Olive Me

Because my work involves convincing people to join me on gastronomical journeys in Spain, there’s a part of my resume that points out the fact that I trained as a chef in Barcelona. But writing Olive Me requires confiding that I’m not a chef. I’m a serious eater involved in a 25-year affair with Spanish food.

It’s not always easy, this love of mine – take sangre frita, for instance. I don’t care how stylish offal has become, cubes of coagulated blood, boiled until they develop big bubbly holes and then pan fried with onions is just revolting.

And oh, the worry. My nerves have been shredded by the Catalan and Basque flirtations with molecular gastronomy.

The serious eating started well before I went to Spain. Among my Oklahoma grandmother’s secrets was the fact that bacon fat improves vegetables. She taught me not to over-handle pie crust. And by 1970 she had clued me into something important: chickens just didn’t taste like chickens anymore.

Before cooking school there were a few good years in the kitchen with my Spanish mother-in-law. She was from Córdoba and therefore taught me to douse vegetables with olive oil. Not that she had anything against bacon it was just that she said finding a decent-tasting piece of pork in Barcelona was damn-near impossible. I wish I’d gotten her in the divorce.

Cooking school in Barcelona involved peeling a lot of onions and learning a few tricks, like how to knock the marrow out of beef bones or clarify consommé. The best part about it, besides that it provided me with awfully good lunches for an entire year had to do with my timing. It was the 1980s, the post-Franco creative boom had reached the kitchen, and Catalan cuisine was undergoing a kind of nouvelle (pardon my French) conversion. Escalivada, the salad of grilled eggplant and red pepper was fashionably spare, traditional flavor juxtapositions like rabbit with langoustines were recognized as exciting fusions; cooks whipped eggy rich crema catalana into something more ethereal and mousse-y whose name was not yet foam.

(I don’t think anyone ever figured out how to lighten and brighten es niu, though. That would be the traditional hunting season dish of the hard-partying cork-makers of the Empordà, which combines game birds, dried cod and salt-cured cod tripe, cuttlefish with its ink, pork meatballs, rabbit, eggs, and the darkest possible caramelized onion sofregit base. Gotta love it.)

The food trips I organize for Spanish Journeys are my way of keeping up my affair with Spain and its cuisines and serving up the most romantic bits – the cheese festivals, the last days of the sea-urchin season, mushroom hunts, anchovies from L’Escala, the fading tradition of the three-course lunch, unsung wineries, cantankerous old sausage-makers and a few upstart experimenters – for other people who believe, like I do, that food is a window on culture.

I hope Olive Me will bring a few other hungry lovers of Spain to the table.