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.
“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.”
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.
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 19th 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: (more…)
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. (more…)
“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. (more…)
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.” (more…)
Wait a minute, I remember that face from somewhere. Yes, he’s back, hanging on subway walls and lampposts in Barcelona, sometimes staring out alone, sometimes looming amongst other scoundrels like Berlusconi, Aznar, and Putin. W is now part of the Catalan socialists’ red-hot, retro-designed, European Parliament election campaign. The copy: “Poden treure’ ns de la crisi els que ens hi van ficar?” Do you really think the ones who got us into this mess are going to be the ones to get us out of it?
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. (more…)
The New Yorkers I’ve shown around Barcelona always seem to connect easily to the energy of the Catalan capital. They get its contrasts, I think, of seediness and elegance, of old and new, and its palpable creative and mercantile drive. When they return to the Big Apple, they invariably find themselves jonesing for more. For a while, that big screenfull of lovesick images in Vicki Cristina Barcelona provided a fix. But now what? I might have suggested heading downtown to eavesdrop on vacationing Catalans as they ransack Century 21. But the Institut Ramon Llull, a Catalan language and culture organization, has come up with something far more tasteful: Catalan Days — an arts mashup spanning music, dance, literature, and food. April 15 through May 20 at venues around New York City.
A few years ago I convinced my husband Ed that spending a week as guests in a country farmhouse in Spain would be the perfect vacation. We’d be surrounded by history, eat some real home cooking, and get to know the people – and more important now than it was then: it would be cheap. (more…)
Thanks to the Internet I suppose I could read El País every day. But I get bored after a while looking at the never-ending stream of news (and ads) that the Internet delivers. What I want is to browse the actual paper, noticing what makes headlines when editors are constrained by the real front page. I like to sip my café con leche and look around at everyone else’s paper, too, comparing, say, the Pais’s political spin to the Vanguardia’s white-shoe one to Avui’s Catalan perspective. The Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages gallery delivers some of that browsing fun on its online gallery every day. (more…)
Those Michelin star folks are troublemakers, if you ask me. A couple of years ago, their meddling came between me and my favorite Barcelona lunch date: Restaurant Saüc. It’s not that Saüc’s star wasn’t well-deserved, it’s just that it brought lots of new suitors to the table. Prices went up and our lunchtime thing had to end.
We have “La Crisis” to thank for a recent e-mail from the restaurant, wooing with a 27 Euro prix fixe lunch special. The note also mentions a pumpkin salad, beef cheeks with wild mushrooms, almond and pear tart with sheeps’ milk ice cream. You better believe I’ll go running back for more. (more…)
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. (more…)
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.