Recipes from the Spanish Kitchen

by Nicholas Butcher

Overview

Learn to make the dishes of Spain, and get a taste of its unique culture and history.
 
This blend of cookbook and travelogue focuses on the traditional cooking of Spain. It starts with a journey through the country, region by region—followed by chapters on tapas, salads, soups, vegetables, eggs, rice, sauces, fish and shellfish, meat, poultry, and game, and puddings.
 
With vibrant flavors and uncomplicated ingredients, Spanish cuisine has its roots firmly in home cooking and has developed out of the ingenious use of local raw ingredients: olives, almonds, saffron, garlic, paprika—together with magnificent fish, shellfish, and charcuterie. The author’s enthusiasm for Spanish cooking permeates every page as he explores his favorite dishes, the culture and history behind them, and how best to recreate them. Their origins lie in the authentic cuisine of the Spanish cities, towns and countryside. From the bustling capital Madrid and Basque seaside towns to rustic Andalucia, he highlights the pillars of Spanish cooking, and the culture in which the food is grown, prepared, and eaten.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909808898
Publisher:	Grub Street
Publication date:	02/20/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	284,890
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Nicholas Butcher was born and brought up in England and ran the family restaurant in Chichester before moving permanently to Spain in the early 1980s.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Journey Through The Regions of Spain

ANDALUCÍA AND MURCIA

There is still romance to be found in a journey through Spain. Nowhere else surprises the traveller quite so relentlessly with so many sudden, sweeping panoramas, so many quiet little towns built on to the side of a precipice or sheer gorge, or overlooked by some outcrop of rock with its ruined castle or religious statue. Above all, there is so often in Spain that lonely sense of being in the middle of nowhere. Travelling through miles and miles of nothing, each new town is an adventure, a magnet in the emptiness and with an air of unassuming drama in its setting.

One never seems to be far from mountains in Spain. Along the south coast they follow you all the way, changing hue with the light or peering mysteriously through the clouds, but always there, thrusting abruptly up from the sea or where the sea once was, a majestic and uncompromising barrier between the tourist and the real Spain. Crossing these mountains, winding your way up to Granada for example, you can only gape, not just at the views but at the feats of engineering that made it possible for you to be there in the first place. Often you can see traces of the old roads. Narrow, tortuous and incredibly slow, these more than anything help to explain Spain's well defined regionality. It used to take five hours to get from Málaga to Almería, both in Andalucía, and even longer to reach Murcia, the next region to the east. Small wonder that there are marked differences in their cuisines, so marked that the people of one province will often be completely ignorant of the cooking of their neighbours.

Where the sea has retreated from the sierras of eastern Andalucía, great plains have been left which are heavily cultivated. Almuñecar, for example, looks as if it's about to be drowned beneath the green forest of chirimoyo trees, their scented leaves a good indication of the heavenly flavour of the custardy pulp of the fruit. Further on, one can barely see for the plantations of sugar cane, and in the Campo de Dalías, the plain beneath the Sierra de Gádor, all one can see for mile after mile in all directions are the invernaderos, a sea of white plastic beneath which vegetables are grown at electrifying speed.

Beyond the city of Almería the road takes you northwards into a stark, barren, desert landscape where the scarred yellow mountains seem to writhe in the arid heat. Nothing appears to grow in these scrub lands except tough skinned grapes, but crossing into Murcia you start to see fields of stunted thistles that turn out to be artichokes, and the white bloom of cotton. Murcia city is at the centre of a great huerta – fertile land dedicated to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables. The city has great charm, and beautiful buildings. One is reminded of Brighton, for Murcia has the same sense of slightly faded grandeur, of calm and friendly elegance.

