Spanish cooking has never been more in fashion, nor has it ever elicited such interest as it does now. Magazines, newspapers, and TV programs have all tapped in to this cuisine that, apart from a handful of well-known dishes, remains relatively unknown to the average cook. And even tapas and paella, surely the two things that most people associate with the Spanish kitchen (along with molecular gastronomy foams), are largely misunderstood. Master chefs such as Ferran Adrià, Joan Roca, and Juan Mari Arzak have been instrumental in drawing attention to Spain and its gastronomy. At times, these culinary alchemists practice something more akin to chemistry in the kitchen, yet in many instances they are deconstructing or riffing on the most rustic of Spanish dishes, striving to elicit emotions frequently rooted in childhood.
I remember some years ago taking a visiting English friend to eat in one of Barcelona’s temples of Catalan avant-garde cuisine headed by a prodigy of Adrià. The dazzling two-hour tasting menu ended with a finale of toasted bread topped with fruity, aromatic olive oil, swirled mounds of soft chocolate, and some flat flakes of sea salt. My friend was exuberant at such an original combination. I laughed. It was a barely disguised spin on the Friday afternoon snack that my youngest daughter was getting in daycare, the one my wife’s school served when she was a girl (this or with quince paste—guess which disappeared first), the one her father ate in the countryside of Lleida as a boy.
Now, I am not suggesting that molecular gastronomy is a modern take on grandma’s cooking, but rather that even at this level, with some of world’s most celebrated chefs, many of the dishes, drawn on the flavors of memory, have their roots in the traditional Spanish kitchen. And the traditional kitchen in Spain is the country kitchen.
I moved to Spain over fifteen years ago and not long afterwards married the local girl I had followed here. (We met in London, in a residence hall for foreign graduate students, where we had, somewhat fittingly, shared a kitchen.) One of the things that I have learned during my time eating and cooking here, and traveling to all but one or two of Spain’s fifty provinces, is that the country kitchen begins firmly with las materias primas, the fresh, high-quality ingredients cooks call “the raw materials.” These are often simply prepared and presented, with usually just a few other components to draw out flavor. It’s a largely straightforward cuisine, rarely overly laborious or complex (which isn’t to say unsophisticated or lacking imagination), and more about ingredients than techniques or sauces. Meat, seafood, and poultry are not just vehicles for other, stronger flavors, nor simply bits of texture drowned in an overpowering sauce, but rather cooked for their own flavor. Sometimes that means quickly grilling, other times slowly cooking down to concentrate flavors. What’s the point of buying a good sea bream if you aren’t going to taste it?
To put that another way, if you are going to taste that sea bream—purely taste it and not the sauce—then it had better be a good fish, fresh, with the right texture, and cut or cleaned for the specific dish that you are preparing. When shopping, be ready for how you will cook it, because the fishmonger will want to know. A bream baked in the oven is cleaned differently than one baked in a salt crust. Butchers ask the same kinds of questions. Different dishes demand different cuts: a rabbit for a rice dish is trimmed into smaller pieces than rabbit for grilling, and so on.
This is one reason why the tradition of covered food markets and small specialty shops remains so important—and intact. Large supermarkets, of course, exist, but the butcher and fishmonger, the vegetable and fruit shop, the place on the corner selling cured jamón and cheese, the bakery beside it—these still dominate, even in cities. (Within two blocks of my residential Barcelona flat, I have five fruit stores—and three others that sell fruit—and six bakeries.) Small villages generally have a weekly mercado that gathers on the central square, usually on the open plaza fronting the church. These traveling markets act as a rural lifeline.
Markets also offer markers to the seasons and the seasonality of ingredients is always clear. What is most numerous is cheapest but also tastiest. It often feels like feast or famine regarding cherries and figs; tiny, crunchy mid-June pears (no bigger than the figs); asparagus and artichokes; wild mushrooms; certain fish, game birds, and fresh wild boar. Those who work in the markets and small shops are experts. They know their products. Their goods are usually marked with plenty of details, but if not, then ask where the fish was caught and how (in the Atlantic? the Mediterranean? line caught? netted or trawled? farm raised?). Look for freshness in the gloss of its eyes, the deep redness of its gills, the firmness of its flesh—but don’t touch.
A guiding kitchen principle is this: The best is used—but nothing is thrown away. Spanish cooks have learned to eke everything they can out of their often undernourished land. What the garden, market, or refrigerator offers up must be utilized. Bones for stock, a pig’s ear for flavor, kidneys to stew in sherry, the rabbit liver pounded with nuts and garlic and stirred into the dish at the end. Trotters, tongue, tail, tripe, even the blood (sangre frita with onions!): You name it, it’s devoured somewhere by someone—with gusto.
