Growing up, my wife and her three older sisters spent a lot of time at their grandfather’s summer house in the densely pine-forested hills outside Barcelona. By the time I moved to Spain in the mid-1990s, her grandfather was ailing, the house largely deserted, and the ample grounds unruly with unpruned and unharvested fruit trees—fig, persimmon, plum. Fallen fruit covered the grounds. And so did pine cones—and it was these that we collected.
We would sit for hours on the stone steps gently crushing the hard husks of pine nuts, extracting the oblong ivory seeds. Just as when she was a child, we followed her family’s basic rule: Cracked seeds went into the mouth, perfect ones into a jar for later use in the kitchen. The creamy, toothy flesh has a piney, resinous flavor that hints of the wooded landscapes.
The house had a simple, two-burner stove with an aged orange gas canister, a couple of large and well-seasoned terra-cotta cazuelas (casseroles), and a grill outside that we used when the weather was pleasant. With vases of wild roses cut from the balcony balustrades and, from a dusty drinks cabinet, forgotten bottles of wine (always festive when one had turned), we ate late, pine nut–studded dinners by candlelight—spinach with pine nuts and raisins (see facing page); rice with rabbit and mushrooms, the sauce thickened by a picada of pine nuts and garlic; or grilled rabbit (see page 221) with dried fruits and pine nuts. After dinner, we’d drag chairs in front of the drafty fireplace to enjoy dessert: fresh cheese scattered with toasted pine nuts and honey (see page 301), and washed down with somewhat sticky dessert wine shot into the mouth in a streaming arc from a thin spouted porrón.
Along the Spanish Mediterranean, piñones have long played an integral culinary role, and are key to countless traditional dishes, from the type we prepared at the summer house to more complex ones made at home—roast duck stuffed with prunes and pine nuts; chicken or pork with orange sauce and pine nuts (see page 248); squid stuffed with pork and pine nuts; and marzipan cookies rolled in pine nuts (see page 291).
The house was sold not long after my wife’s grandfather died, and we began to collect our piñones at the beach place of my in-laws south of Barcelona. Our daughters carry on this tradition and now sit patiently cracking the husks at a table in the breezy afternoon shade. The trick is to get them to follow that age-old rule of saving the whole ones for the kitchen. More often than not, it seems, these end up in their mouths, too.