Tópicos

The dancer's dark eyes flashed. Arching her back she twisted her lithe body so that her brightly coloured dress, tight at the hips but loose below her knees, swirled around her mimicking the movement of her bright blue wrap. She stamped her feet, she clapped her hands and her olive coloured skin shone with a fine patina of sweat. Spanish cliché time. As real and yet as unreal as Morris Dancers outside the pub on the Village Green.

I've just finished a book by a Spanish author. The basic premise is that her main character moves to London looking for work and ends up working in a bookshop where her life takes a turn for the better. It was an enjoyable, if slight, read, a bit like one of those US Christmas films where the hero rediscovers the joy and warmth of small town life. What struck me most about the book was that it was loaded with Spanish clichés about England and that it repeatedly and wantonly ascribed Spanish habits to Britons.

One of the principle things, that turned up time and time again throughout the book was tea. Gallons of tea. I suppose that's because lots of Spaniards truly believe that England stops for tea and a bun at 4pm. It happened in the book over and over again. The characters drank Earl Grey brewed in fine porcelain teapots and when they were not tucking into cakes they could rely on an unending supply of dainty cucumber sandwiches. The protagonist and her love interest even go to Fortnum and Mason's to drink tea at one point. There is no mention of sitting at your desk, drinking tea from stained mugs with pictures of cats on them and having to squeeze the teabag with your fingers because there are no spoons.

Drake, Sir Francis, not the Canadian musician, and Holmes, Sherlock as in 221b Baker Street, get a few mentions as does New Scotland Yard. For some reason Spaniards know these names. It's a bit like the way that the TV news here always says Boris Johnson's Government but doesn't name Macron when speaking of the French Government. Pirate, by the way, always appears in any sentence that describes Frank Drake. In this book the owners of the pub have the surname Drake and, when they are first introduced, the phrase is that they denied any link to the famous pirate elevated to the knighthood. The pub run by the Drakes is called the Darkness & Shadow which reminded me of the pub in, I think, the Reggie Perrin books, called the Desiccated Kipper. It's a bit different to most English pubs, but a lot like a Spanish bar, in that you order your drinks from the table and people serve them to you. Given my minimal bar presence I must seek it out the next time I'm near Earl's Court.

There are lots of things that we English apparently do that I missed out on when I lived there. It is, of course, possible, that they are common now. For instance, in the book, English shops wrap things bought as presents at Christmas time just as they do in Spain. When the owner of the bookshop closes for the evening he puts down a metal shutter blind. In the UK I only remember those metal roller blinds from areas like Hulme in Manchester though I have no idea if Hulme is still dodgy or not.  The bookshop is in Temple though and last time I was there it bore very little resemblance to the Mancunian badlands. There's a likeable if swotty lad in the book, named Oliver Twist, and his mid afternoon snack is bread stick into which solid lumps of chocolate bar chocolate have been pushed. It's Spanish comfort food but I don't think it's an English staple. Now if he'd had a sugar sandwich! I've heard that Britons are now very outwardly emotional and have embraced touchy feely behaviours but I don't think the smacking lips, air kisses to both cheeks are common yet - they are in the book, just as they are in Spain. Oh and Christmas Eve is when families get together for a big family meal just as they do on New Year's Eve. And so it goes. 

No I can't stop. Here are a couple more to finish. There are a few spelling mistakes, Spaniards find English letter sequences troubling at times just as we Brits stumble over Spanish words. They are going to go to Candem (sic). The best spelling mistake though led to an interesting factlet. It's another Fortnum and Mason mention. The book says that the shop's owners invented Scott eggs (sic again) as easy to eat food for Victorian travellers. Actually there was also mention of an English urban myth that was new to me. It seems that many of us think it is an offence to eat meat pies on Christmas Day. I did read the Wikipedia to check and it seems to have something to do with why mince pies are not meat pies. I forget the details though.

Ah well, I might pop down to the bull ring now or perhaps I'll just have a bit of a siesta. No, I'll do it all mañana.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Blood, fuet and tears

What goes into a paella is a bit of a moot point. Valencian paella usually contains white rice, meat (usually chicken or rabbit) garrofó (a sort of bean), saffron and rosemary and, of course, olive oil. There are plenty of variations but most of them replace or add to the meat with, say, snails, seafood or fish and the beans with maybe artichokes or cauliflower. You may remember that, a couple of years ago, Jamie Oliver the British chef, suggested a paella made with onions, carrots, parsley, red pepper, tomato puree, chicken stock, frozen peas chicken thighs and chorizo. He received death threats from enraged Spaniards. They were appalled by the recipe in general but especially about the inclusion of chorizo. I suppose it is a bit like calling something made from quorn and onions in a soy  sauce gravy topped off with mashed yams a Shepherd's Pie. I doubt though that the British newspapers would be able to mine the rich seam of national outrage in defence of the Shepherd's Pie.

Unless I'm very much mistaken chorizo is now commonplace in the UK. So popular, so common, that the pronunciation is no longer the chorritso of a few years ago to something much closer to the Spanish - Choreetho. Chorizo is made by coarsely mincing pork meat, adding seasoning and paprika before pushing the mix into sausage skins which are hung to cure in a nice dry place. Apparently this type of curing without smoke and without salt and where the meat sort of gently rots down is called fermentation curing. Anyway, however it's made chorizo is plentiful in Spain. Any supermarket will have it in a variety of shapes and forms. Some is cheap and some isn't, some is spicy and some isn't, some is obviously produced in huge factories and delivered in articulated lorries and some is made carefully by someone who would be happy to do a radio interview about it.

Stick with me whilst I drift.

In choosing a book I generally work from reviews and lists published somewhere - "Our top ten picks for the beach this summer", "Fifteen new Spanish writers you should get to know" and so on. It is remarkable how many of these books seem to be set in Catalonia or to include Catalan themes. I read the latest Isabel Allende the other day. Nowadays she's a US citizen but I still think of her as Chilean. Her story, about Spanish Civil War refugees taken in by Chile, was full of Catalan words and characters. The book I've just finished was going to be about Catalonia because it was originally published in Catalan. The story is set amongst country folk in the High Pyrenees. There was lots of description in the book and I noticed that in amongst the myriad food references several places smelled of cheese and fuet.

Fuet is a thin, dry cured, solid, pork meat sausage flavoured with black pepper, garlic and, sometimes, aniseed. It has a white appearance, as though it has been sprinkled with flower, though the white is actually a fungus. I'd never particularly associated fuet with Catalonia though, when I thought about it, the name is obviously Catalan. So chorizo is a sausage and fuet is a sausage.

Spain has lots and lots of sausages. If I were to buy chorizo I know there are choices to be made. Any old pig or the little Iberian black jobs? Fed on commercial feed or raised free range on acorns? Basically the cheap stuff or the quality product? On the other hand I just buy fuet. In the same way as I would never associate hot dog sausages, Wieners, with quality meat I've always presumed that fuet was in the same sort of class, made from the the scrag ends. If I were to think about, and I never had till I read Irene Solà Saez's book, I would imagine fuet being produced in an enormous factory stacked with giant killing machines where all the workers wear hairnets and white wellies and smoke a quick ciggy at break time. The sort of place that, every now and then, is infiltrated by undercover journalists who film heartless workers laughing as they do something disgustingly barbaric to terrified blood spattered pigs standing in their own excrement. But, maybe not. If the Pyrenean houses named Matavaques and Can Prim smell of fuet and cheese there must be quality stuff to be had.

Practical research is called for.