Traditional Spanish cooking is flavorful but frugal, and many of its finest dishes originated not in palace kitchens, but as country fare. Take the iconic paella. Born in the fruit and vegetable fields around Valencia, it was a dish for farmers who could not make it back home for lunch. Vegetables from the fields, a few snails (or a sprig of rosemary), and perhaps some rabbit on a lucky day were sautéed and then simmered in a wide, flat pan until tender. Rice sprinkled into the pan absorbed the flavors and offered a filling, starchy base. The pan itself acted as a communal plate (who wanted to carry plates into the field, or wash them?) and the rice was eaten with spoons carved from boxwood crates. Even if paella can be gussied up like a princess with wallet-emptying red shrimp and saffron, or served in restaurants among velvet curtains, patinated silver, and a black-tied maestro on a baby grand piano in the corner, it is at heart a simple country dish where rice remains the star.
But what exactly is la cocina española—Spanish cooking? I can offer dozens of examples, but not one tidy definition. The country, and its kitchen, is simply too diverse, the range of flavors it produces too great. The gastronomy, like the landscape, like the country itself, is blessed with the riches of distinct regions.
Historically, Spain as a country has only been a reality since 1492, and in these five centuries it has resisted complete gastronomic unification. There are deep and distinct differences on many levels between Andalucía and the Basque Country, among Castilla, Galicia, and Catalunya, between the Balearic Islands and Cantabria. These are undeniable. There are the historical, social, and cultural differences that have produced four official languages—Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician—and a handful of dialects, not to mention very distinctive ways of celebrating with food.
The diversity of the Spanish countryside is, in Europe, without rival. Ranging from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, the Pyrenees mountains that run along the northern border and the Sierra Nevada range in the south, the dry plateau that dominates the center of the peninsula, the rocky, fjord-like inlets of Galicia, the verdant greens of the Basque Country and Navarra, the olive-covered southern Andalucía, the spacious pasturelands studded with holm oak trees in Extremadura (where black-footed Iberian pigs roam semi-wild eating acorns) . . . the vast geographical cornucopia offers it all.
First and foremost, then, Spanish cuisine is regional, and the cooking of each region directly reflects the landscape, and changes as the landscape does. It is the landscape that, in many ways, has dictated the cuisine.
And there lies the pleasure in Spanish cuisine, the distinctive cooking that comes from different hamlets and corners, each with their own traditions, products, and dishes. Regionalism is a defining element of la cocina española.
The tastes of those rural landscapes, I have learned from living here, are not easily lost. They are still felt in the connection to the land and the cycles of the seasons: the seasonality of food; not wasting anything, whether yesterday’s bread or the head of a fish (for stock!); long, multicourse meals; unfussy cooking styles and often unfussy flavors; the love of stews and hearty soups, of long-cooked pulses, game, salt cod, of roast suckling lamb and pig, of dishes with innards and extremities; in the tradition of curing and preserving that borders on obsession . . . these remain, making sure that the countryside is never far from any table in Spain, even in the cities.
Take my own in-laws. Tomàs and Rosa were part of a midcentury wave of urban migration that shifted the population, and workforce, from rural areas to the city. In the 1920s, 57 percent of the Spanish population was engaged in agricultural work. In 1960, a decade into an economic boom that was sending a massive influx of people into the cities, that number was steadily falling but still hovered at a whopping 42 percent. Although the percentage of those working in agriculture these days is down to a single digit, the shift came too abruptly for the traditions of the countryside to disappear, especially in the kitchen.
Tomàs grew up in the arid hills of inland Catalunya near Lleida and moved to Barcelona to study engineering; Rosa was born in Barcelona, but both her parents had come not long before from a small village surrounded by vineyards and cereal fields about an hour inland from Valencia on the Castilla–La Mancha border. Rosa’s mother died when she was very young and, with her father owning a colmado (corner grocery store with staples) in Barcelona’s dense Gothic Quarter, she spent large chunks of her childhood with the aunts back in the village. She and Tomàs married, had four girls, and spent their summers and holidays visiting family. They would return home laden with the plunders of the countryside. From one side of the family, they brought cases of wine—rough-edged table wine, but from the family grapes and thus drunk with stoic pride—and home-cured sausages from pigs butchered in the courtyard of an aunt’s house and stored in lard-filled ceramic pots; from the other side of the family, jars of preserved tomatoes and stewed vegetables, quince paste made with the season’s first fruit from the tree in the yard, home-brined Arbequina olives, even large jars of mallard duck legs preserved in olive oil, plus boxes of apples and peaches.
Like so many similar stories, Rosa’s cooking—and Tomàs’s palate—continues to reflect their roots: the long-simmered soups, the snails in spicy tomato sauce, even her weekend family paella. When she was a girl in the village, her aunts prepared paella of rabbit, chicken, snails, and green beans over vineyard cuttings in the courtyard of the house every weekend—and they still do. Sure, Rosa uses seafood in her paella now and cooks it over a wide gas burner on the stove, but the essence is the same, an anchor not just for the meal, but the family. Such tastes, and their accompanying recipes, have been passed down, and my wife—like her sisters, like most Spaniards—can scarcely imagine anything better.
Nor can I.