Olive Me

People around the Empordà differ on the subject of who makes the best recuit––the wheyful cheese of Catalonia that’s so perfect on a little toast with tomato jam. Or drizzled with honey for dessert.

There are those who like the cow’s milk recuit made by Quim, a sweet guy with a roadside stand just outside Fonteta. He makes a good goat’s milk version too, and I prefer its tang. Others swear by the recuit––also goat’s milk––made by the crotchety Nuri in the village of Ullastret. I’m in their camp.

Despite the inviting cursive of the “Nuri d’Ullastret” sign hanging above her door near the road out of that village, you can pretty much count on Nuri to act annoyed to see you coming. There’s something exciting about wresting a little pillow of cheese from her. You tell yourself her attitude is calculated to keep outsiders from scooping up the small batches meant for regulars.

Now there is another recuit in the neighborhood. Made by Manel and Natalia at Formatgeria Mas Marcè, this one is in a class by itself. It is also hard to get because most of the production goes to restaurants. Sometimes they have it at their farm stand in Siurana d’Empordà, near Girona.

I met them at the region’s big cheese show, La Fira de Formatges Artesans del Pirineu in La Seu d’Urgell with some of their prize-winning aged cheeses: El Set is a dense, butter-colored cheese with a natural rind, firm and slightly shardy at two to four months. Llanut is whiter, soft, and melting, eaten just a few weeks old. Manel wraps it in a layer of clean wool––you remove that, of course, before digging in. It makes the cheese just a little sheepish.

But it is their simple recuit de drap that matters in my memory right now.

What makes their little cloth-wrapped fresh cheese so unforgettable is fat. Ewe’s milk fat. And not from just any ewes. Manel and Natalia are raising Ripollesas––a breed of sheep native to Catalonia, but now so rare they’ve been put on the Slow Food Ark of Taste for salvation.

The milk Ripollesas give is much richer than that of other breeds at upwards of 8% milk fat. But hardly anybody raises them because they produce damn little of it: each ewe gives only about 30 liters per year. Meanwhile, Manel tells me, farmers here have gotten used to imported breeds that produce up to 600 liters a year. “You can see why my father, a sixth generation shepherd, who grew up with that level of production, thought ours was a terrible idea.”

A smile takes over Manel’s face as he looks out over the pasture. “That’s him out there with the sheep. He works as our shepherd now.”

The formatgeria is small, but the family’s commitment to it is huge. Besides bringing the Ripollesas back from the edge of extinction, they’ve brought the land into line with standards for certified organic pasture. While they were at it, they decided to revive another lost tradition: they make their cheese with vegetable rennet. The thistly cardoons they use to produce it grow wild on their land.

One more thing Manel’s dad thought was crazy: Manel and Natalia wanted to bypass large cooperatives––a guaranteed outlet for their milk––and keep everything from grazing to cheesemaking right on the farm. Manel set out looking for customers who would care about their project, taking samples of his milk and cheeses directly to chefs. Sure enough, Ferrán Adrià (mastermind at El Bullí) became a customer for the milk, and Jordi Roca got Mas Marcé to start making yogurt for their Michelin three-star Celler de Can Roca.

The difficulty of getting to those places for my everyday cheese has had me thinking about raising a couple of ewes.

Meantime, there’s this: if you can get your hands on good buttermilk and whole milk, turning them into a decent homemade version of recuit is only slightly more taxing than boiling water.

Manel and Natalia would not approve, but even they would have to admit that this stuff, made with organic cow’s milk and no gums or fillers to give it listless water-weight gain, is a hundred times better than store-bought ricotta.

Recuit

Makes about one quart

1/2 gallon (8 cups) whole milk
1 pint (2 cups) buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
cheesecloth and kitchen twine or a rubber band

Warm the milk, buttermilk, and salt in pot––an enameled one, pale and weighty, is perfect: it seems never to scorch. Slowly heat the mixture, stirring now and then to be sure it isn’t sticking on the bottom of the pot.

If you’re a Catalan countrywoman you probably know by looking just when to turn off the fire. It’s not too far south of the boiling point, when the milk is wiggly and threatening to simmer, that you’ll see the milk seem to separate a bit, and a few curds begin to form. I use a candy thermometer and this all happens between 170 and 180 degrees F.

As soon as you get the beginnings of curd formation, turn off the heat and stop stirring. It won’t look like much at first, but if you keep cooking, the cheese loses its delicate flavor and texture. The recuit will continue to develop as it stands. Let it stand for five minutes.

