Conversation and Taste

Tags

Anthony Bourdain, Food & Conversation, Food & Wine, Madrid, Malasaña, Paella, Spain, tapas, Tinto de Verano, wine

More great Paella and Tinto de Verano in Malasaña

One rainy evening in the summer of 1994, sitting cross-legged and looking over the mouth of the Kenai river in Alaska as a rusty fishing boat swung on its mooring,  I ate cold uncooked Ramen noodles with my fingers.  After sprinkling on the Oriental Flavor powdered spice pack, I poured over it a can of cold tomato sauce and began to crunch away and pondered where it all went wrong.

It was always raining there, a place locally known as Tent City in Kenai,  a collection of cannery workers where old growth evergreens waved their branches over the ash-colored bluffs at beginning of the Pacific Ocean and the end of the southernmost end of the Kenai Peninsula.  I had $4.oo in my pocket and I lived under a tarp tied to my Volkswagen Beetle.   I had so little money, that the $5.50 to refill the propane stove tank to properly cook that packet of noodles was out of the question.

Pimientos de Padrón and Tinto de Verano in Palma de Mallorca

But there was good conversation.  I had been working alongside my cousin, at a fish processing factory called Salamatof Seafoods, and we had plenty to talk about.  The guy who got $5,000 from the company for getting his pinky sucked up in the fish hold while he was feeding salmon through the suction tube at the dock.  How locals caught giant chinook salmon by going to where the river met the ocean and posting two sticks in the sand with a net between them and waiting for the outgoing tide to rush out and press the helpless fish against the net until they were lying on the bare sand.  About the only marginally attractive girl in the town of Kenai, a (hopefully) 18-year-old blonde named Sadie, who would wear tight acid-washed jeans and conspicuously mingle around the campfires of horny fishermen and drink tall cans of Miller Lite and participate in conversations about the down side of crabbing and the accuracy of the Farmer’s Almanac.  And how we would, as a special treat for ourselves, smuggle King Salmon out of the cannery in the legs of our rain slicks and bring them up to the campfire, wrap them in foil and pour salt and beer over them and pull chunks out of the fish with our hands like Vikings.

A sodium-filled package of happiness.

But I remember that cold, bland meal of Ramen,  and not because it was simply a cold, inedible cup of desperate food, but because at that time, under the rain tapping on the blue tarp above my head, next to the cold, grey Pacific, and among the mossy trees, I had someone to talk to, someone to laugh with and complain about the silliness of life.

My cousin and I had  driven 2633 miles from Albuquerque, New Mexico to the docks of Seward, Alaska in search of adventure and a job by the sea. We had shared the discomforts and euphoria of independent, long-distance travel.  And when we sat down to reflect and evaluate,  there were the stories and endless anecdotes to fill an evening and add to the memory bank of life.

Oysters at El Mercado de San Miguel

I tend to think that an indicator of a well-lived life is the amount of good days that one has accumulated at the end of it all.  At the risk of being too scientific about it, such a well-lived life may be a function of the collected minutes of simple happiness one has proactively facilitated.  Sometimes you have to make it happen.  Sometimes it happens to you.  Sometimes the opportunity is lost forever.  For me, the antithesis of these collected happy minutes with other people are usually filled with too much caffeine, alcohol, and boredom.  But I have found that the Spanish make it easy to avoid these solitary tendencies.

I have said before that one safe generalization about Spanish culture is the propensity to enjoy the simple moment.  Madrid is a city full of busy people walking around doing busy things.  But on a warm Saturday afternoon (and well into the night) one finds terraces and parks full of people talking and sharing with nothing but a simple tapa presented almost as an after-thought, along with a beer, or wine, or Fanta, and their own stories about the week.  I have found this cafe culture elsewhere around the Mediterranean, and each time I rediscover it, I feel like I am remembering some faded, happy memory from a past life.

Yes, it is a simple observation that may not even deserve mention. People eat and drink all the time.

The now standard coupled gin tonic and vodka tonic.

But add a wonderful companion to the already excellent cuisine in this country, and it is possible to discover that a simple lunch can be dangerously close to a life-long memory.  I used to make fun of people who take pictures of food and post them on the Facebook.  But now I can’t even count how many times I’ve gotten out my iPhone and snapped a shot of a dish of cocido madrileño or fabada.  I took a picture of a vodka tonic the other day, for God’s sake.

