Brandon Eats

Fiesta Nights Continued

Now it was about midnight, and all of a sudden the goat we’d heard earlier appeared, led along a leash, bleating furiously, and the children at the tables rushed out of the tent to pat it. The oldest child, a girl about eleven or so, took over the leash, and led the goat and all of the smaller children up and down each row of tables, so that all of the adults could admire it and pat it for themselves. One little boy, however, was very concerned with its angry bleats, and once the goat was tied to a pole outside of the tent, he tried to calm it with hugs and gentle pats, talking softly and warning the other children to stay away. When I went up to pat it, he showed me the little horns that were about to erupt from the top of its head and assured me the little goat was “lindo, muy lindo,” which I agreed with enthusiastically. Later that night, after buying dozens of raffle tickets, we found out the goat was the prize, and would be slaughtered on the spot for the lucky winner to take home.

Giant sheets of a slightly sweet pound cake soaked in milk sort of like Tres Leches cake (minus most of the sugar) cut in squares were handed out with tongs to everyone, and coffee was served at top speed, but not quickly enough for our table (which was last) in big, stainless steel coffee pots with long curving spouts carried in one hand, while in the other hand, the server held a bottle of milk with at least four other bottles of different kinds of liquor (rum or whiskies? I couldn’t see) clutched between his fingers. Someone else gave out little cigars the size of cigarettes to everyone, and laughing, two each for every for women.

 

I used to smoke (a lot) and although its been fifteen years since I’ve had a cigarette, one puff of that little cigarillo, and I knew the only thing that still stood between me and smoking was (sadly) will power. It wasn’t disgusting or awful or like the smell of bars and ashtrays, but wonderful and satisfying—just as I remembered it. I left the table instead and wandered over to the fire, where a big pot was being stirred. It smelled like the scent autumn on this cold, cold July night (we all should have been wearing long pants and warm jackets), and when I looked inside, I saw a swirling liquid filled with apple slices. The man at the fire took out a match and lit the whole thing on fire. He then dipped a ladle in and pulled it high up at shoulder height so that there was a thin column of blue flame shooting straight down from the big spoon into the pot of fire.

This was aguariendente, liquor specific to northern Spain, similar to grappa but smoother, distilled from the skins of the grapes leftover from winemaking. You can buy it commercially bottled in different flavors like honey or coffee or the bright yellow “des hierbas,” but this was the real stuff, homemade and strong. A swallow or two was served from the same big pots the coffee came in--just a swallow tasting of apples and honey, and it was strong, strong enough to knock your socks off. Then the dancing began.

My husband’s great-aunts used to always dance together at family events (before they got too old), much to everyone’s quiet amusement, and now I know why. The dancing at the fiesta started mostly with the Austurianos; all the girls danced together and the old women, and then the men joined in, not dancing with each other, but with their wives and girlfriends. Everyone helped themselves to cocktails in long, skinny glasses with big, square cubes of ice and the party continued on, going strong until early the next morning. We got directions back minus the shortcut, and around 1:30 am, with our dozing children, drove slowly through the silent fog home, startling only an owl on the way, who flew with wide wings outspread, into the darkness.

Fiesta Nights

I wasn’t sure if I could handle another Spanish fiesta—they start so late and last so long—but my husband’s cousin Mari-Carmen really wanted us to go, so we all took naps and headed over to her house to follow the little bus she and her friends had rented for the night.  We took a terrifying shortcut (“remember to bear left around the church—no, right--we’ll be going in the other direction and left on the road with the sign to Parexes—don’t forget the barn”) and then we were there, in Crecente, where an enormous tent had been set up in a cow field a little ways from a cemetery with towering monuments and a high, gated wall around it.

It was just dusk and long, long rows of tables had been set inside of a big white tent.  We heard the bleat of a young goat as we walked through the cars.  We were the last to arrive and everyone was already seated. They applauded as we arrived, calling out, “Los Austurianos!” 

Crecente is near the border of Asturias and Galicia (as is Taramundi), but it’s on the Galician side, so whether you’re Asturiano or Galician is a matter of happenstance.  Everyone, however, speaks Gallego.  Gallego is a distinct dialect that’s a mishmash of Spanish and the ancient Gaelic the lost Celtic tribe spoke who settled here hundreds of years ago.  Up in these mountains, that so resemble those of Scotland or the Blue Ridge Mountains back home, bagpipes are played, Celtic runes abound, and at the fiesta, a sort of two-step was danced that reminded me of the way people used to dance to country music that predated rock and roll.

 

We passed a huge open, wood fire where racks and racks of ribs were being grilled. Next to it was what looked like an enormous, round cast-iron griddle above a ring of blue propane fire; wide, paper-thin sheets of pork belly were being sizzled like bacon upon it. After we sat down and helped ourselves to the unlabeled bottles of very young, red wine, everyone began eating empanadas already at each place (were they waiting for us?). Some people mixed their wine with a Spanish version of 7-Up and others with a little water, but most of us drank it fruity and strong, like a drinking a glass of an older, more sophisticated sibling to grape juice. One sort of empanada on my plate was the usual kind, very good but a little boring with just tuna and tomatoes. The second, however, was filled with a thin layer of potatoes that had been cooked slowly in olive oil with onions and bits of chorizo and tasted unexpectedly like a narrow sliver of tortilla between two layers of pastry. 