The market here is a fine Spanish Modernist building near the river Segura. Its upper floor is devoted almost entirely to local vegetables, including hairy bearded bunches of young garlic shoots and huge garlands of dried red peppers. The garlic might go into a tortilla or into scrambled egg with prawns or chopped ham; or the shoots can be combined with the dried pepper, salt cod and black olives for a salad called mojete. Downstairs are fish and meat. Much of the fish is preservedthere are great black planks of cured tuna, mojama, huge dried boards of saltcod, dried bonito, and grey mullet roe, pressed and cured and needing the occasional dust and polish with a scrubbing brush to keep it looking in the pink of health, as one stall holder unashamedly demonstrated. The local sausages sold there include great squidgy sobrasada, delicious on hot toast, small round morcillas, the blood sausage that usually comes in a loop and goes into soups and stews all over Spain, and thick black butifarras, the Catalan blood sausage quite a way from home. Now we can smell vinegar and spices, and find several stalls putting out their basin piled high with olives of all colours and sizes, and pickled vegetables and capers. Even pickled caper plants are on sale.

Food markets inevitably make you pay closer attention to the wares in the neighbourhood pastry shops. In Murcia you'll probably want to try pasteles de carne round, flat pies of very crisp pastry filled with chopped meat and hard boiled egg, topped with a clever swirl of tissue thin pastry looking like mashed potatoor cordiales, little marzipan sweets made with pinenuts instead of almonds. Another curiosity to look out for is paparajotes, lemon leaves dipped in batter and fried. You eat the batter, but not the leaves themselves.

VALENCIA

Heading northeast out of Murcia you enter an area recently devastated when the Segura burst its banks after heavy rain, submerging everything in mud. It is a dreadful sight, the fruit trees barely holding their branches above the surface and the great palms of Orihuela looking pathetic in their muddy puddles and ponds. There are many more palms in Elche (or Elx), where they make up for an otherwise rather dull town. This is the biggest plantation in Europe, and the chances are that the palm frond you wave on Palm Sunday came from here. They are bleached by wrapping them in black plastic, and look like dark thorns against the skyline.

Unless you want to go to Benidorm (actually a weirdly interesting experience) it is best to leave the coast at Alicante. For up in the scruffy, unkempt looking hills to the north, all pleats and folds, is Jijona, home of Spain's turrón industry. From September to December they work flat out producing Spain's favourite Christmas sweetmeat, a mixture of almonds, sugar and eggs. The factory may close for the rest of the year, but to stay open some are now producing turrón ice cream and trying to sell turrón overseas. A visit round a turrón factory is a must, if only for the smell of roasting almonds.

A second place of pilgrimage is farther up. The road twists and climbs way above the huerta, into greener mountains and Alcoy. As you leave Alcoy look for a stone horse trough. It belongs to the Venta del Pilar, one of those precious Spanish restaurants (no longer with us, sadly: Ed) that actually go out of their way to serve regional specialities, dishes that are usually long forgotten or ignored by the restaurant trade. Indeed, there is something not quite right, something uncomfortable, about preserving local traditional dishes in this way, as if they were museum pieces. But if the alternative is that they are forgotten then I suppose we should be grateful, though I will never be happy eating such country food off expensive china with two or three waiters forever at my elbow with their linen cloths and bow ties.

Here we were brought bajoques farcides, large peeled red peppers stuffed with rice, and a little dish of pericana, something almost impossible to reproduce here but consisting of dried red peppers very briefly fried without prior soaking, then crumbled and mixed with tiny pieces of salt cod, garlic and oil: delicious and surprisingly delicate. This was followed by conejo espatarrat, an extremely rich dish of rabbit and potatoes gratinated under a thick layer of garlic mayonnaise, and some fillets of fresh tuna fried with garlic shoots. Also on the menu were borreta (see page 113), the local version of cocido called olleta, and two regional rice dishes, paella de sabater and arroz con costra.

If some of these names sound a little strange to an ear accustomed to Castilian Spanish, this is because they come from the local Valencian version of Catalan. Now we are in what is cumbersomely known as the Valencian Community, the signposts tend to be in both Castilian and Valencian, and are frequently disfigured if not, with the Valencian word obliterating the Castilian.

Valencia itself is the commercial centre of a giant agricultural area, whose principal product appears to be oranges. I never thought I would tire of seeing those neatly rounded trees brightly decked with fruit like orange light bulbs, but as one trudges through the flat huerta, a stream of lorries crawling in both directions, the attraction begins to pall.

