“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.

“I always wanted to eat plankton,” said Angel León, beginning the story of one of his culinary affairs. He seemed too sweet to be a chef, especially one of Spain’s most inventive ones. “When I was young,” he went on, “I remember they told us all about how whales feast on it.”

He looked hopefully across the room full of cooks and students who gathered to hear him last Thursday at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. “I mean, it always seemed to me it would be kind of like eating life itself — primordial.”

León grew up in Cádiz, the faded-gold southern Spanish port that sits right where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean meet. And he grew up fishing. But you know how fishermen are — it would take him a while to find other gaditanos interested in going out after something so tiny and unimpressive. Then there was the problem of finding a net fine enough to pull this nearly invisible fish food out of the ocean.

Eventually, León got a few friends to join his quest, and he persuaded a university biologist to give him some sort of scientific cheesecloth they use to measure plankton density. The day came for his plankton expedition. After hours of trolling, they came back to shore with exactly two grams of the stuff.  Plankton are really really small.

It took two more years, but León is now a plankton farmer, growing his own and harvesting it every three months from his swimming-pool-sized vat of autoclaved seawater. He brought a whole bowl full of green powder to New York last week. “This is freeze-dried,” he said. “At home, we use it fresh.”

When he says “at home,” he means at his restaurant, Aponiente, in el Puerto de Santa María, about 20 minutes outside Cádiz. “My love of fishing came first,” he said, “and one passion led to another.” But he was working as a chef during his plankton-pursuing years and before that, too, when he spent some time on commercial fishing boats. What he learned there — that about three quarters of what is caught is nameless by-catch that is dumped, mostly dead or damaged  – has had a huge impact on his cooking. Now he’s on a mission: to give those unknown fish a name and to put them on our plates. Plankton, it turns out, fit into that scheme.

Plankton are very very green. At his French Culinary Institute talk, the chef mixed plankton, mineral water, a pinch of salt, and just enough xanthan gum to make a syrupy paste. When you’re dealing with a food that looks like spirulina, maybe it’s inevitable that you end up saying things like “Plankton has 30 times more omega-3s than olive oil.” León said these things and added, “I’m working on making a plankton-based baby food.”

Wait a minute, we’re at the FCI, and Dan Barber, who knows when a thing tastes good, introduced this man. I’m working as his interpreter and am trying to focus, but I am starting to be distracted by worries about the f-word. He hasn’t mentioned what all these virtuous nutrients add up to, flavor-wise.

“Luckily,” chef León said (and now he used the Spanish word for a Cupid’s arrow of desire — for being lovestruck), “that plankton flechazo that struck me so long ago was a good thing.” He passed around a glass of his primordial soup: it tasted like the sea in that juicy, creamy way that oysters do.

And that means León can bring the plankton into traditional Spanish cooking in roles ordinarily played by expensive and overfished species. He talked about how he blends it into bechamél for croquettes and uses it to make “instant” fumet.

He poured a little cold plankton sauce into a wide bowl (”Maybe the biggest problem with this is really its name,” he digressed), placed a few oysters on top (”I bought these here in New York, but at home I would use a more humble clam, something with a nice texture but without the flavor of an oyster — the plankton is flavorful enough”), then garnished the plate with a little pretend seafoam made of beaten egg whites flavored with zested lemon rind (”A classic complement to seafood”).

“Emotionally,” he said “I feel this is just a very essential expression of the ocean.” It looked surreal, like a close-up from a National Geographic article about beaches.

Warm, he said, the plankton has a more “commercial” flavor, by which he meant less pungent, something more familiar to diners.

He stepped up to the big casserole he’d had on the back burner all that time; in it was a base for an arróz (paella is just one category of Spain’s many arroces — rices). But this base was plainer than usual, nothing but chopped onions simmered in olive oil. No fancy, expensive, or threatened shellfish in sight. In went the rice (in this case Arborio, but en casa it would be Bomba), then plain fumet. Taking it off the fire, he stirred a big dollop of plankton into the finished rice with a warning: “You don’t want to really cook this paste — it’s very high in protein and it will coagulate,”  and doled out plates for tasting.