Line a strainer or colander with four layers of cheesecloth. Be sure you use squares of cloth big enough to allow you to wrap around a quart-sized blob of cheese. Using a skimmer or slotted spoon, scoop the curds into the cheesecloth-lined colander. Keep scooping until all that’s left in the pot is the whey and the itty bitty squigles that are hard to catch with your slotted spoon.

(Why not just pour the whole mess through? You can. But then your cheese is wetter and takes longer to drain. Instead, use a separate piece of cheesecloth to strain the last bits of curd out of the whey, chill it, and drink it later on. I sense a healthy bottled whey drink craze coming on.)

Now gather up the corners of your cheesecloth and tie it with a piece of kitchen twine or a rubber band. Tie the bundle to your faucet and let it drip into your sink for 20 minutes. Don’t let it go much longer or it gets too dry.

This is so good just unwrapped and drizzled with honey while it’s still at warm room temperature. But you can leave it wrapped and store it in a shallow bowl for a few days in the fridge, and use it as you would ricotta.

It has always seemed to me that cooking over a wood fire requires a certain restlessness. Cookouts with my Catalan friend Jaume prove this is true even on Mediterranean shores. The mood around his fire might be mellowed by fall sunshine and hits of wine from a porrón, but still, there are mushrooms to move from one side of the grill to the other, arguments to be fanned regarding the best way to grill a coca (pizza’s Catalan cousin), and embers to be jabbed.

That’s why it struck me as a little odd that Assumpta, who was, after all, in charge of dessert at this particular October cookout, was making herself so comfortable. “I’m doing pomes a la pedra,” she said from her hammock: apples on a rock.

And there they were, teed up at the front edge of the fire: four flat rocks, each with an apple on top. At home, she had sliced off the top of each apple, pared out cores and seeds, and filled their centers with chopped toasted walnuts and honey. The tops went back on, leaving the apples looking whole again, with only a fine line around their tops giving away the fact that they’d had some work done.

“I make these at home, too,” said Assumpta, “on cool fall nights when we have a fire.” She keeps a few flat rocks on the hearth just for this purpose. She puts an apple on each rock and sets them next to the fire to slow roast through dinnertime and on into the evening. She has perfected a technique for turning the apples: “I nudge the rocks around with my toe every so often while we’re sitting around the fire.” Dessert is ready when the apples begin to blister and their sugary juices bubble out onto the rocks.

They’re not bad oven-roasted in an ordinary baking dish. If you add a few drops of good Spanish brandy to the filling, and eat them next to a warm wood stove, they might even taste a little like the smoky ones from Assumpta’s hearth.

Slow-Roasted Apples

I like a smallish apple for this dessert, unless you’re sharing. Honeycrisps, which are descended from Macouns and goldens turn a very pretty pink color when roasted.

For each apple:

1 tablespoon toasted walnuts, chopped (or one prune, chopped, or a combination)
a pinch of cinnamon
2 teaspoons good brandy
2 teaspoons honey
a pat of butter (about one teaspoon)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Pour a tiny bit of water, a scant 1/4 inch, in the bottom of your roasting pan (apple cider or orange juice work nicely if you happen to have those). Cut off the top 1/2 inch of each apple, on the stem end, and reserve the tops. Carefully cut out the stem, seeds, and cores, but don’t go all the way through to the bottom of the apple––the apple to will hold its filling and juices better that way.

Set the apples, cored end up, in the roasting pan. Stuff them with the chopped nuts and/or prunes. Add a pinch of cinnamon to each. Spoon in the brandy and honey. Poke in the pat of butter. Place the top of each apple back in its place, covering the filling.

Roast for about 45 minutes, or until the apples are tender. Spoon any pan juices over the apples before serving them.

“Melmelada de tomàquet is not so much a tradition as it is a necessity,” says Georgina Regàs, the creator of Catalonia’s Museu de la Confitura. “You know how tomatoes are, they come in such overabundance.”

That’s easy for her to say. She lives in l’Empordà––a kitchen-garden-rich corner of Catalonia with a ridiculously long tomato-growing season. No one on my cold New England sandbar would dare to speak so casually of that kind of success with tomatoes, for fear of being struck down by blossom end rot.