 

Once the empanadas were gone, big platters filled with ribs, thick slices of grilled chorizo, and the smoky pieces of pork belly that melt so effortlessly in your mouth, came out, and I have to confess, I was very disappointed at how restrained the eating was at our table. I don’t know how many ribs I normally eat, but it’s definitely more than the four I felt compelled to restrict myself to, once I noticed that three ribs were the most anybody around me had eaten. Those ribs, just pork and salt and smoke from the fire, were tender and deeply flavorful despite their simplicity; it took every bit of self-control I had not to wipe out the platter in front of me. I tried to console myself with the big hunk of country bread next to my plate and another glass of wine, but even with that, I had to watch my consumption carefully, because although I wasn’t driving, I knew we had to find our way home eventually.

 

To Be Continued . . .

Formatting

Bear with me please; I´m a Mac user using a PC with a foreign keyboard (and instructions in a foreign language I barely understand) and I can´t get the formatting to work right!  I´ll correct it as I can.

Fairy Land

I’m living in Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s cottage.  We’ve come to Taramundi, a little mountain town in Asturias, to stay for three weeks or so while my husband does some work on the old house we, his siblings, and cousins bought three years ago.  It was once their grandfather’s house, the one he left back in the twenties to immigrate to America.  I think he’d find it ironic that his grandchildren have come back to a place and a house he left so gladly all those years ago. 

Antonio de Roxo as a prosperous New Yorker

My husband’s grandfather left behind poverty and subsistence farming, but also staggeringly spectacular views and great food.  Actually, he brought the food along with him, but the landscape is almost impossible to put into words.  It’s dramatic, beautiful, dumbfounding, and a little surreal too, because after years (hundreds of years) of logging and fires, the trees to replace the ones lost have been planted in enormous swathes of perfectly even lines.  This oddly artificially element in a landscape so wild and elemental-looking, a place where even the houses look as if they sprang organically from the mountainside, is hard to discern at first precisely because of its incongruity.  You look out your window and see something vaguely strange, something a little Middle Earth-like about the view, and then you suddenly realize that every tree in the forest is growing exactly behind another one, and, even stranger, that they’re all the same variety of tree as well.

Like the rest of the old houses that stud the mountainside, our house is hundreds of years old.  It’s going to need a lot of work to make it habitable, and the work is hampered partly because all of the contractors in the area are booked nearly two years in advance.  That’s because the town of Taramundi and the countryside surrounding it are experiencing a dramatic boom in tourism.  Instead of barely getting by in ancient houses that have had few modern improvements and living a lifestyle that wouldn’t have been so out of place more than a hundred years ago, the people here are renovating those same houses and renting them out to people from Madrid or Barcelona, who’re looking for a break from the oppressive summertime heat and can’t get enough of the views.

 

It’s easy to sentimentalize the old ways of Taramundi and lament their passing, but it’s also possible that there wouldn’t be very much of Taramundi left, other than a few old people who hadn’t died yet, if this new industry hadn’t come along to save everyone. 

“The name Taramundi can move mountains,” my husband’s cousin, Mari-Carmen, told us.  And it’s true.  Carbon steel knives made in Taramundi are sold all over Spain as souvenirs, and its cheese can be ordered from both Despana and La Tienda in the US. Spaniards of all ages come to hike its trails and fish in its trout-filled streams. The poverty my husband’s grandfather ran away from used to hold the town in a death grip, even into the eighties and early nineties, but now the outhouses have been replaced with real bathrooms, roads are paved, and electricity is everywhere.   

When given the choice, I think, wouldn’t anyone choose comfort over the (smelly, damp, cold) picturesque--every time? There’s a strong sense of local pride and a deep attachment to not just the place itself but the history of the place here.  That means that fortunately, the renovation being done and the new structures being built are well integrated with the architecture that was here before.  There’s virtually no commercialization at all, if you discount the two gift shop/grocery store/hardware stores that sell t-shirts and knives and other tchokes with “Taramundi” emblazoned upon them.  Although I instinctively recoil when I watch a Madrilêno buy a bunch of old skeleton keys or an iron cauldron to take back to their apartment to pot a plant in,  I can’t begrudge a population that can make money from their old keys while using brand new ones to houses with the kind of kitchens that have made the little three-legged pot obsolete.

 

Where and What to Eat in Luanco

 

All of the tables were full outside, but when we walked into the Bar el Muelle in Luanco, the old men playing dominoes and cards were clearly annoyed. It was 8:30 pm, dinner wouldn’t be served at the restaurants for another two or three hours, and this was the only place where people seemed to be eating. Everywhere else, only cups of café con leche or big bottles of sidra were being consumed, but here, everyone was attacking plates piled high with grilled, fresh sardines or tiny bígaros (little sea snails called winkles in the UK) or dishes of sliced chorizo simmered in more sidra.