The rice was perfect, buttery rich without being milky; it smelled like a jumble of fresh shellfish, and it had people murmuring about flavor. “We don’t have taste memory for plankton itself,” León said. “So a Spanish friend says it tastes like langostinos, a Japanese friend says it tastes like nori. What it tastes like to you depends on your experience.”

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 (about 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)

a fat pinch of salt

1/4 lb. (one stick) butter

Preheat oven to 350F. Put almonds on a baking sheet and toast them lightly, about 5 minutes, until they’re aromatic. Let them cool completely. I don’t bother to skin them; the ground skin makes the cookie more rustic.

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

(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.

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 take back all those unflattering things I’ve said in the past about Bilbao. That stuff about how it’s the “the Pittsburgh of Spain.” Yes, it’s an iron city. Yes, the Ría that runs through it is brown. And yes, it’s annoying, if not panic-inducing, that the Guggenheim Bilbao is now listed in 1000 Places to See Before You Die. But the city that inspired a planning cliché, “the Bilbao effect” (build a Big-Name-Architect museum and you’ll soon be polishing up your rusting economy with wads of tourist dollars), is more than all that.

A month ago, we set out on the Camino de Santiago from here. There are historical arguments for starting in Bilbao – the city has figured on Camino trail maps since the 1300s – but I chose it for practical reasons: You can get to Bilbao from just about anywhere. And yes, there’s Gehry’s museum.

But while the Guggenheim lends this departure point an Oz-like glow, for me the real Bilbao effects, the things I want to go back for, are these:

Its green, green heart. You fly into Bilbao over rounded hills. “It’s like a fairytale,” said Ed, looking out the window at forests, meadows, and farmhouses coming into view through a mist. The Guggenheim is famously sited up against the city’s industrial edge, but here’s what nobody tells you: it looks pretty swell against that green farmland too.

Its good, good eats. The market has a whole floor, icy and sweet-smelling, dedicated to fish. An encouraging first stop. Afterwards, my Bilbaina colleague, Carmen, pointed us to her favorite bar on the Plaza Nueva for a pintxo (peppers and tuna and cod and countless other little bar bites) and a zurito (a little beer). The tap is a bronze hand by Lorenzo Quinn. And the fluffy scrambled eggs they fed us as a vehicle for buttery sautéed cèpes, well those cured our jet-lag, I swear.

Big colorful windows. It rained a few times on our first day here. Then again, the sun came out a few times, too. The Basques track it all from their pretty enclosed balconies, sometimes painted bright colors.

The Euskotran. The walks from old city to new couldn’t be better: fifteen minutes along pretty 19^th century boulevards and grandly gardened roundabouts or an equally easy stroll via the promenade along the river (and you get to cross Calatrava’s glass bridge). But it’s just so sweet the way this little tram zips quietly along the grass.

Bilbao’s big girl. You gotta love her. And also the shop selling boinas, those huge rain-worthy Basque berets. And the windows full of hiking gear including stuff for the people who are into ropes. Bilbao is just that kind of hearty, practical place.

Ongi etorri! Actually, nobody welcomed us with this greeting when we touched down in Euskal Herria (that’s the Basque Country, to you). But, with our comfort in mind, the airport did offer this helpful invitation to the komunak. Just the fact that the Basques have Euskara, their very own language that no one else can figure out, makes me want to write them a love letter in lemon juice.

In all, the plan was to land in Bilbao and get on the Camino without looking back. But that’s not the way it went.

For one thing, there was that last lunch at another of Carmen’s favorite places, a restaurant whose name I cannot bring myself to reveal (except to my clients): beautiful ham, and a “Rioja with Ribera tendencies” (my god, what was that?), a luscious stew of garbanzos with lobster, tiny squid with slow-cooked onions, a delicate shell of a cream puff, coffee on the terrace overlooking the city.

