INTRODUCTION

IN MY HOME, PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS EATING—whether it’s a freshly made pan con tomate thrown together from the last of the ripe summer tomatoes, good olive oil, and some crusty bread; a big pan of seafood paella shared amongst three generations in a backyard summer feast; or a lunch of leftover tortilla española alongside a simple green salad scattered with candied nuts. No matter the meal, cooking and serving delicious Spanish food at home is much easier than you might think. When you envision Spanish food, you may think tapas—small dishes meant to be served with drinks. And while flavorful bites like banderillas and empanadas provide plenty of inspirations for entertaining, tapas are just a slice of what Spanish cuisine has to offer.

The Spanish cuisine of today in many ways reflects the privations of their civil war years, when home cooks had to be creative with humble ingredients. As a result, simple, comforting food that highlights the beautiful produce, seafood, and meat grown, caught, and raised all around the country forms the basis of Spanish cuisine. Given the fertility of the land and huge coastal areas, Spanish food has always been about the ingredients. And then there are the flavors. Unlike most other countries in Western Europe, Spain is heavily influenced by the spices and seasonings of North Africa. Regional cuisines within Spain vary not only geographically but culturally as well. Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia have their own languages and almost feel like countries within the country. However different their heritages may be, regions within Spain share a philosophy of cooking and dining that places food at the center of familial and unpretentious everyday celebrations.

The food itself is as comforting as the ritual of sharing it. Cúrate, a Spanish restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, that I opened in 2011 along with my husband, Félix, and my parents, Liz and Ted, translates to “cure yourself,” an imperative I take to heart when welcoming guests for a meal. The traditional Spanish cuisine we serve honors the seasonal, local ingredients of the Blue Ridge Mountains and celebrates Southern simplicity and hospitality while championing authentic Spanish dishes and techniques. If these sound like contradictions, they’re no more surprising than a former chemical and biomolecular engineering major at Cornell University dropping out of a PhD program to pursue a culinary career. But first, let me tell you how I got to that point.

MY STORY

Growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, I developed an abiding love of pulled pork with mustard sauce, smoked ribs and chicken, boiled peanuts, and the healing power of soul food. Back home, my grandma and mom slowly stewed collard greens and baked tomato pies and peach pies. For my birthday every year, they followed an orange sponge cake recipe from the Heritage Southern Food Cookbook that came out of the pan as light and airy as a cloud.

When my mom launched her own catering company, my palate continued to expand beyond Southern cuisine. Our home kitchen always buzzed with activity, and commercial freezers lined our basement walls. The scent of Mom’s wonderful rosemary butter rolls hung in the air until the smoke from seared beef tenderloin took over. Any leftovers from catering jobs ended up as my brown-bag lunches. One day it’d be baked brie with raspberries and mushroom paté; on other days I’d get spinach wrapped in phyllo or white bean shrimp salad with goat cheese. If Mom had dough scraps after forming tiny tart shells, she’d fill them with jam and sprinkle them with sugar to bake into lunchbox treats.

I discovered a wide range of flavors early on, and even more important, I quickly learned the joy of feeding others. By the time I was twelve, I was the one making the birthday cakes for our family: German chocolate for Mom and Boston cream pie for Dad.

But as much as I loved food, I never dreamt of cooking professionally. Always strong in math and science, I majored in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University and then went to Paris for my master’s degree. I lived in an apartment in the fifth arrondissement, right on the rue Mouffetard. Dining out didn’t work with my student stipend, but examining all the food stands on my street was free. Each little store had a specialty: brioche here, fish there, pork at this butcher, rabbit at the other. I’d smell and feel every fruit and vegetable and, when I could afford it, I’d splurge on some. I spent what little money I had on the few ingredients I could afford and Le meilleur de la cuisine française saveurs et terroirs, a huge tome that covered every classic French preparation and plating. Learning to make quiche and poisson en croute in an apartment with no kitchen counters, I bleached a three-square-foot section of floor, taped it off as my work surface so no one would walk on it, and rolled and folded dough over and over again to perfect the pastry.

When I returned to the U.S., I enrolled in a PhD program to continue my graduate studies. But as I continued to cook at home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my heart belonged in the kitchen. I decided to drop out of the PhD program. Living in Washington, D.C., at the time, I walked into one of star chef José Andrés’s Spanish restaurants to apply for a job as a server. I went on to work in his kitchens and, from there, I had the privilege of doing a seven-month stage in elBulli’s pastry kitchen. Revolutionary chef Ferran Adrià’s restaurant in Roses, Spain (now closed), was the very best in the world at that time. My stint cooking there was even chronicled by Lisa Abend in her book The Sorcerer’s Apprentices.

