“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. What happens is this: the 85,000 lottery numbers each potentially represent such a big chunk of this rich pot that fractions (a series of 195 billetes or tickets for each number) and fractions of fractions (décimos or tenths) are sold and even smaller bits of those (participaciones) are divvied up amongst friends and co-workers. Which boils down to the fact that the winning number ends up being held by lots of people. Besides the usual holiday-spirit-inflected things losers say, like, “Well, at least we have our health,” people also like to note, “The prize certainly was bien repartido.” Life is good when the winnings are well distributed.

Even anti-lottery types like me get a thrill when the chant of the winning numbers begins on TV. The children of the Colegio de San Idelfonso, which began as a school for orphans of civil servants, do this job. It starts out sweetly and three hours later sets teeth on edge.

One thing I truly love about the whole thing is how people don’t say “Oh, if we win we’ll just go on with our lives like always.” I worked at a machinery manufacturing firm in Barcelona, a big, successful business that went back generations. While the machines his company built were admired at trade shows all over the world, Sr. Mateu, the owner’s elderly father, still roamed around the factory floor. The company bought a whole number and gave us all shares. “What will we do if we win?” I asked, counting on some kind of savvy Catalan businessman-type investment-oriented response. But no: “We’ll shut this place down!” he said, eyes cheerier than I’d ever seen them. That honest, practical brand of seasonal hope warms my heart.

All this is to say that when, in my quest to figure out a homemade version of Alicante’s famed almond and honey nougat, I came up with this smashing toasted almond praline semifreddo, I decided not worry about its ephemerality. Turrones will be mailed in due time. This can be whipped together now, stashed in the freezer, and pulled out looking swanky for after Christmas or New Year’s Eve dinner. And more so if you add a little cherry-port sauce on the side.

Semifreddo de Turrón––Frozen Almond Praline Nougat

Serves 8

1 cup raw almonds (5 oz.), skin on
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup honey
2 large eggs
1 tsp. grated lemon zest
1 1/2 cups chilled heavy cream
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract or a few drops of pure almond extract
a few drops of grapeseed oil for the pans

Heat the oven to 350F, spread the almonds on a baking sheet, and toast them for 5-10 minutes. Check and stir the almonds; you want them to smell toasty and look a shade darker. Set the toasted nuts aside, and when the baking sheet is cool, rub it with a little oil for the next step, the praline.

Meanwhile, line a standard loaf pan (about 8 x 5 inches) with plastic wrap, leaving several inches hanging over the sides––you’ll wrap that over the semifreddo later. The plastic clings neatly to the pan if you rub a few drops of oil into the pan before you line it.

Melt 1/2 cup of the sugar (save the other 1/4 cup for the nougat) in a small, heavy saucepan, on medium heat. Don’t bother to stir the sugar syrup––it will just clump up on your spoon––but give it a swirl now and then as it bubbles, until it takes on a deep caramel color. Quickly stir in toasted almonds and turn the mixture onto the oiled baking sheet to cool. Break the praline into a food processor and whirl until it is finely ground but not reduced to a paste: you want the finished dessert to have some crunch.

Beat the eggs in a large bowl until frothy (use a standing mixer if you have one; there’s a lot of beating ahead). In a saucepan, bring the honey to a boil; let it foam up as some of the water in it evaporates for a minute or so. Whisk the remaining 1/4 cup sugar into the hot honey. Whisk and simmer the honey syrup another minute to make sure the sugar is completely dissolved, take it off the heat and, with the mixer running, pour it slowly into the frothed eggs. Beat this nougat at high speed until it is fluffy and cool, about 5 minutes. Beat in the extract and the zest.

In another bowl, whip the cream until it holds stiff peaks. Fold about one third of the whipped cream into the nougat mixture, then continue folding in the remaining cream. Gently fold in the praline. Spoon the mixture into the lined loaf pan and cover it with the extra plastic wrap. Freeze until firm, at least four hours and up to 10 days.

Uncover and unmold the semifreddo onto a cutting board or platter. You’ll either need to let it sit for a few minutes to thaw enough to loosen or dip the bottom of the pan in a sink full of hot water for just a second, then dry the pan and turn out the dessert. Slice to serve. Sift a little good quality cocoa onto each plate. Or drizzle on some chocolate sauce. Dried cherries plumped up in a little port-sugar syrup are perfection with the almond flavor here.