As I was leaving, the gracious owner-maitre, Patricio Valiño, discreetly handed me something. “Oh madam, I believe you dropped this…” It was the button from my pants which had, it seems, miraculously shrunk during our Camino journey.

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.

It’s August and I keep thinking about cold gazpacho.  I picture myself gulping it under the shade of a fig tree.  But I’m stuck in New York City right now, and, at least down here below penthouse level, we don’t have many fig trees.  And what’s worse this year:  we don’t have tomatoes; there’s a tomato blight on.  For once, rather than whining about what they’ve got that we ain’t got, I’m endeavoring to change my inner tune.  Today, borscht is my song.  This one goes out to my Spanish friends who do love beets, thank you very much, in their potato salad, and who have, after all, become suckers for foods with other-worldly looks, con un abrazo, desde Nueva York — toma ya, Ferrán:

Borscht

Serves 4

3 medium beets (250 gr.), roasted or steamed, cooled, and peeled

1 small red onion (100 gr.)

1 and 3/4 C cold water (400 ml.), plus a handful of ice cubes

1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice (un buen chorro)

1 Tbsp. chopped fresh dill (de guarnición)

1 C sour cream (crème fraiche, también de guarnición)

s&p

Place beets, onion, water, and ice in a blender (licuadora) and blend until smooth.  Season with lemon juice, salt, and pepper to taste.  Serve in bowls, topped with a spoonful of sour cream and a scattering of dill.

(Some people doll it up with halves of hard boiled egg and peeled, steamed, chilled new potatoes, and an additional sprinkling of minced red onion.  Not me.)

]]> http://spanishjourneys.com/oliveme/2009/08/25/whadda-we-got-that-spain-aint-got-borscht/feed/ http://spanishjourneys.com/oliveme/2009/08/01/waiting-your-turn-the-spanish-way/ http://spanishjourneys.com/oliveme/2009/08/01/waiting-your-turn-the-spanish-way/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:45:13 +0000 Teresa http://spanishjourneys.com/oliveme/?p=255

If you think the harried shop shopkeepers of Barcelona are ignoring you just because you’re a tourist, you would be wrong (oh, all right, you might be wrong). Maybe it’s just that you don’t know the seemingly disorganized, fabulously efficient, time-honored rules for waiting your turn in Spain.

Queueing-related angst nearly ruined my recent summer pilgrimage to the rope-soled shoes mecca, La Manual Alpargatería, in Barcelona. The place normally dredges up issues for me, in a good way. I mean, do I really need the sexy, sparkly, red peep-toe espadrilles with the dark soles? And if not, what am I doing wrong? But just as I was getting into the groove of my crucial inner dialogue, an exasperated British voice knocked me off course: “Let’s just leave – they’re never going to wait on us.”

The owners at La Manual insist on doing certain things the old fashioned way. They know how to fit the uptown ladies in cheery, mid-heel monotones, the first communion candidates in custom beribboned flats, and the bohemian Barcelonins in plain black slip-ons. The whole scene is charming enough to have earned the shop attention in the New York Times and in Travel & Leisure magazine.

But their adherence to the traditional system of sorting out the eternal question, “who is next?” can mire unsuspecting out-of-towners in huffiness.

Not that I want La Manual to abandon its non-queue queues. The method, used in shops all over Spain, is superior, really, to standing in a rigid line. It allows you to browse the goods rather than the hairs on the back of the neck of the person ahead of you. And, without requiring real friendliness, it is much more politely sociable than the “take a number method” encroaching from the colder cultures. In short, it is a system worth saving and maybe even exporting.

Understanding the local technique requires letting go of the myth that Southern Europeans are too pushy to wait their turns. Doing it right starts with noticing the order in the chaos of the crowd. Here’s how it works:

1) As you walk into a crowded shop, you pause, look around at the crowd, and ask firmly:  “Quién es el último?” Or if you’re in Catalonia you might want to try out “Qui és l’últim?” Either way, your meaning will be clear – you’re asking, “Who is the last person in line?”