Entering the city is something of a nightmare, a sprawling confused mess of concrete and cars. Despite one's first impressions, however, Valencia does have some beautiful architecture, for like most of Spain's urban conglomerations it preserves something of its past at the centre. It has a fine cathedral, and you can climb the Miguelete bell tower to get a view over Valencia, a considerably tougher assignment than the similar trip up the Giralda in Seville. But the market is the place to go. Here you can naturally buy all you need for a paella, starting with the stall that sells the special pans on the steps outside. There are baskets of snails of various sizes and prices, all very well behaved (in Granada I watched them climb all over the stall holders' walls and ceilings). There are sacks of garrafones, the large white butter beans that form part of the authentic Valencian paella. The vegetables here seem if anything even crisper and greener than those of Murcia, and we find great red volcanoes of paprika and beautiful mounds of gritty rovellons, flame coloured fungi flecked with mossy green. There is horse meat too, if you want it, enormous plumber's lengths of white sausage, tripe hanging up like a washing line of peculiar nappies; and in the fish section an endless variety of prawns, monstrous monkfish and hake, cuttlefish (their roe sold separately), a much larger version of Malaga's chanquetes resembling our own whitebait in size, and, of course, eels, slithering slimily around their boxes. They are one of Valencia's greatest specialities in dishes such as all i pebre. Then there are boxes of dried octopus, salted tuna (called tonyina) and much more. These Spanish markets, as well as being an education, are a delight to the senses.

Apart from the hundreds of rice dishes, and the fish dishes of the coast, the region has a few other interesting things: the caragolada for example, made with little snails called avellanencs and spicy with chilli, a stew of goat or lamb called tumbet or tombet, the various versions of gazpacho and flaons, the little pastries stuffed with curd cheese and flavoured with cinnamon which come from Morella, a romantic fortress of a town in the northernmost part of the region.

CATALUÑA

While still officially very much part of Spain, Cataluña can make that hard to believe at times, as every sign you see, every notice, every conversation you hear, seem to be in that clipped, chunky language with its slightly awkward words (for a Castilian speaker) ending in t and c. The fiercely insular pride of many Catalans is extremely irritating to nonCatalans, but sweeping down into Barcelona along its great long avenues one soon falls under the spell of Cataluña and its difference from the rest of Spain. This confident, cosmopolitan, forward looking metropolis may be second to Madrid in size, but in every other department it is the peninsula's first city. Here we seem to be in an accelerated Spain, the Spain of the future.

One gets the taste of Barcelona walking down the Ramblas, the series of avenues that run together into one down to the port, with a paseo, or promenade, down the middle which is sensibly much wider than the traffic lanes. Here are stalls selling flowers or pets (in the widest sensesome of the stalls are almost mini zoos) and tables where you can have your fortune told. As you pass the Liceo opera house, you may feel the rumble of the metro coming up from the Barceloneta. Down there, around the harbour, it can scarcely be described as attractive, but it's a good place to eat fish or zarzuela, Barcelona's fish stew. You can also try a tapa of a bomba, a fried cannonball shape of meat and mashed potato served with an explosive sauce. It seems these fishermen like their food hotsome patatas bravas I tried were almost lethal.

Along the Ramblas, too, is one of Barcelona's principal markets, that of Sant Josep, more popularly known as La Boquería. In autumn there is a mind boggling display of fungi, most prodigiously the rovellón or bolet (Lactarius deliciosus) but of all colours, shapes and sizes, including a most peculiar one called pie de rata (rat's foot) which is white with numerous shaggy brown fronds, looking like a sea anemone or a species of coral.