The experience was intense, to put it mildly. During our first week, the whole staff had to polish all of the rocks in the restaurant’s garden entrance and replace them in their exact positions. Doing so taught us the attention to detail we needed in order to succeed in creating a restaurant experience as impeccable as the one elBulli promised. Each day, I put my head down and did every task asked of me as flawlessly as I possibly could, as fast as I could. As the end of my time there neared, I was tempted to stay and pursue a full-time position.

But there was another commitment I needed to honor—this time to my parents. They had founded the Heirloom Hospitality Group and chosen Asheville, North Carolina, as the location for its first restaurant. When they generously invited my husband, Félix, whom I’d met while working for José Andrés, and me to be their partners, we were thrilled to accept.

Given Félix’s Spanish heritage and my experience cooking Spanish cuisine, we decided to open a tapas restaurant with my parents. It’s a true family business. Mom’s the CEO and she keeps the whole company running, handling everything from human resources and payroll to public and media relations. Félix has decades of experience running the front-of-the-house and continues to do so at Cúrate, along with overseeing the entire beverage program. Dad takes care of all the finances, keeping us afloat in so many ways.

CÚRATE

In this cookbook, I’ve taken the best principles of Spanish cooking and shown how to apply them in an American kitchen. For example, many people in Spain tend to shop more frequently throughout the week, going to their local markets daily for produce, meats, and seafood. I’ve made sure that the recipes in this book allow you to do your shopping for the week all at once, as we tend to do in the U.S. But of course I encourage you to shop the way the Spaniards do whenever possible, in order to serve your friends and family a large variety of the freshest ingredients. Unlike in the U.S., in Spain the main meal of the day is generally cooked for a leisurely lunch, and then dinner is a quick salad. In this book, I’ve placed recipes in categories more in line with the American conception of lighter, quick-prep lunches and hearty dinners. When I create dishes for the Cúrate menu, I always start by thinking about the main ingredient and how to make it shine. Using authentic Spanish techniques, I expand upon classic Spanish recipes, infusing them along the way with the culinary traditions of the South. If I’m making canelones, I can swap out the meat stuffing for anything, but I’ve got to have the pasta rolled, smothered in béchamel and cheese, and broiled. For white asparagus with mayonnaise, I aerate my sauce to make it fluffier and top it all with torn tarragon leaves. You won’t find the herbs in any classic recipe, but they brighten the dish with a scent I love without compromising the essence of the original. I never veer so far from tradition that a dish loses its soul.

One of my greatest struggles when opening Cúrate was figuring out how to replicate the home cooking of Spain for hundreds of diners a day. Learning to cook in Spain is a lifelong journey, with recipes often passed down from generation to generation. Typically, friends and family will whip together similar dishes without a recipe, purely working from the memory of cooking those dishes time and again with mothers and grandmothers at home. I’ve worked hard to make these authentic Spanish dishes approachable and replicable so that anyone, regardless of their heritage (and regardless of whether or not they come from a long line of great cooks) can prepare them. In all my years of scientific research, the goal of each experiment was to perform the same test again and again to see how results differed. I approached my restaurant dishes the same way, while implementing the kitchen organization and culinary precision that I learned at elBulli. I create and test my recipes and weigh ingredients to the gram; I take temperatures of everything from hot oil to the center of a roast to bubbling caramel; I time confits and measure the diameter of cookies. And then, I let it all go and share a delicious meal with friends and family. And you can, too. When you’re cooking at home, don’t worry if things don’t go quite right. Follow the recipe, follow your instincts, and enjoy the process—and most of all, the food.

Even though the food and drinks in this cookbook will make you feel as if you’re sharing in the dining experience we’re so proud of at Cúrate, they’ve been adapted (and in some cases even improved) for home kitchens. I’ve kept the flavors and textures and included the smart techniques I’ve learned over the years, but found substitutes for things like siphons, immersion circulators, and deep fryers in recipes like the Ensalada de Alcachofas and the Espárragos Blancos con Mayonesa. If anything, the book’s recipes will taste even more like they came straight out of a Spanish home kitchen, which is what we strive for at the restaurant. Most Spanish dishes taste best when made at home.