2) You’ll hear someone, somewhere in the crowd, say, matter-of-factly, “Yo.”  (I am.)

3) Make eye contact with that person, then keep an eye on him, even if he moves around the store in one direction and your browsing takes you in another.

4) Notice that the saleslady or counterman calls out occasionally, “Quién es?” or “Qui és?”  (Who is next?). Customers respond one by one, placing their orders in a, well, orderly way. They know it’s their turn when the person ahead of them has been waited on.  No matter where they are each standing.

5) Once the person ahead of you (figuratively if not literally) has been waited on, you need to be on your toes because when the next available salesperson asks, “Quién es?” it’s your turn to order.

6) Of course, during your waiting and browsing, you’ve also kept one corner of your mind focused on others entering the shop.  The person who enters after you will ask the usual question, “Quién es el último?” and you’ll be the one to answer, “Yo,” exchange glances, and know that person is keeping an eye on you.

“Oh, no, not me.  I don’t drink cocktails,” I said, as Xesca mixed up a pitcher of rebujito, her favorite summer potion.  “And especially not cocktails made of wine,” I added snootily to myself.  I mean, there’s a reason spritzers are so 1970s, and that reason is wine.  Yet here she was, a friend I truly admire, blithely swizzling up a bubbly drink with, of all things, a delicate Manzanilla.

Bone-dry and well-chilled Manzanilla is southern Spain’s perfect cocktail all on its own.  In fact, it would be the whole world’s favorite aperitif if it weren’t so misunderstood.  You see, it’s a sherry.  If you’re an American, that brings to mind white-haired ladies sipping sweet, warmish, tea-colored booze in a cobwebby drawing room in the vicinity of Harvard Yard.

You would be wrong, of course.  My advice to purists ready to get to know the pleasures of dry sherry is pretty simple:  buy a bottle of Manzanilla (perhaps La Guita from the Hijos de Rainiera Pérez Marín), get it good and cold (about 45 degrees F), and sip it with a bowl of salty marcona almonds, spicy garlic shrimp, or a sliver of good jamón Ibérico.

Like all sherries, Manzanilla is made by the solera method:  each year’s vintage is added to barrels racked at the top of the bodega as the year’s bottling is drawn off from barrels at ground level (the suelo, thus solera), while, in between, the new and less recent vintages mingle.

As with all dry sherries, the barrels are filled only halfway.  With other wines, barrels are topped up to prevent the wine being exposed to air.  But with dry sherries, oxidization is prevented by a more magical process:  a yeasty covering blossoms on the surface of the wine.  The longer a wine spends under this creamy, foamy blanket of yeast, known as the flor, the drier, paler, and finer it becomes.

That’s why Manzanilla is finer than Fino:  In Sanlúcar, where Manzanilla is made, local sea breezes support the flor year-round, plus, people say, they also impart a hint of saltiness to the wine.

So Xesca’s rebujito cocktail is just so wrong, you’re thinking.  Well, I should warn you, Xesca is one of those Andalusians who is perfectly happy living in Barcelona.  Her Catalan is just fine, but so is her flamenco.  She says she doesn’t really miss the South of Spain, but then she sneaks off to Jerez to the feria in spring.  She is serious and not so serious at the same time.  She is something of a seductress.  “Come on, mi amor, it’s hot out.  You’ll see, a little rebujito is just the ticket,” she says, pouring the icy, bubbly, minty, sherry potion into my glass.  And it is.

El Rebujito, Según Xesca
for each cocktail

2 oz. well-chilled Manzanilla*
4 oz. cold tonic water**
1 large, leafy sprig fresh mint
plenty of ice

Pour the Manzanilla over ice and mint in a lowball glass, then add the tonic and give the mixture a quick stir.  Soon you’ll be making these by the pitcher full — just keep the proportions as they are here, and pour a round soon after mixing so as to take advantage of the tonic’s bubbliness.