For all that fuel, the pile generated surprisingly little smoke, which Sr. Plà explained is what you want with this oxygen-deprived burning process. He told us he was on the lookout for “clean” smoke, which indicates things are progressing well and the wood converting to charcoal as it should. “Too much air and all this would go up in flames,” he said, “and that would be a disaster.”

“Listen,” he said, sklonking two black logs together. The sound was hollow and glassy. “This is from last year’s Carbonera. You can hear that this is good charcoal. It doesn’t weigh a thing, but it will burn perfectly.” If all goes well, he said, every thousand kilos of wood will yield about 170 kilos of charcoal.

Plà learned the art of charcoal-making as a young man, when every community had a carbonero who knew how to turn aged cork oaks uprooted to make room for crops into cooking fuel. “This is what I did up until 1950 or so, but then they came along with gas.”

“Nowadays,” he said with a shrug, “we do it to entertain ourselves.” And so they do: hundreds of people from towns up and down the coast find their way down a winding dirt road to a clearing in the oak woods around the old Mas Frigola farm in the village of Sant Climent de Peralta. Sawhorses and plywood are strung together into long communal tables and festival lights dangle overhead. Since the Carbonera has to be tended from the time the fire is lit on October 12th until the time the finished charcoal is stacked on the 30th, visitors are welcome to stop in any time, 24 hours a day. A dozen barbecue grills dot the clearing and everyone is expected to bring along plenty of sausages, bread, and wine, at the least.

The Carbonera is about tradition-keeping, too.

“Want to see our barraca?” asked Sr. Plà. We stepped in through an opening on the side of a long oval hut faced with stone. The Homes del Foc (Men of Fire), including the mayor of Forallac, Josep Sala, sleep here, right next to the pile. The mayor wasn’t around last Thursday––perhaps he was napping back at Town Hall. But we did meet one intrepid young Dona, Cristina Colom, who has joined the crew. Her father, Lluís Colom, knows the ropes well. “I’m still learning,” she said with a modest but confident smile.

“Yeah,” said Sr. Plà, with a glance at the sleeping bags lined up on the tamped earth floor of the barraca, “I’m here every day, but my days of sleeping on the ground are over.”

XVIII Edició of La Carbonera de Forallac, 2010, began on October 2 (when the carboneros built the wood pile); the earth layer was added on October 9. Things really got under way October 12, when the ull or “eye” of the fire was lit (a local archaeologist is responsible for rubbing a couple of stones together to supply the spark). Special events so far have included music, children’s activities, and a screening of “El territori al plat”––a documentary about the relationship between our landscape and what we eat) by the journalist and gastronome Salvador Garcia. Click here to see the trailer on Facebook.

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.

“Oceans cover seventy-five percent of the planet and yet we eat like there are only about 20 kinds of fish out there.” That’s Angel León again, talking at the French Culinary Institute in New York last month. He had a couple of mackerel in front of him–not an obscure “nameless” fish like the ones he coddles at Aponiente, his restaurant in el Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), but one of the only small bluefish he could find in markets here. The fish was fresh and firm and he’d filleted it neatly; as he talked, he put the two fillets together again, gently pressing and smoothing them into a mackerel-shaped whole.

“One thing about a lot of the fish trashed at sea,” León said, “is that it is small. In thinking about how to use the smaller fish, I took some inspiration from, well,” he smiled sweetly, “fish fingers.”

León pulled out a few mackerels he had reconstructed earlier, each one plastic-wrapped into a perfectly round fish-loin-shaped tube. He sliced one to present in the guise of a sushi roll, nori-colored skin on the outside, pale fish within.

Next, he stoked his little countertop barbecue grill. “This charcoal is made of something we have a lot of in Spain,” he said, revving up a smoldering pile of olive pits with a blast from his portable hair dryer.