Here, it seems, you can buy anything. Black truffles at £150 a kilo, tiny wood strawberries, madroños, the fruit of the strawberry tree and symbol of Madrid (and which will supposedly make you drunk if you eat more than a few), green hairy squashes called chayotas, all manner of tropical fruit and nut, and trendy balsamic vinegar. If it's the season for game, you can buy wild rabbits and hares, delicious in those original Catalan combinations with snails or prawns or chestnuts, or maybe even in a dark chocolate sauce; there are partridge for stewing with stuffed cabbage leaves; and pheasants and even thrushes. The latter are called for in niu, perhaps the strangest, most cacophonous dish in Spain. This calls for peixopalo (stockfish), the innards from a salt cod, thrushes (or pigeons), squid or cuttlefish, pork sausages, potatoes and hard boiled egg.

Then there are some fine yellow chickens, boxes of coxcombs for all those weird garnishes to be found in Le Repertoire de la Cuisine, stalls where you can buy nothing but salt cod, already soaking in its salty bath water. And the fish market, a snow scape of ice and wet floors, where there is surely enough fish to feed all Barcelona for a week. There is dorada, that splendid member of the bream family with a gold bridge across its nose, plenty of hake, as ever, and monkfish, here forced by unnatural gymnastics to display themselves with their tail curled over their heads and clamped into their own gaping jaws. They will be delicious in a burnt garlic sauce. And one lady has a box of freshwater crayfish, cangrejos, belligerent little creatures in scarlet, some of them climbing over the ice in a chilly bid for freedom. Can there be any fish markets more exciting than those of Spain?

Catalan food is perhaps the most interesting in Spain but eating it in Barcelona is not easy, as the restaurants that specialise in it are extremely popular, making reservations almost essential. The Catalans go for combinations which appear barbaric to other Spaniards: you can try pigs' trotters with aubergines, snails or chicken with prawns, duck with dried figs, goose with pears, as well as a host of less outlandish dishes. Pudding after a Catalan meal is often crema catalana, custard topped with scorched sugar and very similar to our own burnt cream; or mel i mató, an inspired combination of fresh curd cheese and honey. Look out too for cocas or coques, a sort of Catalan pizza really, but rectangular with rounded corners, like a billiard table. They can be sweet or savoury, crispy or chewy. I particularly recommend the coca de llardons, with pork scratchings on top.

ARAGÓN

A vast plain divides Aragón, once desert and previously sea. Marooned in the middle is Zaragoza, with its famous baroque basilica, home to the much revered Nuestra Señora del Pilar. It's to be found alongside Spain's greatest river, the Ebro, which, in autumn sunshine, with the burnished leaves of the trees along its banks, and stroking oarsmen, reminds you almost of the Thames at Putney.

Aragón's food is little known and tends towards the plain and simple. There are good dishes of baby goat or lamb, sometimes accompanied by a powerful allioli; game such as venison or wild boar; famous hams from Teruel in the chilly mountains of the south; a sort of cocido called recao, thick with beans and rice; a dish well known to readers of cookery books called espárragos montañeses which are not mountain asparagus but stewed lambs' tails; and the two dishes perhaps most famous in the rest of Spain, bacalao al ajo arriero and magras con tomate. The first takes its name from the muleteers, the arrieros who once travelled Spain with their merchandise, preparing meals on the way with whatever dry stores they had with them and whatever they could scrounge (or pilfer) from the surrounding countryside. The accepted version of bacalao al ajo arriero generally contains dried red pepper, tomatoes, onions and, of course, garlic. Magras con tomate are thin slices of ham in tomato sauce, which is excellent if both the ham and the sauce are of the highest qualitya salty, watery disaster if nor. For pudding you should try the lovely firm peaches poached in red wine or cuajada con miel, junket with honey.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Recipes from the Spanish Kitchen"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Nicholas Butcher.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword to the New Edition,
Introduction,
A Journey through the Regions of Spain,
The Spanish Larder,
Tapas,
Ensaladas - Salads,
Sopas - Soups and Related Dishes,
Verduras - Vegetables,
Huevos - Eggs,
Arroz - Rice,
Salsas - Sauces,
Pescado - Fish,
Mariscos - Shellfish,
La Carne, Las Aves y La Caza - Meat, Poultry and Game,
Postres y Dulces - Puddings and Desserts,
Further Reading,
Index,