Spain
One of my last weekend trips this semester was to Spain. Our ragtag group (barely) boarded our train to the south of France and then onto a train to Spain. We knew we were getting closer each time we saw a sign in Spanish or heard an announcement reiterated in that warm, familiar language. Finally, at sometime between six and seven PM we crossed the French border and began a bittersweet culinary experience. It’s not easy to summarize any trip, but if the easy train transition between France and Spain was any indication, then Spain offered us a blending of its history and our home. And as usual, the food spoke to me (ha!).
We spent our first night in Barcelona at a Mexican restaurant to celebrate my friend Paola’s birthday. The restaurant was spacious, festive, and still populated by the time we arrived at 10 PM. We say down and talked to our waitress, a Mexican ex-pat from Puebla. After small talk, we quickly ordered chamoy margaritas, horchatas, and water with tamarindo. A short while later, I ordered carnitas and guacamoke and let all the spices just sit in my mouth. Apart from a brief adventure at the Milan Food expo nearly a month before, this was my first encounter with authentic Mexican food in nearly three months. After almost a semester of buttery, bland, and delicate French foods, my taste buds were ready for bold flavors that stood alone and didn’t need wine to bring them out.
Perhaps the greatest part of the meal was the connection our Mexican dishes had to home. Though not everyone at the table strongly identified as Latino, we all grew up with taco stands and a neighborhood Mexican restaurant around the corner. Unlike French food, Latin-inspired cuisine is more familiar and welcoming to us. It tastes like home. The Mexican owners of the two other Mexican restaurants next door likely felt the same.
The owner of one of those restaurants, a street taco inspired place, was a Mexican ex-pat from Mexico City. He told us about how he wanted to bring the tastes from his neighborhood to Barcelona. He’s not alone. In recent years, Barcelona has joined Chicago and Los Angeles as one of the “most satisfying places to eat Mexican food outside of Mexico” (Lobrano). This growth has occurred despite few if any historical ties to Mexico and a Spanish cuisine that is blander and almost at odds with most Mexican plates. For example, while Mexican food centers on pork, chicken, and beef, Spanish food centers around shrimp and other seafood (B&G Foods Inc ). The main spice in Spanish food is saffron and it relies on the combination of different foods to achieve a desired taste. Mexican food, in contrast, uses a wide array of spices like chili powder, garlic, and cloves. The flow of people and ideas from Mexico to Spain stands in contrast to the much larger trend of Spaniards flocking to Mexico to wait out a terrible economy (Flannery). Maybe that’s what made the food all the more special: that the cultural fluidity within Spain’s dining and cuisine was still evident despite recent challenges.
Pork tacos from the Mexican restaurant we went to on the second day
One of the few Catalan dishes we had in Barcelona
Throughout our stay in Barcelona, we ate mainly Mexican food. However, the second we got off our train in Madrid we switched gears. My cousin picked us up and we headed straight to a “cave” in the town square where Vincent, Paola, and I ate ham, crackers, and sipped on sangria. Time stood still as the windowless dark cave made it hard to keep track of how much time had passed. The saltiness of the ham mixed well with the fruity sweetness of the sangria.
As Sue Shepard notes in Pickled, Potted and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Processing Changed the World Spain is famous for its huge dried mountain hams derived from wild Red Iberian pig found near Madrid (Shepard). Traditionally and even today, the meat from these pigs is placed in a cloth sack filled with crystalline salt. The result, jamón Serrano, is quite prized around Spain. Over sangria, my cousin jokingly told us how guests at dinner parties are expected to bring the leg of a pig to make a good impression.
Made from wine, sparking soda, fruit, and sometimes brandy, sangria is arguably one of Spain’s signature beverages. Sangria started around 2,000 years ago when Romans marched through the Iberian Peninsula and planted vineyards (Aloise). As in other pre-modern civilizations, wine was one of the few drinkable beverages because of poor water conditions. In Spain, however, red wines were mixed with herbs, water, and spices to ward off bacteria. Drinking water has obviously become more readily available over the years, but this hasn’t done much to lessen the dominance of sangria. Throughout Madrid, but less so in Barcelona, most Spanish restaurants offered sangria and not much else on their alcoholic menus. Tinto, a variant of sangria was also popular. Made from wine and lemon soda, tinto has less of a fruity taste and more of a pep.
My cousin and I trying tinto at the market in Madrid
I first tried tinto at the Mercado de San Miguel the next day as well as a host of other Spanish dishes. Built in 1916, the famous Mercado de San Miguel is the last remaining market hall in Madrid and has been categorized as a Site of Cultural Interest by the Spanish government (Meracdo de San Miguel). Just like France, Spain is serious about its food. Today, the market’s mission is to “reflect the gastronomical plurality of Spain” and “to work with the human, technical and industrial resources necessary for sensory evaluation, tastings and gastronomical challenges” (Meracdo de San Miguel).
The market in Madrid
When we entered the market we were bombarded with sounds and smells. At the front of the market, there were rows and rows of seafood. Fresh and staring right at us, these fish were prepared into tapas and paella right before our eyes. In another section, we saw pigs legs hanging from the walls and watched as they were cut right there for our consumption. In the far back, we found small, colorful Spanish pastries. Naturally, each booth offered wine or sangria.