“What’s great about olive pits,” he added, “is that you can get them really hot–it’s easy to take them up to 600 C.” (That’s 1112 degrees F.) For the moment, he settled on a slower fire, 200 C (about 400 F), unwrapped another boneless mackerel, brushed it with a little olive oil, and put it on the grill. “You want crackling skin, but you also want the fish to gently confit,” León said, “to take on flavor from the oil but also from the olive pit smoke, flavor something reminiscent of olive trees themselves.”

Unless you live near an olive grove, you’re going to have to make quite a few martinis to collect enough pits for this kind of barbecue. One ambitious New Yorker in the audience asked about the dynamics of lighting the pits. Not easy, it turns out, until the pits have been carbonized as in the oxygen-deprived burning process that turns wood into charcoal. Best to wait until León adds ready-to-burn olive-pit charcoal to his roster of products for export.

León is one of those chefs with product ideas in the works. But his are no mere Food Flippin’ Mario Batali Tin Wind-up toys. There’s that plankton he’s farming, for one thing. And the Clarimax, his de-fatting gizmo that puts fossilized diatomaceous marine algae to work in the service of crystal-clear stocks. At the FCI, he unveiled a yet-to-be-named instant bottle chiller. These are things that are getting attention from chefs and sommeliers now, but won’t likely change things for ordinary cooks anytime soon.

It seems to me that for all of us, León’s re-fashioned mackerel is the invention that matters most. After spending time on commercial fishing vessels watching quantities of dead by-catch dumped at sea, León decided simply to stop serving big-name fish at his restaurant.

“Why do we think the only kind of tuna worth eating is sashimi-grade loin?” he asked. “In Cádiz, where I grew up, we could feed a family on a rice with meat scraps from one tuna bone. Heads are full of meat. We need to learn to cook this way again, to take advantage of the whole fish.”

A few days after his FCI talk, León prepared a blowout seven-course feast with Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Barber excused what appeared to be various eating-high-on-the-tuna sins on our plates: The caviar atop the Ibérico consommé was American paddlefish roe. The lubina (sea bass) was sourced at Veta la Palma, far away, yes, but an ingeniously designed environmentally friendly fish farm at the edge of the Doñana wildlife reserve in southern Spain.

“Sooner or later,” says León, “we’re going to have to discover the fish that have not been glamorized by marketing. Big beautiful cuts of tuna loin and all of rest of the fish we see on menus now will be gone.”

Back at the French Culinary Institute, León asked that the lights be turned down. “I brought a little video. I hope you don’t mind,” he said, not preparing us for the violent scene that came next: Andalusian fishermen balanced on the edges of their boats, sweating, yelling, working the underwater mazes of the almadraba. The water is roiled with waves of fighting tuna, captured as they swim from the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean.

“We have to try to save this kind of fishing,” León said after the film clip ended. There was an awkward silence. I read later that almadraba means battleground in Andalusí (Andalusian Arabic of the early middle ages). How could a bloody man-on-fish battle like this be something to save?

León’s explanation: because it is historic. “The almadraba is a way of life dating back to the Phoenicians and after them to the Romans in Cádiz.” His real point: because it is sustainable. “That long history is possible because we had it figured out over two thousand years ago: enough fish get through to produce the next generation.”

The almadraba is seasonal. Because the tuna are culled live, this is a one-at-a-time confrontation that produces no by-catch. And, most important to a fisherman like León, it involves chance, and therefore is ethical hunting.  “Había suerte?–Any luck? This has always been the question asked of returning fishermen,” he explains.

High-tech fishing that has eliminated the concept of luck and the reality of mutual struggle is, in León’s view, what’s got us into this mess. “The kind of fishing that should scare us doesn’t because it’s done at a remove from the sacrifice. It’s carried out with helicopters and radar. The fish can be hunted down anywhere–that’s the kind of fishing that must be stopped.”

It was time to go, but Angel León had one more thing to show off. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a thick brown coin. “A friend gave me this coin,” he said, “It was found in Cádiz, but it’s Phoenician. See here? Stamped on it are two tunas. That is how important the tuna were then. I carry it with me always.”

Please don’t flash that thing on the street in New York.  And don’t show it to the full-body scanners over at TSA on your way back to Spain. Oh, Angel, I hope those tuna are still in your hands.

About the photos in this entry: these were taken by a talented photographer at Angel León’s seminar at the FCI and are posted at their blog, The Hot Plate. They are indeed, “hot,” I’d love to hear back from someone at the FCI for proper credit.