But this year we did have tomatoes. And once the thrill of tomato sandwiches (thick slices, white bread, mayo, salt) eased up, the season kept on long enough to allow us to act like Catalans. That is, pa amb tomàquet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Until I remembered the tomato jam with locally made fresh cheese at Georgina’s little confiture workshop in the village of Torrent.

When I called, she didn’t really want to talk about tomatoes. She was gearing up for her autumn classes. “The madrones are so beautiful right now. They say if you eat them in full sunshine, they’ll get you drunk. Plus, they’re loaded with pectin.”

“Wait a minute, is madrone jam traditional in Catalunya?” I’ve seen madrone trees there and in California, but I never knew those little orange fruits were edible.

“Probably not,” she says. “Catalans are not really a serious jam-eating people. But I’m into the recovery of the art of preserving. I’m not interested in limiting myself to traditional Catalan jams.” Georgina started her museum after an English visitor turned her on to lemon marmalade as a way to use the fruit that was littering her dooryard. “This project is more about nature’s treasures than it is about national ones.”

I think maybe Georgina is herself a Catalan national treasure. She is 79 years old and started this project just seven years ago. She does have a business partner, Teresa Millàs. “I had to cut her in,” she says, “Because I’d go to the bank for a loan on kitchen equipment and they would say I needed someone who was going to be around a while to back it up.”

“But really,” she goes on, “the only part of this I’m too old for is Facebook. I’ve lived my whole life without it just fine.” (Nonetheless, you can “like” the museum here.)

Teresa and the rest of the museum’s small staff all share Georgina’s passion for preserving and teaching. And in spite of their prize-winning forays into foreign jams (they won a gold medal for their kumquat marmalade at the Dalemain Marmalade Festival last year, which landed their jars on the shelves of Fortnum & Mason in London), they do teach classics from her region, including tomato jam.

Georgina approves of my totally simple recipe, though she would add an apple to the pot. Its pectin will make the jam set faster, which she says translates into fresher flavor. She also recommends another combination locals are fond of: tomato-watermelon jam. Both are traditionally eaten alongside fresh cheeses for breakfast or for a mid-afternoon snack. A smidge on a cracker loaded with goat cheese makes a nice American style hors d’oeuvre. I predict we’ll soon see see tomato jam as part of a fancypants restaurant dessert in New York or Barcelona. I imagine it alongside, say, basil ice cream, with a drizzle of arrop.

“After the war, when nobody could afford sugar, preserves were made with arrop––grape juice, boiled into a thick, slightly caramelized syrup,” Georgina says. “But yes, I hear arrop is in fashion again.”

Melmelada de Tomàquet — Tomato Jam
makes about 4 half pints

3 1/2 lbs perfectly ripe plum tomatoes
1 1/2 lbs sugar
1 oz (two tablespoons) freshly squeezed lemon juice
a big pinch of salt
a sprig of fresh thyme

Blanch the tomatoes for half a minute in boiling water. Then peel and core them and drop them into a large, heavy jam-making pot. Add the sugar, lemon juice, salt, and branch of thyme. Bring to a simmer, then a steady boil, stirring every few minutes. Watch the jam closely as the water cooks off and the juices become syrupy: you’ll need to stir it steadily to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Squash any big chunks of tomato while you’re at it. Skim off any sticky foam that forms on the surface, too, since those dense little bubbles will cloud the jam’s sparkle later. The jam will begin to set up in about 25 to 35 minutes. When it’s softly set, remove the thyme and ladle the jam into clean hot jars and seal.

If you need instructions on testing jam for doneness or on preparing, sealing, and processing your jars properly, the people at Ball jars are more than happy to tell you what to do.

El Museu de la Confitura is on the Plaça Major in the village of Torrent, Tel: +34-972-30-47-44. Summer classes are for kids, but during the rest of the year, the museum offers classes for adults, about once a month. A typical Saturday class covers techniques, hands-on preserving, and a light tasting menu that can stand in for lunch. Don’t be afraid to join a class just because your Catalan is rusty: Georgina speaks Spanish, French, and English and, besides, when people are cooking, they nearly always understand one another. Coming up, Saturday, October 4: madrone jam and picapoll grape jelly. Winter classes move on to preserved pumpkin, and for the holidays, there’s Cava jelly, and citrus marmalades.

Once I placed a few shards––say about five bucks worth––of Spanish tuna, the kind packed in olive oil, on my tongue, there was no going back. Does it do any good, in this economy, to argue that a fabulous lunch for two can be made with just one eighteen-dollar tin?

