Spain carries on as nexus of simply excellent food

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN

I didn’t go to Spain precisely to eat. But wherever you are, you have to eat. So why not be in Spain? When I lived there, during the ’70s, I was always impressed with the tastiness and the simplicity of the food. If you use parsley, garlic, salt, lemon and olive oil, and fresh ingredients, you end up with very good food. I remember getting up early in Madrid years ago to see donkeys arriving in the city, pulling carts laden with produce freshly picked at dawn. And I remember the newly butchered beef carcasses dragged into the market square and the bloody chickens hanging from hooks in the vendors’ stalls.

I went to Spain this past fall, with Gloria, the younger of my two daughters. We loved the food. The basic, wonderful food I remember hasn’t disappeared. We stayed with my longtime friend Barbara in Barcelona, where we cooked a lot of meals from whatever she had picked up randomly at the market (the cornucopia). Everything we invented was sensational. Gloria observed that it was the quality of the ingredients, especially the freshness. We couldn’t fail.

Right away when we arrived, Barbara served us jamón serrano—along with its usual companion, Manchego cheese. My friends Antoni and Rosa in Barcelona and my friend Maimen in Madrid also served us the same kind of ham and cheese. It’s the easiest way to say “you’re welcome in my home.” I mean, the communication is clear and it’s no trouble to prepare—you just slice it and put it on a plate with some typical daily baguette-like Spanish bread. When Gloria was in grade school, she had a Spanish teacher, from Madrid, who told me she couldn’t stand to live somewhere that didn’t have jamon serrano and queso Manchego, the staples. She just had to go home.

Similar to Italian prosciutto, jamón serrano (mountain ham) is dry-cured ham (from grain fed white pigs) hung in sheds at high elevations. It is usually served raw in thin slices. Queso Manchego is sheep cheese made in La Mancha, the central rocky plains region.

Eating out I gravitated toward the traditional foods I remembered. There’s a place in Madrid, near La Puerta del Sol, the center of the city, where they serve patatas bravas (“brave potatoes,” or “very fine, excellent potatoes,” a more likely translation). The famous picante red pimiento sauce had a new smoked flavor component, I thought. And I didn’t remember, consciously anyway, the strong potato flavor in the fried potato chunks. Evidently patatas bravas are a “thing” because when we went to Informacíon and Turismo to get the location of the bar, the girl knew exactly what we were talking about and seemed very pleased—or amused—at our interest in something so humble.

Winding along the street Echegarray in Madrid we found a perfect “economico,” one of those low-cost restaurants with marvelous food. There were no tourists there besides us. We ordered all the fundamental dishes, such as very fresh salad, a bowl of creamy lentils that I couldn’t say enough about, then grilled white fish, and flan for dessert. The exquisite daily bread and wine of Spain came with the meal. It cost 9 Euros apiece (about $11.25 at the rate of exchange I got in June—the best exchange rate I’ve seen in a year and a half—when I bought Euros on a pre-paid card).

One evening we went with Maimen to the very packed Café Aleman, where they say Ernest Hemingway wrote some of his novels and short stories, on the Plaza de Santa Ana. We had old-fashioned tapas (appetizers, which can constitute a meal). We ordered boquerones en vinagre (pickled fish), croquetas de pollo (tasty dough with little chunks of chicken in it, shaped like small cylinders, breaded and and fried in deep fat) and tortilla de patatas (the signature Spanish potato omelette).

Our one full day in Granada we climbed a half hour up the very steep hill to the Alhambra—the 14th century Arabic palace—then climbed another half hour to the machines where you turn your online tickets into real tickets, and then saw the actual site in a marathon of tourism. That night we ate dinner outside along Navas Street, in a narrow river of restaurants, one after the other. The gazpacho was superb, just a tad better than the very good commercial gazpacho sold in cartons. Gazpacho is a puree of salt, bread and water, olive oil and vinegar, raw tomatoes and garlic plus combinations of green pepper, onion and cucumber that vary from cook to cook. We had fried squid, Romano, the most traditional way, just deep fried with a sprinkle of lemon juice, and for dessert, honeydew melon, despite always hearing in Spain that you shouldn’t eat melon at night—I don’t know why. Bread and wine was again included in the 12 Euro per person price (about $15 at our exchange rate).

In the mornings we sat outside in the plaza near the Cathedral and dipped our churros (fat ropes of deep-fried dough) in thick hot chocolate. The waiter said the best Granadino churros were made at this restaurant. I believed him. It cost about $6 for both of us.

After 30 years in the U.S. I was reminded how much I still miss the simple, everyday olives, cheese, chorizo (typical Spanish red sausage), bread, madalenas (typical lemony muffin/cupcakes for breakfast or afternoon snacks), table wine, beer and café con leche (espresso with steamed milk) and the culture they represent. These foods are more than just food, they are a way of life.
There’s also a new, fancier and perhaps less fattening form of the old cuisine. Barbara, who has lived in Barcelona over half her life, gravitates toward the nouvelle cuisine, maybe for her health, maybe out of boredom.

The old food and the new food, which we sampled several times, both boast the fresh ingredients. And what’s really nice about Spanish food, new or old, is that you always accompany it with beer or wine, which feel so much lighter and provide a better bite than soft drinks, and are so much cheaper in Spain than here.