The hardest part of Spanish cooking is changing your mind-set about meal preparation. It’s not about speed; it’s about convenience, ease, and, above all, pleasure. Félix’s mom never frantically whipped up dinner in 20 minutes (though the tuna tomato salad takes less than 10). Instead, like moms all over the country, she leisurely cooked classics—tortilla española, canelones, albóndigas—when she wasn’t pressed for time. Many dishes not only hold up well but also are meant to be made ahead and eaten at room temperature.

When entertaining, I love to spend time with my guests once they arrive. It’s so much nicer to have things done and be able to share a glass of wine with friends. Maybe I’ll have made the brandada the night before, or the beer-braised chicken. In fact, any braise works well made ahead and then reheated for company. In the summer, I’ll have spice-rubbed and marinated meats ready to toss on the grill. Imagine the thrill you feel when you’ve baked a coffee cake and the next morning you see it there on the counter, just waiting for you to cut another slice. That’s the happiness most Spanish recipes give the cook.

At the heart of Cúrate and of this book is honest Spanish food and the dining culture that surrounds it. At the restaurant, we offer a tapas experience, sending out small plates throughout the meal for the whole table to share. If you want to prepare a dozen or more recipes from this book for a tapas party, you’ll have fun doing it. But most of the dishes ahead are meant to be eaten on their own or with one other dish or just some good bread. When you go through these pages, pick a recipe or two based on your mealtime scenario. Doing a dinner party? Braise oxtail a few days ahead and simmer again right before your guests arrive. Last-minute cocktails? Throw together some banderillas. Weeknight date night? Wrap a trout in Ibérico ham, pan-fry it fast, and eat the whole fish together off a shared plate. Busy kids’ schedules? Make croquetas on the weekend and fry them straight from the fridge all week long. Your kids will never tire of them and will love you forever.

In this book, I re-create the meals I have at home with Félix and our daughter, Gisela, and the ones we share when visiting Félix’s family on the Costa Brava. There, his mother, brothers, aunts, and uncles make big family-style platters and casseroles and set them all down at the same time. We gather around the table, doling servings out to the kids and each other and laugh and eat and eat and eat. We hope you’ll experience the same pleasure of a leisurely Spanish meal on this side of the Atlantic.

TE QUIERO MUCHO COMO LA TRUCHA AL TRUCHO.

That Spanish saying literally translates to “I love you like a female trout loves a male trout.” It’s just a silly way of expressing how much you care for someone, but it means a lot to me. When Félix and I got married, we decided to engrave the phrase on our wedding bands. His is inscribed with “te quiero mucho” and mine with the ending.

We met working together and that’s been really important in our lives. My progression as a chef is totally dependent on the fact that I met Félix when I did, and the success of Cúrate stems entirely from our unity as a team. We complement each other perfectly. I handle the food and he oversees the beverages and service. But our roles are much more fluid than that, and there are a million and one ways in which we’re compatible. We’re rarely apart for more than a few hours and while our debates over business decisions (or our baby’s sleep schedule) can get heated, we resolve any tension really quickly. There isn’t a place where our professional lives end and our marriage begins because our relationship started in the business. We always say we never would be who we are without each other.

Félix claims he knew the moment he saw me that I was the one. On our first date, we hit it off right away. We both love food, so that was a big connection for us, but we immediately fell into such a natural rapport. I had never felt quite so loved quite so easily and readily.

As our relationship grew, our careers evolved together, too. Félix, who knew I wanted to continue pursuing a career in restaurants, convinced me to let him ask Ferran and Albert Adrià, whom he worked for in Roses, if I could work at elBulli. Félix arranged for me to work half a season at elBulli as a server, and the experience blew my mind. I knew then that this was the life I wanted.

I was offered the opportunity to return to elBulli, this time as a cook in the pastry kitchen, for a full season. During that stretch, Félix and I made two of our biggest life decisions. We got engaged and partnered with my parents to open a Spanish restaurant in Asheville.

The rest, as they say, is history.

ONE THING I LOVE ABOUT SPANISH FOOD IS ITS regionality. There are so many different areas with so many specific cuisines, and I’ve just begun to scratch the surface. In San Sebastian bars, they serve pintxos (little skewers) with sidra (cider) on tap. In Segovia, you get suckling pig. In the Canary Islands, potatoes come in all forms. In Madrid, you can spend hours savoring cocido Madrileño, a multicourse stew of meat, beans, and vegetables. In Rioja, the suckling lamb is unbelievable. Even though each region’s cuisine is distinct, the dishes of many regions can be served together and still taste wonderful.