, either organic or not, at around 6€ or 7€ per litre but their marketing goes into the classy looking half litre heavy, opaque green glass bottles with gold lettering and a strange name. One variety uses the arbequina olive which has a very light flavour and the other uses picual which has a much more intense taste. The price on their website is 12.50€ for the half litre bottle. So five litres of that oil would cost 125€.

Last year we went on a wine and oil trail in Yecla. We had breakfast at an oil mill, a mid morning snack at one winery and a sweet course at a second bodega. Interesting and inventive sort of day. The oil mill, Deortegas, had several different oils most of them based on different olives but there were also some flavoured with, for instance, wild mushrooms. The usual thing when tasting oil is to dip bread into it but we talked to a couple of blokes who were tasting their oil directly from glasses. The bread changes the flavour they said. Spaniards take oil seriously.