What does it matter when the fact is, the kind of tuna salad I grew up on now tastes distinctly like a bowlful of fish oil soaked spit wads?

Now it’s Ortiz or bust. The ventresca is ultra-luxurious, even though it comes in a can. One that looks just like the same ring-topped oval that my dad would pop open for his Saturday post-golf ration of cottonseed oil-laced sardines. This is so much better. Scroll back the lid and you’re face to face with a few perfectly delicate long strips of tuna belly.

The larger, firmer, but still luscious slabs of loin that come in a jar are great in a puttanesca or a salad.

Whether ventresca or not, it’s bonito del norte you want: Thunnus alalunga, which is known as “albacore” in the American market. (For the species conscious, albacore is not to be confused with thunnus albacares, which we Americans call yellowfin tuna but the French, naturally, call albacore.)

Maybe the best use of a stash of this stuff: Toast a diagonal slice of baguette; drape on a forkload of tuna; give it a pinch of crunchy sea salt (because this tuna is not overly salted, the way the American tunas are) and a twist of black pepper, and away you go.

Maybe too, just a few slices of tart pickle or sweet onion on top. Definitely a piece of pimiento de piquillo, if there’s an open jar in the fridge.

And for a summer lunch, here’s a whole ‘nother tuna salad. I won’t give it a Spanish name, but it does have a Spanish accent.

Summer Rice Salad with Spanish Tuna

Serves 2

3 ounces Ortiz bonito del norte (part of a jar, or for the profligate, one tin of ventresca)
2 cups leftover white rice, cold
2 heaping tablespoons pesto (preferably a supply that hasn’t had any cheese added yet)
about a dozen cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1/4 small sweet or red onion, sliced thin
one small unwaxed garden cuke, diced small
sea salt and fresh black pepper

Put the rice and vegetables in a bowl and stir in the pesto to dress it all. Taste and season with salt and pepper if need be. Gently toss in the tuna, so it doesn’t get too busted up.

I hear that in France people settle for just one day to celebrate fat: Mardi Gras, that happy Tuesday before Lent and all its pious negation begin. In Catalonia, the fat-eating starts almost a week ahead of time, on Fat Thursday. First thing in the morning on Dijous Gras, they reach for a slice of coca de greixons to get the ball rolling.

“Ooh-la-la,” say the French, when you tell them the other name for this barely sweet, mysteriously savory breakfast flatbread,coca de llardons. Yes, those little bits in the dough are, well, they are not exactly lard. They’re bacon.

Coca de greixons is a simple one-rise brioche dough. The butter and eggs are dialed back a notch to compensate for the other gras, which you’ve slowly crisped so that it practically amounts to lean cuisine anyway. Roll it out into the traditional oblong coca shape, paint it with olive oil, and give it a scattering of sugar and pine nuts for crunch, and voila! Or, as I believe I said at my first confession: Je regrette rien.

Coca de Greixons

This is one of those rare breads for which a sturdy stand mixer comes in really handy. If you have one, you let the dough go for a good five minutes while you clean up the kitchen or make a phone call. If you don’t have one, be ready to spend about 10 minutes kneading a very sticky dough.

3/4 cup milk (whole or reduced fat, just not skim)
1 package active dry yeast (about 2 teaspoons)
3 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar, plus 2 Tbsp more for sprinkling on top
1 tsp salt
1 tsp anise seeds
1/4 cup cold sweet butter (1/2 stick), cut into chunks
1 large egg
1 Tbsp anís (optional; Spanish anisette liqueur; Pernod or pastis will do)
1/2 cup chopped greixons*
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup pine nuts

Warm the milk. Make sure it is not too hot (about 110F is just right. At 120F or more, you’ll kill the yeast––if you don’t have an instant-read thermometer, stick your finger into the milk and aim for hot-but-tolerable; later, go and spend the $7 on a thermometer), then sprinkle the yeast over the milk and let it begin to dissolve and activate while you start the dough.

Put the flour, sugar, salt, and anise seeds into a mixing bowl, and give it a whirl using the mixer’s paddle attachment. Drop in the butter and beat the mixture for a few minutes, until the butter is well distributed and things have a sandy texture.

Change out the paddle attachment for the dough hook. Beat in the milk and yeast slurry on low speed, then add the egg and the anís liqueur, if you’re using it, and beat them in, too. Bring the speed up to medium and let the mixer go for a good five or six minutes.

Add the chopped greixons* and mix or knead them in well, for a minute or two.