Some of you (especially readers around age two) may have felt drawn to the little guy peeking out from behind the pile of mantecados I wrote about last week. He’s my favorite caganer, a traditional rendition of the Catalan shitting man. He takes his place in all Catalan nativity scenes (even the ones in churches) to remind you of your humanity.  Here’s what it’s all about: no matter what kind of miracles may be going on around you, the arrival of kings and gods and so on, there you are, you and the call of nature, somewhere behind the manger.

I’ve noticed some of you don’t quite believe my annual claims about the importance of this tradition in Catalonia, though I’m glad at least a few of you are as charmed by it as I am. Either way, here’s a link to this year’s Catalan Christmas hit, ‘El Caganer,’  in which pop stars Albert Pla, Joan Miquel Oliver, Gerard Quintana, Estopa, and Quimi Portet i Manel wax nostalgic about what makes for the perfect nativity scene:  ”There’s Mary and Joseph, the three kings, shepherds and sheep, a little old lady roasting chestnuts… and above all, there’s gotta be a caganer.”

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.

I’m working on creating a walking and eating route across northern Spain — the drizzly part of the country travel marketers call Green Spain.  I realize the pairing of drizzle and green may not sound all that exciting, but we’re going in September, close to grape harvest time, so we can take advantage of the fact that entire villages will be praying for good weather.

Anyway, there are enough intriguing pairings to be found along the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James, the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain) to make braving the mist seem worthwhile:  scallops and albariño, white bean stew and bubbly hard cider, tapas of octopus and pimientos de padrón, mountains and cave-aged cheeses, stories of forest gnomes and songs of bagpipes, Javier Bardem and Oviedo.

About those scallops: they are one of the wonders of Galicia’s coast.  And I’m not alone in thinking of albariño, the crisp white wine from the d.o. Rias Baixas in Galicia, as their perfect companion.  These wines usually suggest citrus and a whiff of melon or peach, though they finish dry.  When you picture the region’s granite terrain and imagine its salty sea breezes you start noticing their minerality or even a salty note, more present in some albariños than in others.  Last night called for albariño and a springy treatment of scallops, like this:

Scallops with Apricots and Albariño
For two as a first course or light main course

6 big sea scallops
1 thick slice pancetta, cut into small cubes
1 handful of sugar snap peas, about 1 Cup
2 apricots, cut into small cubes
2 leafy sprigs of mint, about 10 leaves, minced
zested rind of 1/2 lemon
1/2 shallot, minced, about 1 Tbsp
1 Cup albariño
a drizzle of olive oil
1 Tbsp butter (optional)
salt to taste

Place the minced shallot in a small saucepan with the wine and simmer to reduce by about half.  While the wine reduces, cut up the pancetta, rinse the peas, pit and chop the apricots, zest the lemon rind, and mince the mint.  Your wine is probably reduced enough by now, so turn it off.  Sauté the pancetta in a medium hot skillet until crispy, remove the pancetta and set it aside.  Wipe out the pan sauté the peas in it, with a drizzle of olive oil, then remove them and set them aside.  In the same pan, sear the scallops – salt them lightly and remember they don’t need much time, a minute or so on each side to caramelize and firm them up a bit.  Remove the scallops and deglaze the pan with the shallot-studded wine, swirl in the butter (or not, it just makes the sauce lovelier), then throw the scallops, pancetta, peas, and apricots all into the pan to coat them with the sauce.  Plate the apricots, peas, pancetta, then the scallops and any remaining sauce, then sprinkle the plate with zest and mint.

Some people feel the scallop should be more properly paired with Santiago.  The scallop shell is the symbol of the Camino, or at least the Christian version of the pilgrimage.  I’ve found two stories about why:  The Apostle James, one version goes, did a little evangelizing among the Celts on the Iberian peninsula.  On vacation, I guess, back in Jerusalem in 44A.D., Agrippa thanked him for his efforts by beheading him.  Going down as a martyr disqualified James from a decent burial, so his buddies (or some say a bevy of angels) put him on a raft and set him out to sea.  Next thing you know, the raft turns up on the Galician shore.  Or at least so said the witness, a hermit named Pelayo, who, it must be said, also reported seeing a field of stars shimmering at the scene (Campostellae).  Here’s the thing:  the body of James was covered in scallop shells, but in really good shape, considering it had been out at sea for more than 700 years (think about this next time you consider cryonics).