Sidra is a potent cider specific to northern Spain that tastes nothing like the hard cider or applejack we have in the US. Its flavor is more reminiscent of flat beer or maybe the warm, unfizzy bitter they serve in England. It lacks all the sweetness of apples and the taste you eventually acquire for it is more one of toleration than true appreciation. The reason to drink sidra, really, is the fun of pouring it. You hold the bottle high and the glass low, and what winds up in the glass has been mellowed by the oxygen it picks up during its trip on the way down. Its mild carbonation has been activated too, and you drink it off in a swallow and start the whole process over again. The most astonishing sight is the waiters and longtime sidra drinkers who can hold their fragile, thin-walled glasses behind their backs and pour the sidra over their shoulders without missing--much.

We, apparently, signaled an invasion to the old men, who swept up their clacking dominoes, exchanged euros and coins with each other (they play strictly for money), and finished off their beer or sidra. Once their tables were vacated, new, younger customers poured in and the real eating began.

 

The problem with tapas, like dim sum, is that it’s very easy to overestimate how much you really can eat and almost impossible to remember that you’re going to have a full dinner in a couple of hours. Obviously, you can make a meal of tapas alone, but then, you’d miss all the other wonderful dishes of northern  Spain, like fabada or fabes con almejas, full of fat, creamy white beans, which are served only in restaurants. So, if you’re like me, you’ll end up with plates of half-eaten grilled shrimp, sweet and salty, with the heads still on, or baskets of crumbled bread, or that one lone crusty, grilled sardine that can’t quite tempt you anymore with its smoky allure.

 

We came in looking for percebes (Northern Atlantic goose barnacles) which look as if someone chopped off the fingers of a dozen or so witches, complete with pointy, blackened nails, and piled them on a plate, but settled instead for a dish of bigaros, the tiny sea snails I mentioned earlier. Their insides bounce out like a little spring and you pop them in your mouth with the pin and take a swallow of sidra to enhance their addictive brininess. It’s easy to absent-mindedly eat a whole plate of them while talking and drinking, and you’ll find yourself poking inside empty shells twice over in the hopes of finding one bigaro that might have been missed.

The sun won’t set until at least 10:30 pm, so like the rest of the town, you’ll roam the narrow streets and peer into shop windows, or perhaps stop for another drink and stand outside on the sidewalk with your glass (all the tables will be taken by now) in your hand until it’s finally time to eat again. Once you see other people starting to go into the restaurants, you’ll look for the most crowded (always an indication of good food in Spain), and hope there will be a table overlooked in the corner, ready and waiting just for you.

 

More photos after the jump . . .

Spain in the Summer

It’s like being on a movie set. Luanco is a little port town on the very northernmost tip of Spain, and it looks so quaint and so unlike anywhere in the US, it’s disconcerting to smell the sea and actually taste the salt in the air.

It’s a place that by all rights should be flat and flimsy; it should only be an idealized celluloid projection of someone else’s imagination. I found it hard to believe a decaying house might really be falling apart or that the brightly colored doors and ancient cobblestones might have been put in place for some other reason than my own personal pleasure. The strolling accordion players and violinists provide the perfect soundtrack, and they do nothing to help dispel the illusion that you’ve wandered into a subtitled film shot sometime during the fifties.

There was a festival about to start when we arrived. The last time we were in Spain, it seemed as if every little town we visited had just had a festival or was about to have one the day we were scheduled to leave. One morning we passed through a town near the Picos de Europa with its festival banner drooping a little, trash everywhere, and a drunk still passed out on the path leading up to the church. We thought we knew what to expect.

It’s impossible, however, for the American imagination to grasp the scope of a Spanish festival without actually experiencing one first. Everyone, in their best dressy-casual, drapes and ties a sweater around their shoulders and makes sure their children have on red and white matching outfits. Then they set forth to eat and drink their way through the night, moving from bar to restaurant to bar, while their children play out front and the babies snooze in their strollers. The teenagers head to the beach, weighed down with grocery bags full of big bottles of Coke or lemonade, liters of rum, and lots of bags of chips. The bands start playing in the center of town around midnight, and so the crowd moves there, dancing and singing all the words to all of the songs. It finally winds down around 4:00 am or 5:00 am (so they tell me), and everybody’s up drinking coffee and eating pastries by 10:00 am. Then, of course, you have the second day of the festival.

My children started fading around 11:00 pm and demanded to go bed at about 12:30 pm. This was their second night and they couldn’t take the party anymore. It wasn’t as noisy as the first night, since we didn’t have eight or nine children shouting and playing games directly under our window until 1:00 am this time around. In fact, everyone in my family was so exhausted they fell right to sleep, and if it hadn’t been for the dog fight around 2:00 am and the group of men singing around 5:00 am, it would have been a solid night’s sleep. Someone told me you just have to give up and join in when it comes to a Spanish festival, but we Americans, I discovered, are too soft and don’t have the kind of stamina even the smallest of Spanish children is born with.

More photos after the jump . . .