Eating to learn

One of the questions that Spaniards ask me, from time to time, is "Have you ever tried.......?" The dots represent some typical, local food. It's a question that makes me feel unloved. They obviously suspect that I sit at home listening to the BBC wearing my Union Flag socks and eating Chicken Tikka Masala.

It might, I suppose, be a reasonable question at times. Imagine we have a Spaniard who has lived in Notting Hill for fifteen years. I say, "Have you ever tried Parkin?" or "Have you ever tried bubble 'n' squeak?" They are not common foods. On the other hand were my question to be, "Have you ever tried roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?" the question verges on the insulting. I do understand where a Spaniard might get the BBC and socks idea though. The Spanish TV News has been full of Brexit the last couple of days and the cameras went in search of the British immigrant response. They went to places like San Fulgencio where they filmed immigrant Britons reading the Daily Mail as they tucked into a Full English at outside tables in the sun.

I don't eat in Spanish homes very often but the last twice that I have the food has been spectacular. It was Arroz al Horno, oven baked rice, in the first and Cocido in the second. Arroz al Horno translates easily but Cocido doesn't; the verb simply means cooked and the noun is a stew. Neither convey the complexity of Cocido.

I've had Cocido in restaurants only a couple of times in all the years that I've been here. On the plate it usually looks like a sort of half stew; lots of thin gravy with a selection of chickpeas, vegetables and potatoes that have been cooked until they are very soft alongside some cheap cuts of meat cooked for ages to make them tender. I thought that was what the real thing looked like and that I knew two factual things about Cocido. As it turns out both were wrong. The first was that it's a dish linked with Madrid. Our hosts were very firm that it is typical of Valencia too.  The second was that the home-made version produced two courses from one pot cooking. I had it in my head that the chickpeas, meat and other veg, were cooked inside a muslin bag, so that their flavours seeped into the water producing a broth which was then used to produce a noodle soup, whilst the meat and veg were served as the second course.

It's not that I was far off in my idea but it's a bit like making tea in a microwave. It might work but it's just not right. In fact, traditionally, the chickpeas go inside the muslin bag but not the meat. The veg, things like cabbage, potatoes, turnips and carrots are cooked apart. The broth is used to make the soup (photo at left) but some is kept back to serve with the meat. Then again I also suspect that originally Cocido was a dish designed to use up left overs and that there are as many versions of Cocido as there are people who make it. Google certainly presented me with a wide variety of recipes. The one we had yesterday had the pelotas -the meat balls I talked about when I went to the Cuadrillas in Patiño - and black pudding sausages and turkey legs as well as knee joints and ham-bone. To be fair it's not an attractive looking dish but it tasted great. The cook said that the whole lot had taken hours to prepare. Her effort was my gain both culturally and weight wise.

A couple of days after eating the Arroz al Horno I had a go at making one at home. I thought my effort was OK and Maggie didn't complain as she ate it all up. I don't think I'll be having a go at the Cocido though. Far too complicated.

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The photos are just from somewhere on the Internet.

Our menu today

Egg and chips is a typical Spanish dish. Egg and chips is a typical English dish too. I wouldn't be surprised if half the world has a similar claim to egg and chips. Of course there can be lots of differences between one plateful of egg and chips and another dependant on the quality of the ingredients and the preparation. I like my bacon sandwiches in white bread with lots of butter and with crispy but cooled bacon. I know people who are appalled at the idea of butter and white bread and pour ketchup or brown sauce on theirs. So preparation, ingredients and personal taste all make a difference when we're talking food.

Sometimes Spanish people ask me if I eat British or Spanish food at home. I suppose the question is whether I eat paella or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding because, most of the time, the stuff I cook is probably stateless. I might think it's chilli con carne or biryani but a Mexican (or is that a Texan) and an Indian wouldn't recognise it as such. And who lays claim to chicken with garlic and lemon? Eating out of course it's possible to choose. Spanish pizzas, hamburgers and Spring rolls have numerous Spanish touches but the sign above the restaurant door still says American or Italian or Chinese. There are plenty of restaurants though that sell food that most would class as local, as traditional, as Spanish. Lots of it, like pork chop and chips or fried hake is as nationless as egg and chips. Hand over the steamed mussels and tell a Belgian that they are typically Spanish and I don't think they would agree however normal it is for Spaniards to eat mussels.

There is obviously lots of food that is Spanish through and through. Nobody would doubt the parentage of the myriad of rice dishes that we lump together as paella or the less internationalized classics such as fabada Asturiana, marmitako, cocido, michirones, calçots, patatas revolconas, flamenquines and hundreds more. I heard someone once say that lots of the best Spanish food depends on the shopping and I tend to agree. The cooking is often simple but the food is well conceived and tasty if the ingredients are good. Las papas arrugadas, something typical of the Canary Islands, are simply wrinkly boiled potatoes usually served with a sauce made with oil, vinegar and paprika pepper. This is hardly haute cuisine but they can be splendid. Or they can be very ordinary. It's the same with so many of the dishes. I had the local rice with rabbit and snail dish in a restaurant in Chinorlet when I was with my mum and the one word to describe it would be sublime. I could not believe that rice could be so good. I made a reservation to take Maggie to the same place. The rice was good but nothing special. It may have been a different cook, the wood may have burned at a different temperature, maybe it was a variation in the amount of salt, the rabbit may have been from a farm rather than caught on the mountains, maybe it was the wrong season for the snails - who knows, but it wasn't as good. And if you go into a restaurant where one of the starters on the fixed price 9€ lunch is labelled as paella, or if there's a photo of it, I can guarantee that the rice will not leave you impressed. It's only paella in name, not in spirit, not in ingredients, not in the care. I've had worse fabada in a restaurant than the stuff that comes out of the cans bought in the local supermarket and I've had fabada that made me understand why the dish is famous in Spain.

So the upmarket Spanish restaurants work in two modalities. The first is a restaurant that cooks the same food as your mum or your grandma (dad or grandfather if you prefer) but tries to do it better. My grandma never cooked gazpacho pinosero so I can't comment but I've enjoyed traditional food, of this type, in lots of those restaurants. The second style is food that may pay lip service to local cuisine but the interpretation is a very personal one, that of an auteur chef. As the waiter describes the dish they tell you that the small spot of reddish paste represents a traditional local food or that the tiny mound of mashed potato flavoured with almond represents the symbiosis present in the local agricultural economy. Well, if they say so.

For the past two years, on Maggie's birthday, we have gone to a restaurant with a couple of Michelin stars. Last year I had to try hard not to laugh out loud when the waitress was telling us about using the mould that grows on corn as one of the ingredients. If I'd been in argumentative mood I may have asked why that corn fungus had never caught on in the majority of the bars, cafes and restaurants of the world. Last night we went to a place in Almansa. No names no pack drill. The room was pleasant, the servers were very personable and efficient. The problem was that the set menu, which included  a very creditable 12 or 13 courses for a reasonable 69€, was quite unpleasant. I can't say that I enjoyed a single dish. Most were OK, edible enough, the sort of thing you eat as a houseguest so as not to upset your host. Not something you would choose to eat but something you force down behind a pantomime smile for someone else's benefit. A couple of the courses were, literally, hard to swallow, the sort of food that was close to making me gag. Tuna hearts stuffed with something that I missed in the description, but which looked like snot, resembled nothing more than a couple of glassy fish eyeballs. By the end of the meal I was really hoping that they did ordinary coffee; surely good coffee would overpower the variety of tastes lingering in my mouth?

But I suppose we'll be back to another one next year. Hope springs ever eternal as they say even if kangaroos just hop.