Another explanation for why the image of scallop shells is so frequently found along the Camino is that scallops just happen to be one of the great foods of the Galician coast.  And they must have been plentiful back in the early days of pilgrimages.  So picture this:  humble penitents and seekers making their way to Santiago gobbled them alongside wild chestnuts and whatever else they could lay their hands on for sustenance.  Plus, the empty shells came in handy as bowls and spoons.

I don’t really know Alberto Romero but thanks to the Internet, I have seen what he has for breakfast and I love him for his dedication to one of Spain’s perfect meals: a little crema-topped café with a glass of water back, olive-oily bites of crunchy fried dough in the form of a churro (or a puffier porra, since he’s in Madrid), and that excellent newspaper, El País.  Thanks, Alberto, for the photo above.

I rejoice when I hear that Starbucks has overextended itself and may have to close a few stores. As if that sameness they bring to city streetscapes weren’t tiresome enough, the coffee — ordinary beans, overroasted — just isn’t that good. And it gets my goat that the megachain has made inroads in Spain, where a well-priced, very good cup of coffee, served up quickly enough to make takeout seem like a waste of effort, is a long-established tradition.

Walk into any decent bar here and order a café con leche.  You get a nice, dark, crema-covered shot with freshly steamed milk for maybe a Euro twenty-five. If, like Alberto, you are not late for work, throw in a slice of toast with tomato (una tostada con tomate), a bite of omelet (un pincho de tortilla), or that porra, and linger for a whole five minutes. The point is, in the same time it takes you to get your “to go” order at Starbucks, you can stand at the counter and have your coffee made-to-order, spend a moment savoring it and reviewing news headlines, and be on your way.

Then there’s this:  if you buck Starbucks, you get to drink your coffee out of a real cup instead of paper.  Unless of course you’re one of those people who insist on having their coffee served in a glass (en un vaso, por favor).  Alberto drinks his coffee solo but his girlfriend, a café con leche woman, explains the glass permits the addition of a little extra milk.

In Spain, your coffee need not match some pre-programmed corporate coffee drink profile.  Ask for your coffee shorter and stronger (corto), or longer (largo) and while you’re at it, say whether you want your milk heated very hot and frothy (muy caliente) or just lukewarm (templada) or, maybe because you’re late for work, cold (fría).  Coffee with just a little milk foam is un cortado. A plain old espresso is un café solo, though you are welcome to get your hit of coffee spiked with a shot of brandy (un carajillo — for which you may also specify whisky or anís).  If you must have something like a drip brew, long and watery, order an americano.  Decaffeinated beans brewed properly in an espresso machine (un descafeinado de máquina) have, in swankier bars, replaced the dreaded envelopes of instant coffee decaf drinkers were once given.  A glass of water alongside your Joe is customary, but as Alberto points out, it is also customary for waiters to forget to serve it, so if you want water, ask:  y un vasito de agua también, por favor.

Have it your way, with one exception.  Do not order a milky coffee after mid-day, and most especially not after a big lunch or dinner.  If you order a café con leche after, say, 11:00am, a seasoned barman will serve your coffee in a cup, knowing you won’t want to fill up on milk so close to the lunch hour (which comes around 2:00pm).  This has to do with the Spaniards’ ceaseless worry about things that will give you a corte de digestión.  They care about this the way the French care about their livers.  And maybe they’re right.  You wouldn’t want your digestion cut off, would you?

More musings on a proper breakfast, on why waiters forget to bring water, and how that relates to what we get and pay for in the online realm can be found on Alberto’s blog.

The Catalans paid special homage to Obama this year at Christmas by creating one of their traditional nativity figurines, the caganer, in his image.  I’m assured by the friends who sent me this one that it is intended entirely as an honor.  The caganer — that man who’s gotta go just as events unfold at the nativity scene — is , after all, a beloved character in Catalonia.  And since he’s meant to remind us of our humble humanity, I figure Obama would be flattered.