The dough will look rather wet, but scrape it out of the bowl onto your lightly floured countertop and you’ll see it holds together in a supple, elastic way. Knead the dough gently, giving it just a few turns and shaping it into a smooth ball. Smear on a little olive oil to coat the dough’s surface, cover it lightly with a clean floursack towel or plastic wrap, and set it aside to rest for a half hour.

Roll the dough into a big oval or circle, aiming to get it a little under an inch thick. Line a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper and lift the dough onto it. Spruce up the coca’s shape after the move. Brush the top with one tablespoon of olive oil, then sprinkle it with the pine nuts, smoothing over them gently with your hand to be sure they’ll stay put.

Let the coca rise. It needs about one and a half hours at warm room temperature. Heat the oven to 350F. Brush the top of the coca with another tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle it with the two tablespoons of sugar. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until it is deep golden.

When making this for breakfast, I’ve prepared the dough and just let it rise overnight, no problem. You can also let it rise, then refrigerate it for a day or overnight to hold it until you’re ready to bake it; just get it out of the fridge when you first get up, before you even begin preheating the oven.

* Greixons, llardons, let’s face it, these are bacon bits. Homemade. From good pancetta or very thick cut bacon (uncured, nothing smoked, nor mapled, herbed, peppered…). A half pound cut into cubes or 3/4 inch sticks will yield about the half cup you need for this recipe. (If you make extra, it’ll freeze.) Cook the bacon over low heat, stirring frequently. You want it evenly rendered and caramelized. You’ll end up with at least a half cup of bacon fat as a handy by-product.

Suquet, everyone will tell you, is Catalonia’s  bouillabaisse––a thrifty fishermen’s stew made from the less promising creatures amid the day’s catch. Next thing you know, they’re serving you a rich bowlful of the stuff, scented with brandy and saffron and topped up with luxury goods like langoustines.

Who wouldn’t put it past those Catalan fishermen to take a little extra time at sea to flambé their lunches? (more…)

“La Crisis” cut so deep this year in Spain that my friends will first have to gather their lottery winnings before they can mail my year-end turrón supply. That said, I am not terribly worried about suffering a turrón-free 2011 because the chances of my nougat suppliers winning at least a little something in the Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad, to be drawn in Madrid tomorrow, is around 15 percent. In lottery terms, if you buy a billete it’s a cakewalk to win a piece of El Gordo, the big one: 0.0012 percent (one in 83,333).

Virtually everyone in Spain plays the Christmas lottery. It’s the biggest in the world in terms of total prize payout (a couple of billion Euros) and surely the most democratic. (more…)

Back in New York this week, but comforted by quinces at the Union Square Greenmarket.

I felt a little sorry for them, bitter, lumpy things, and took some home with me. Well, they rolled out of that bag in a cloud of their own perfume, asking who was feeling sorry for whom. They smelled like lemon. Or over-ripe pear. Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit in the flesh. My plan had been to cook them down into codonyat, the Catalan quince gelée that is so perfect with cheese. But now all I wanted was to have them near me. Sniff them. Run my hands over their fuzzy backs. (more…)

Lluís Plà, age 87, is the host of La Carbonera de Forallac, part country barbecue, part Burning Man Project, a wonderfully odd happening that runs 24/7 for nearly three weeks every October. A sign on the road connecting La Bisbal to Palafrugell, hardworking inland towns near Catalonia’s Costa Brava, points the way to the celebration. My friend Assumpta and I showed up mid-morning last Thursday during a lull in the action that allowed Sr. Plà to tell us about what appeared to be a woolly mammoth, alive and snoring steamily at his feet––the centerpiece of La Carbonera. (more…)

The bulgy yellow and red tomatoes stacked up at the greenmarket Saturday gave New York City a sweet glow. That is until the sun turned its back and went down, cold-bloodedly, at barely past six o’clock. Samfaina is Catalonia’s consolation for this particular heartbreak. (more…)

“Well, peel you a grape.” That’s what my mother always said to let us know we were asking for too much. Then I went to Spain, where I met Joaquín, a guy whose mother actually willingly peeled grapes for us and fed them to us for lunch. (more…)

Cows are important on Minorca and have been going way back. Archaeologists have found evidence of cheesemaking on this tiny island dating from 2000BC, and historians say Minorcan cheese crisscrossed the Mediterranean with Moorish and Pisan traders in the Middle Ages. Eaters may be interested to know that you can now buy the good stuff — that is, artisanally-made raw milk Maó de Minorca D.O.P. (complete with the Spanish denominación de origen protegida “Mahón de Menorca”) — in the U.S.