* Xesca insists on La Gitana brand because she is fond of the label – “es la más folklorica,” she says. Any Manzanilla or even a Fino will do.

** In Spain the mixer of choice would be  La Casera, a gaseosa that is not quite as sweet as our tonic water.  Some shameless expat drinkers substitute Sprite or Seven-Up, but doesn’t tonic seem classier?

As I pulled these creamy blocks out of my suitcase after my last trip to Spain, Ed was standing by as usual, salivating, and asking about how I had eluded the food-haters at U.S. Customs this time.  Then I broke it to him:  “It’s not cheese, it’s soap.”  The stuff is so pure you could almost eat it.  It’s made out of nothing but olive oil, water, and lye.  So even though Ed is not much interested in things you can only almost eat, I think the recipe is worth sharing.

My soap coach on this trip was the fabulous Paquita Funes, andaluza and mother of  Señorita Bragas Limpias, a friend who earned that nickname on her last trip to the U.S. for the meticulous care she lavished on her deluxe dainties.  Little Miss Clean Underthings never leaves home without a bar of her mom’s homemade soap.

Paquita recycles her family’s olive oil into amazingly soothing slabs six liters at a time.  “I like to make the soap out of the oil I’ve used for frying roscos,” she said, referring to her plain little doughnuts — they leave the oil nice and sweet and clean.  She filters her olive oil by pouring it through a cheesecloth-lined sieve, and because she fries the roscos gently, she re-uses it a couple of times before turning it into soap.

Andalusians are shameless consumers of olive oil.  And why not?  They produce more of it than anyone else in the world.  My former mother-in-law swore the secret to my ex’s fabulous skin was that his first bath involved no water whatsoever: “It’s much better to massage newborns in olive oil,” she always said.  For those of us who don’t generally have six liters of oil in circulation, I’ve reduced Paquita’s recipe to proportions based on one liter of olive oil and converted it into U.S. measurements.*

Paquita Funes’s Recycled Olive Oil Soap

1 Quart olive oil (it’s fine to recycle used oil for this purpose, especially if the oil was reserved for frying mild foods on gentle heat and you’ve strained it clean)
1 Quart water
3/4 Cup additional cold water for diluting the lye
6 Oz. lye (also called “caustic soda,” chemically it’s sodium hydroxide, NaOH)**

Place the olive oil and the quart of water in a large nonreactive bowl (ceramic, glass, or plastic).  In a separate nonreactive bowl,  carefully add the lye to the additional 3/4 C cold water — it will bubble and steam, and the lye can burn, so do this carefully***.  Then add the lye solution to the olive oil and water base, stirring in a bit at a time, and again using great care.  Stir the mixture with a long wooden spoon, mixing always in the same direction, until it thickens to the consistency of a thick bechamel — this can take some time.  Pour into glass, silicon, or metal loaf pans (or an official soap mold) and leave to set for at least 24 hours.  Turn out the soap, slice it into bars, and wrap in parchment paper to cure for another two weeks before using.

*Paquita’s recipe uses the simplest cold process method.  And by the way, this soap is technically “pure Castile,” sometimes called “pure Marseilles,” in that it uses 100% olive oil.  Check out Walton Feed Company’s soapmaking pages for loads of details on the soapmaking process, including charts for double checking your measurements, which are especially important if you want to mess with this recipe by, say, swapping out 20% coconut oil for harder bars or tarting them up with oatmeal or essential oils.

**Good pure lye for soapmaking is not to be found over the counter in the U.S.  Various soapmaking sites I’ve browsed recommend Camden-Grey, an online supplier of lye, essential oils, and other supplies for soapmakers.

***I recommend suiting up in goggles and gloves and otherwise doing this project the personal-injury-lawsuit-conscious American way.