So it seems to me that sometimes life is clarified when placed in the context of these contrasts of experience.  I have hand-washed myself in a cold lake with sand, and brushed my teeth with my finger because I didn’t have a toothbrush or toothpaste.   But I have also eaten both beluga and osetra caviar while stuffing myself with king crab legs, New Zealand green-lipped mussels, red-wine braised duck and a 1990 Perrier Jouet.  I prefer the duck, but all these experiences are tied together and given meaning when there are other people to share it with.  And sometimes the company even makes the food and drink irrelevant.

I have had a bottle of wine alone.  I have had a bottle of wine with friends.  It wouldn’t take Anthony Bourdain to guess which one tasted better.   And it is refreshing to realize that these experiences can be found in a living room in Amarillo, Texas, on a Tobago beach, on a dusty stretch of the Alaska-Canada Highway, on a sunny terrace in Madrid, in a dark, sub-arctic tavern with peanut shells covering the floor, floating on a 39-foot catamaran somewhere in the Atlantic between St. Helena and Brazil, or at warm restaurant table next to the sea in Palma de Mallorca.

pigs, acorns and happy meals

Tags

Anthony Bourdain, Jamón Iberico, Jamón Serrano, Madrid, tapas

There are few times when I will blatantly or generally discredit my own home culture and upbringing.  For me, it has always been too easy to hold something at a higher level of appreciation simply because of its apparent exotic or undiscovered nature.  This is an adolescent and ironically myopic view of life. To belittle my own way of life to which I have grown accustomed, a way of living that has produced who I am today, doesn’t really do me any good.  I travel not because I hate where I’m from, but because I desire something new in where I am going.  As I grow more pragmatic, there are few times when I want to say, without hesitation, “they just don’t know how to do this where I’m from.”

But, well, this is one of those times.  And I have evidence to present to the court.  

Some may dread the idea of getting philosophical when it comes to food. But in Spain, as I assume in much of the world,  it is often natural and even automatic (especially after a few glasses of some provincial spirit).  Every night in cramped bars across Madrid, there are heated food-related discussions, often of superiority and inferiority, arguments and agreements about region, preparation, age, and quality.  And there are also discussions of football, sex, the day at work, Zapatero, the lottery, family, children, and between all the long-winded exchanges, there is always a cornucopia of food, eaten slowly and with particular convention, and designed over generations to facilitate the progress of the night.  I can’t remember when I had a satisfying, enthusiastic debate over an olive loaf sandwich.  In Madrid, the food is both a subject and a catalyst.

Some Spaniards find it silly when a foreigner becomes enamored with something apparently Spanish.  And often rightly so.  But they often simply cannot imagine the absence of such perceived cultural gems. Even though they are plentiful, they may be taken for granted. For example, I am still in the stage of my Spanish expatriate life where I lust after all the food that I see displayed in windows everywhere I look in Madrid.  As I walked along the street with Madrileño friend, I marveled through the glass at a shop with a rotating display full of handmade sweets, breads and chocolates.  I mentioned to her that we really don’t have this kind of thing where I am from.  She said, somewhat jokingly, “What kind of place is this where you’re from anyway?” But I suspect that they like this admiration, at least a little bit.  I know myself, however, and I must be on constant guard against sentimentality and my pathetic habit of over-romanticizing life.  Yes, I can see, ultimately, that Paz Vega is not really the most gorgeous thing ever to walk the earth. I know that Almodóvar movies sometimes drag, and that not every Madrileño dresses to the nines every day, and that Zapatero’s socialist government is not a real attempt at utopian humanity.  I know that sometimes the bar food is stale and unenthusiastically prepared.  And although I have not yet seen it in person, I may not enjoy seeing bulls stabbed in the shoulders for 3 to 6 hours.

But, then there is the ham.

Jamón Serrano, or simply mountain ham, has a diminishing name.  It is not that hurriedly packaged, vaguely reddish meat of unknown origin, cut in sandwich squares.  And it’s not that glazed, neatly shaped orb poked with cloves found on your Thanksgiving table.  Here, the leg of the pig is there for all to see, right there on the counter, little hoof and all.  They are in home kitchens, in the windows of tapas bars and restaurants, and hanging from ceilings with paper cups underneath them to catch the dripping fat and gristle.  The preparation is long.  Covered in salt for a couple of weeks, it is then cleaned and hung in a dry, cool place for up to 18 months.  The secaderos, or drying sheds, are usually found in relatively higher elevations, hence the name mountain ham.  At its point of presentation, it is thinly sliced bits of heaven, simply placed in layers on a plate, often with some tart cheese as a companion. It has a rich flavor that somehow explains to the eater the specific, rural history of each slice.  I asked a Spanish friend if it is difficult to slice the meat so thin like that.  He said, “You would definitely destroy the first half of your ham. I would not suggest it.” This simple method of presentation is not pretentious; it is a result of practicality and necessity, and it shows a strong, direct connection of the farm to the mouth.  Speaking for myself, much of the food I’ve eaten in bars and pubs throughout my hurried college and post-scholastic life is careless and disconnected from its origin.