(more…)

Fava beans are a bother. But they make such a grand appearance in spring, you really can’t help wanting to give them a chance. (more…)

Still in New York, sniffing around the Greenmarket for the first signs of fruit and smelling nothing but ramps. Of course, if I were in Catalonia right now it would be a whole different story: I’d be bathing in rose petals and eating fruits vermells, the red fruits of early summer. I’ve been working on a dessert as pink and tart as that fantasy. Here it is: a fresh strawberry and raspberry soup (more…)

We never made chocolate desserts when I was in cooking school in Barcelona twenty years ago. Don’t get me wrong. The Catalans love the stuff, and so do the Spaniards: bread and chocolate have probably been the entire peninsula’s favorite after-school snack since around 1500, when Cortez came back to Spain with a freighter-sized stash he got from the Aztecs. But my teachers frowned on chocolate as too heavy to take center stage in an after-dinner role. (more…)

My friend Jaume called the other day to brag that he’s in charge of the annual calçotada in his village again this year. He grows his own supply of calçots, the sweet spring onion sprouts that are the raison d’etre of this particular Catalan eat-a-thon, but he’ll keep those to himself, as his little kitchen garden can’t produce enough for the event. He’ll have to buy them, though he won’t go so far as to import them from a grower down in calçotada country around Valls, Tarragona where calçots get the IGP seal of approval (indicació geogràfica protegida — the real thing, so to speak).

Jaume is in the Empordà, some 100 miles north of the calçot heartland, and while normally he’s pretty cocksure what they eat down in southern Catalonia is just not on a par with his own Empordanese cuisine, he is not above shameless imitation on this one. There is just nothing better than eating calçots in early spring and if you can’t get to Tarragona to do it you have to do it where you can.

A good calçotada has got to be big. Not big as in those tour bus feedings orchestrated by Tarragonese restaurants for Barcelonins who are too prissy to build their own fires. But big as in rusty old bedframes scavenged as grills.

Big as in guest lists that include friends of friends of friends. At a good calçotada, you’ll drink unmeasured amounts from a porrón. Grilled sausages are mere palate cleansers. Jaume figures he and his neighbors will go through 6,000 calçots and right now he’s working out the logistics of making enough salsa per calçots for 500 people. No question he’ll use a restaurant blender instead of the traditional mortar and pestle. “My problem is,” he says, “I like the sauce to be really smooth, but passing that much romesco through a chinoise is a bitch.”

So romesco and salsa per calcots really are one and the same sauce? “I didn’t say that,” Jaume hedges, “but everybody’s got their own little secrets.” Some people say that while  romesco can be made with raw tomatoes and garlic, salsa per calçots has to play up the flavor of the fire:  the nuts should be toasted, the tomatoes and garlic roasted, the red pepper smoked. The recipe I brought home from Valls twenty years ago has raw and roasted garlic. I call it romesco because Americans like that word. And I know for a fact it works well on all things grilled. After I hung up the phone with Jaume, I went out to the grocery store in New York City, laid in a couple of bunches of those big Texas spring onions (bigger and sweeter than scallions), and roasted them in the oven. You couldn’t really call it a calçotada, but slathered in sauce, they did me, Ed, and our two neighbors just fine.

Calçots in the City

a side dish for 4

12 big spring onions

a little olive oil

kosher or sea salt

Heat oven to 400F. Drizzle a little oil on a baking sheet and smear it around, lay the onions on the sheet in a single layer, and roast about 45 minutes, until the onions are very tender through and browning.

Serve with romesco. The prep work for the sauce eats up a little time just because there’s some toasting and roasting involved, but you can do that ahead of time, even the day before if you happen to have the oven for something else. Once the ingredients are ready, making the sauce is just a matter of whirling everything in a blender.