And just like the Romans brought sangria to Spain, so too did the Arab Moors bring many of these features to Spanish cuisine. For example, the almonds and citrus fruit featured in the matecados, catalan cream, and fardelejos we found in the dessert section came from the Moors and their innovative irrigation techniques (Davidson). They enabled the first plantings of groves of almond trees along the Levante coast and today the areas where the Moors once ruled is evident by the rich confections made from almonds, eggs, cinnamon, and butter (Grigson).
Paella, another dish I tried at the market, exemplifies the cultural fluidity of Spain’s food. While the Roman’s introduced irrigation, the Arabs perfected these techniques and brought rice to Valencia in the 8th century (Casas). The cultural fusion goes further. Paella is named after the utensil for which it is cooked, a frying pan, and this utensil comes from the Romans. The Moors used this frying pan to make rice with seafood, vegetables, pulses, and fish during religious holidays (Davidson). Later, the scale increased as everyday life in Valencia and surrounding areas became more social and food was needed to entertain large groups. Today, traditional Valencian paella includes rice, butter beans, tomato, olive oil, paprika, saffron, snails, water, and salt. Though not a universal habit today, paella is eaten straight from the large round frying pan and made by men, not women. Interestingly, and perhaps, contributing to the theme of cultural fusion in Spanish cuisine, are the similarities that paella has to Lousiana Jumbalaya and Italian Risotto. Both of these rice-based Italian and French-inspired dishes are cooked in mass and incorporate regional meats and spices. These three dishes only underscore the fluidity of food and highlight how that fluidity appears on plates everywhere in Spain.
I completed my Spanish food experience by eating many tapas. At the market, these intricate sliders were only a euro and incorporated seafood, poultry, vegetables and sauces. I later learned that they originated during the 1850s when cooks at inns would place bread topped with cheese and ham over glasses to protect the wine from dust (Torres). Ironically, these hungry horsemen only paid for the wine; the tapas were free. Over time, Spaniards established the tradition of eating tapas before lunch and dinner, enjoying them with wine and conversation (Casas). The most basic tapas still have just meat and cheese, but in metropolitan areas like Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, and Valencia they are more extravagant. The tapas I had for example, had octopus with mustard and salmon with citrus sauce.
Tapas! These featured cod with dill sauce and salmon!
When my cousin’s Spanish boyfriend saw how brave I was for trying these extremely Spanish delicacies he applauded. In fact, I applauded myself too. It’s not typical to eat such a wide variety of foods in one day back in the United States. The cultural fluidity of the Spanish cuisine was astounding and the high energy in the market only highlighted this part of the experience. Looking back, I see now how Spain’s unique history of conquering and being conquered put it in a unique position to integrate new foodstuffs into its cuisine at a much faster rate than other powerful European countries. From the Mexican food in Barcelona to the Arab-inspired paella and desserts, Spain opens itself to other cuisines in a way I have not seen in France. The message here: new ideas and new people are not entirely bad. And neither are the tourists who butcher the pronunciation of paella, tapas, and tinta. Be open. Good things can happen when you do.
Be open to creepy looking fish
Versailles
Two weeks later I travelled to Versailles to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin and aunt. They had spent the last week in Paris and the Bordeaux region, experiencing a lot of the culture shock I had endured during my first couple of weeks in France. Like me however, they loved the cheese and wine they had had along the way. We checked into our hotel and decided to start our Thanksgiving celebration with glasses of champagne in the lobby.
As we watched the bubbles fizzle in our glasses, we reflected on what I consider to be the biggest irony of champagne: That the region that offers the world the beverage of celebrations, happiness, and new beginnings has endured the most suffering and pain. A flat terrain with no mountains or bodies of water to protect it, Champagne has constantly been in the path of invaders from the north, south, and west. The same families that have enabled the world’s festivities have also borne the most severe casualties during the Hundred Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the two World Wars (Saunier). What’s more, the climate of the Champagne region is the ecological limit of where grapes can grow. Champagne differs from Bordeaux and other southern wine regions in that it receives very little sunlight and warmth throughout the year, making it difficult for grapes to remain healthy for harvest. We had a lot to be thankful for—starting with the miraculous beverage sitting in our glasses.
We ate dinner at a restaurant called La Tour, an intimate, quiet, homey feeling place off one of Versailles main streets. The owner seated us at one of the few tables and my aunt and cousin eagerly told him how excited they were to try authentic French food. We ordered a bottle of white wine and started off with a plate of sautéed mushrooms and devilled eggs. The less acidic wine mixed well with the creams and sauces of our appetizers. For dinner, I ordered my French favorite, canard, or duck, and gratin dauphinoise, or scalloped potatoes. This too mixed well with the wine and the creaminess of the sauce melted in my mouth. I could taste the butters and oils at the heart of these dishes and I was reminded once more why France has chosen not to co-opt or integrate other cuisines into their meals as Spain has; they don’t need to.
When my aunt and cousin complimented the owner and chef on how hearty and tasty our meals were, they both just shrugged because they knew. Heck, the world knows. The French kill it when it comes to food. This Thanksgiving meal, one of my last in France, counterbalanced my meals in Spain. Yes, be open to new ideas, but know what you’re good at and don’t apologize for sticking with it. The French have taught me a lot: the value of indifference, the value of passion, the value of time, but through their food, they have taught me the value of taste and communion.
Merci France!