Jamon Serrano and Jamon Ibérico appear similar in presentation but differ in quality.

As I watched on TV Anthony Bourdain devour a bonanza of tapas at Mercado San Miguel in Madrid,  he mentioned his appreciation that the food was made right next to where they were sitting and eating it.  His guide, in what I have noticed a very Spanish quirk, just shrugged his shoulders with a look that seemed to state, “of course.”  I’m not sure he really understood what Bourdain was talking about. This immediate attention to food is not a common, expected sight in the bars of the United States (sorry, dropping a bag of frozen chicken fingers in a vat of grease and squirting ranch dressing in a cup is not attention to food preparation and origin). Granted, once this leg of ham arrives at the bar or restaurant, there is not much actual work, but the near brutality of slicing a piece of food from the leg of an animal is refreshingly real.

In case you’re wondering, there are laws and regulations in Europe that (in theory) ensure both the quality and safety of this food.  Jamón Serrano has Protected Geographical Status (TSG), which is slightly misleading in that it means that in order to call it such, this ham must be prepared only in a known and traditional way.  In contrast, imagine Hormel or Cargill pumping out billions of cookie-cutter, leg-shaped ham products, filled with chopped up animal parts, feces and androden trenbolone acetate.  Jamón Ibérico is even more regulated, and thus higher in quality, as it must originate from a specific geographical area and be prepared in a certain traditional way (with specific feed, range area and breed requirements).  I believe these regulations of quality and origin are a reflection of the Spanish attitude about its food.  Many Spanish wines have similar governmental oversight (a whole other blog entry).  In short, the ham that you find on your plate in that noisy, smoky Madrid bar should have come from a pig that walked around on an actual Spanish pasture, and it must have been fed real pig food that did not contain other pig body parts or chemicals to alter its normal growth.

Stacks of cured jamón waiting to be bought at Mercado de San Miguel.

It appears to me that this sad loss of food quality to which I’ve grown accustomed is a direct result of a market-driven system of business that encourages mass production and makes obsolete the importance of quality and works to diminish the value of history and tradition.  Even when I was a professed vegetarian, I was once presented with a giant steak in a Buenos Aires hot spot, the blood oozing out of the striations of cow flesh.  I sliced up and gorged on this pile of meat like it was my last meal.  It should be said I was starving at the time, and I could not be asked to defend myself as that inconsiderate guest with a list of seemingly trivial dietary requirements. But among the reasons I finally abandoned my veggie diet was the fact that I had a pretty good idea where this meat came from and how it was raised.  Through my own cursory look at meat production practices in Argentina, I found a conspicuous absence of deplorable living environments and standardized hormone injections. In fact, the man who handed me my food (and the my local friends at the table) led me to the conclusion that this meat came from an actual cow that lived relatively near, and this cow walked around and ate grass and some other foods that were meant to make it healthy, fat and strong (granted, not for its own benefit).

I am not so naive to think that there are no artificial influences in South American meat production or that all pigs in Spain live happy lives in lush green fields, free of the human greed and shady practices of their owners.  A blog post of standard bacon and pork production would likely have a different tone, at least.

A Black Iberian Pig pondering his fate as a tapa.

In Spain there are rules about food, both cultural and officially sanctioned.  Some are followed, some are not, but it seems the plethora of high quality cheeses, wines, meats, and seafood that I find everywhere in Madrid speak of an overall attitude.  Jamón Serrano and Ibérico are classic examples that show in Spain, quality matters.  To sit at a table with friends and eat these little pieces of meat, also forces me to see, again, that overindulgence is not a prerequisite to a good time.  I am reminded:  slow down, stop looking at your Blackberry, and have a real-time personal conversation or two.

And my grand personal discovery of cured ham is just scratching the surface of Spanish cuisine. I took the photos below on a quick 10-minute walk from my apartment.  Each picture deserves an entire article of explanation.  Spaniards probably find my taking pictures of food in the windows of tapas bars strange.  But if there are any Madrileños reading this, take it from a traveled epicurean guiri–you’ve got something great.  Don’t let your rich gastronomic habits erode to a processed food waste dump. It is has happened elsewhere, and with stunning speed.  We need these things of quality in our lives.  And when they’re lost, our lives will have become that much more generic and impersonal.   And then, we’re in trouble.