Romesco Sauce

makes about two cups

1 cup good olive oil

1/2 cup (about 3 oz.) toasted hazelnuts and almonds

4 small tomatoes (because they’re roasted, even the hothouse “vine” ones will do)

6 big cloves garlic (4 will be roasted, 2 used raw)

2 nyoras (these dried smoked sweet red peppers can be found in the US, imported from Spain) or 1 ancho chile (a smoked poblano pepper )

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar (red wine vinegar is OK too)

kosher or sea salt to taste

Put the dried peppers in a bowl and pour boiling water over them to soak and soften. Heat oven to 375F and roast the tomatoes and 4 cloves of garlic (skin and all) in a small baking dish slicked with a little olive oil for about 45 minutes, until they’re bubbly, caramelized, even and a little brown; peel the garlic after it’s roasted. Turn the oven down to 350F, and toast the hazelnuts and almonds at 350F for about 10 minutes, until they take on a little color and smell toasty. No need to peel the nuts, but after they cool take a minute to brush off skin that comes off easily.

Drop the roasted nuts, tomatoes and garlic in a blender.  Add the two cloves of raw garlic. Take the peppers out of their soak, remove and discard the stem and seeds, and add the pulp and skin to the blender. Add the olive oil and whirl until well blended. I don’t pay any attention to what Jaume says about straining the sauce — the slightly chunky nuttiness is nice.  Whirl in the vinegar season to taste with salt.

Although “cookies” have recently appeared in a few modern-chic pastry shops in Barcelona and Madrid, there is not really any equivalent of the American Christmas cookie tradition in Spain. For one thing, let’s face it: cookies are lumpy, loving-hands-from-home things and Spaniards are uptight about that kind of homeliness. They prefer to entrust their sweet endings to fancy pastry shops where they can count on perfect discs of mousse-filled genoises with glossy-gold caramelized sugar glazes.

Besides, except in the cooler, cow-studded, mountainous north, people just don’t have a lot of butter lying around the house here. What they do have is manteca. Lard. Yes, from pigs.

My ex was Andalusian, so even though we lived in Barcelona, his mother always laid in a supply of mantecados – a crumbly shortbread made with lard and ground almonds — for Christmas. Polvorones too:  they’re a more nutty, less floury formulation of the mantecado. They came from Estepa, delivered by visiting Sevillano friends. The story goes that mantecados were perfected some 150 years ago by a famously large woman known as “La Colchona” (translation: “The Mattress”) who baked them for her husband to sell along his pony express-style transport route from Estepa to Córdoba. Nuns in Southern Spain still crank out tons of these sandy sweets for the holidays (keeping cloistered, perhaps, for fear of nicknames).

Mantecados come individually wrapped in crinkly thin paper and dusted with powdered sugar. When you unwrap them you get only the faintest whiff of almond or cinnamon or lemon or anise seed — the classic sweet-enhancing flavors of Spain. You have to nibble carefully or the whole cookie just dissolves into a pile of crumbs in your hand. Joaquín always advocated squeezing the whole thing into a ball before unwrapping it, and felt it was crucial to pop it into his mouth all at once.

If you’re in Barcelona and missing Southern Spain’s mantecados, head for Caelum, a shop full of sweets supplied by convents and monasteries (C/ Palla 8 at the corner of Carrer del Pi, Tel:  93-302-69-93).

If you’re in the U.S., I know you’re tempted to slip on your wimple and start baking, but you’re probably afraid to go for the lard. So here’s my butter-based interpretation. This is an easy cookie of few ingredients, humble, crumbly-dry, not too sweet, meant to keep company with a good café solo or licor.

Cinnamon Almond Mantecados

Makes 30 cookies

3 oz. whole raw almonds (a steeply heaping 1/2 C)

5 Tbsp. confectioners’ sugar (plus 1/2 C for rolling the finished cookies)

1 tsp. cinnamon (or a Tbsp. or so anise liqueur, or a few drops lemon essence)

1 cup all purpose flour

a fat pinch of salt

1/4 lb. (one stick) butter

Preheat oven to 350F. Put almonds on a baking sheet and toast them, about 10 minutes. Give them a stir after 5 minutes and take them out if they’re very toasty, you don’t want them to burn… but in my oven they need another 5 to get a bit darker and aromatic.  Let them cool completely. I don’t bother to skin them; the ground skin makes the cookie more flavorful and rustic.

Whirl almonds, the 5 Tbsp. confectioners’ sugar, cinnamon, and salt in a food processor. Process until almonds are finely ground. Add the flour and pulse again. Add the butter and pulse the processor until the dough holds together — it will be crumbly.

(At this point I like to take the blade out of the processor, clean it, and get it put away somewhere safe. That way you can work right out of the processor bowl without losing any fingers.)

Gently roll dough in your hand to make small balls about 1-inch in diameter (or 1/2 oz each). Place on cookie sheet — they can all go on one sheet, they do not spread much. Using the bottom of a glass dipped in confectioners’ sugar to prevent the dough from sticking, squash each ball slightly, leaving the rounds quite thick.

[NOTE: The originally posted recipe was short of flour. I've corrected it: should be one cup. In re-working the recipe, I tried a different way of shaping the cookies and I love the results... If you want something more like what the nuns cookies look like, do this:  shaped the dough into a couple of logs 1 and 1/4 inch in diameter and sliced them 1/2 inch thick. The dough is very crumbly and doesn't want to make a neat roll, so that's why even for this small recipe, I made two rolls: they're easier to manage. I formed the roll on a sheet of plastic wrap and rolled it around the dough to help me shape and gently squeeze it into a neat round. No need to refrigerate before slicing and baking.]

Bake 10 to 12 minutes. They should be firming up a bit but not browning at all. Cool a few minutes on the cookie sheet, then remove and cool a bit more on a rack. Roll in the remaining 1/2 C confectioners’ sugar while they’re still a little warm and continue to cool before eating. Or storing. If you’re feeling saintly wrap them in little waxed paper squares.

Forget about butter and jam on your morning toast (and maybe all that pre-dinner double-dipping of bread in olive oil, too). The Catalans have a better idea: pa amb tomàquet, bread with tomato.  Add a smidge of garlic, olive oil, and salt, plus a slice of protein — sheep’s milk cheese or dry cured ham — and you’ve got a complete breakfast.

Pa amb tomàquet is like biscuits and gravy:  a perfect pairing that got its start down on the farm, but has since made its way to big city tables.  Here in the New World it is found on “tapas” menus and recipe pages described as a Catalan specialty but given a new name based on a translation, inexplicably, not into English but into Spanish:  “Pan con Tomate.”  Whatever you call it, it is just about the most scrumptious thing you can do with a late summer tomato.  And there’s nothing to it.  Just don’t go about it the way Melissa Clark did in the New York Times a couple of years ago:  Rubbing the toast with tomato after drizzling on the olive oil will not do — you need the crusty toasty surface to act as a sort of grater for grabbing the garlic and the tomato and you want the olive oil to dress the top juicily.  Here’s the proper order of business:

Oh, wait.  Did I say there’s nothing to it?  There is one challenge to getting this “recipe” right.  It’s the ingredients.  With something this simple, the flavor of each element matters exquisitely.  The bread should be real bread, a rustic round or a ciabatta, substantial, crusty, hole-y.  The salt should be sea salt or kosher salt with a nice crunchy texture, but not that great big coarse stuff.  And the tomatoes should be the small, juicy, thin-skinned kind — this year, after a summer without tomatoes, the fall ones here seem just perfect.  In Catalunya when the last late fall tomatoes ripen, people pull the whole plant out of the ground and hang it upside down in a cool, dark pantry or attic.  And here’s my kind of transubstantiation:  The tomatoes last deep into winter this way, their flavors concentrating to perfection.

Once you’ve gathered these few good ingredients, here’s what you do:

Pa amb Tomàquet

Serves 4

For four people, toast four big slabs of bread or eight smaller pieces.  If you happen to be grilling, toast your bread on the grill, but the oven or broiler or ordinary toaster will do.  Do both sides, why not?  Meanwhile, cut a couple of garlic cloves in half crosswise, and do the same to four ripe little tomatoes.  Have your pitcher of olive oil and bowl of salt at the ready.  Let people gather around and do up their own:  first rub the hot toasts lightly with the flat side of the garlic — don’t be compelled to use the whole piece, a little goes a long way; next rub the tomato halves onto the toast, gently squeezing so the pulp mashes onto the toast  — do be compelled to use lots in this case; then drizzle with olive oil; sprinkle with salt.

Pa amb Tomàquet

A fancier version

Here’s a tidy make-ahead version that works well for a big party or one that doesn’t invite the do-it-yourself scene described above.  To prep the tomatoes ahead of time, I use a great Catalan cooking trick:  halve them and grate the pulp — yes, just press the halves, pulp side down, along the big holes of a plain old grater, catching the juice and pulp in a bowl.  Just before serving, cut a ciabatta in half crosswise, expose its hole-y bellies to the grill or toaster, and when it’s toasty, scrape on the garlic, lightly.  Now you can spoon on the tomato neatly and quickly, drizzle the whole show with oil, sprinkle with salt, whack into pieces like a pizza, and bring the whole thing to the table on a platter.

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