“Reach out your arms, as far apart as possible – one high, one low – then just bend your wrist, but do not look!”, instructed the waitress. “Oh, and beginners like you must stand over the barrel,” she added. I followed her advice exactly but still ended up with a soggy shirt-front and damp shoes, wasting half a bottle.

Even though the cider was cheap, learning to pour it like a local wouldn’t be and accepting I could be thirsty for a long while before I acquired the knack, I invited my hostess to demonstrate proper form. Sure enough, her aim was perfect and my glass was soon two inches deep without the loss of a drop. “Now, drink it! Fast!” she cajoled. “Before it goes flat!”

I hadn’t counted on necking shots of cider at lunchtime, and wondered if I was playing the straight guy in a game of haze the foreigner, but as foamy, appley goodness cascaded down my gullet it started to make sense. Then, after taking my order for broiled razor clams and hake in cider, the waitress turned on her heel for the kitchen, leaving my glass empty. Now eager to drink some more, but reluctant to soak myself further, I reached for the bottle. “No lo mueva!” warned a finger-wagging old guy to my left. “She will pour for you when she returns. And, you should leave a drop in the bottom of the glass. It’s good luck.”

Thanking him for his advice, I sat back and looked around the white-washed room from my seat against the wall. Cut-off barrels half-filled with sawdust littered the blue-tiled floor between tables, along with the usual jumble of crumpled napkins, discarded toothpicks and cigarette ends. Through the open window, small gaily-painted fishing boats bobbed up and down, and their creak and bump as they nagged at their moorings offered a pleasant counterpoint to the hoarse cries of seabirds.

Luarca, on the Asturian coast of northern Spain is still a working port and, the tasca where I sat, the place to enjoy the morning’s catch. From the ruddy faces surrounding me, it was entirely possible that my hake had been landed earlier in the day by a fellow diner. The globe is so well traveled these days that it’s virtually impossible to find anywhere you’re the only foreigner, but in this place, during the off-season, I had managed it. In fact, I was the only guest at the only open hotel in town. An anomaly I was quick to appreciate, because it allowed me to slip into the natural rhythms of local life and prompted me to assume the most humble status, that of being nobody at all. Sure, it removed me from many things, but there’s an advantage to that when all you want to absorb is atmosphere – the feeling that five hundred years could pass in this place and the faces wouldn’t change. What Cees Nooteboom described as “the feeling that everything except time has stopped.“

My razor clams arrived, redolent of garlic and spicy with piperade, followed by tender hake with softened apples, their acidity perfectly balancing the sweetness of the reduced cider sauce. A side of fried potatoes appeared as another two inches of cider found its way neatly into my glass. Lazily enjoying it, happy and relaxed, I barely noticed when it was all gone and the waitress returned. “Postre?” she asked. “Hay queso de cabrales, flan, y frutas frescas, o si usted prefiere, un poco de cada uno.” I opted greedily for the latter, along with a nip of orujo, she returned quickly with a little of each – blue cheese, stick to your teeth caramel pudding, and a pear. “Ningunas manzanas?” I smiled. “Haven’t you had enough apples yet?” she joked back.

Chicken in cider is not necessarily a traditional Asturian preparation, though it might as well be, so while this dish is modeled on the hake in cider I had that day, it is cooked for much longer. Asturian cider is produced from small, tart crabapple type fruit that are no good for eating, the juice of which is fermented for up to six months in oak barrels. It typically registers only 5% alcohol, compared to the seven or eight degrees common in French and English ciders and is rarely carbonated, hence the habit of pouring from a great height to aerate, followed by swift consumption before the froth disappears. Spanish ciders can be found in the US, but domestic varieties like Woodchuck are perfectly acceptable for cooking with. The chanterelles were added to balance out the sweetness of the sauce with an earthy, autumnal boskiness and some slices of eating apple dropped in with five minutes to go offered some crunch and acid to what is a very satisfying dish.

According to British and Irish tradition, black pudding has an esteemed place next to the bacon rashers, sausage links, fried eggs, mushrooms, fried tomato and fried slice in an old-fashioned greasy spoon breakfast, but its almost complete absence from the American breakfast table is confusing, especially given our known preference towards an injection of cholesterol to kick-start the day.

This phenomenon might be partially explained by the less euphemistic title of “blood sausage” in use on these shores. The more descriptive terminology acting as a major deterrent. In fact, blood sausages are an integral part of the diets of many European countries — the morcilla of Spain and French boudin noir, among them — and their former colonies in the new world, especially South America, with the Cajun country cooking of Louisiana and the Canadian province of Quebec being the only areas of North America to demonstrate any real enthusiasm for these dark mystery bags.

Supposedly a corruption of the English word “pudding”, boudin are common throughout France in various colors and flavors, and in many ways the term refers to fresh sausages in general, with the more familiar cognate, saucisson, reserved largely for salumi/preserved sausages. Boudin blanc, made with veal and pork are commonly seasoned with quatre epices (white pepper, ginger, nutmeg and cloves) and closely resemble many of the sausages I remember growing up in England where pale colored pork sausages, flavored most commonly with either apple or sage, were a weekend breakfast table favorite. However, it’s the boudin noir, made with pigs blood, grains, fat and seasoned with white pepper and nutmeg that I am most interested in, perhaps, because of a fascination with just how one makes sausages out of congealed pigs blood, but, principally because their gruesome reputation belies their extremely delicate texture and taste. Their rich color, unique minerally-flavor, and loose, unctious mouth-feel, is obscured by our collective fear of blood, though given the current inexplicable popularity of all things vampire-related, whether this is shared by younger generations is unknown.

In France, there are various centers of boudin production, but it is relatively easy to find throughout the country. The meal above is a take on one we ate in the charming medieval town of Arras (more famous for its wall-hanging carpetry than its gastronomy) in north-eastern France around New Year 2009. The potato gratin and green salad of that meal being substituted here with puy lentils and some charmingly minute steamed vegetables – zucchini in this case – and pickled pattypan squash. The latter picked up during some holiday impulse buying at a supermarket outside the nearby town of Noyon, and the jar breached for this special recreation. This dish was extremely good, though the boudin did deflate somewhat during cooking which I took to be an indictment of the particular sausage-maker’s art rather than a facet typical of blood sausages in general. Should you wish to avoid that possibility altogether though, I would certainly council frying thick slices of boudin on a hot plate, or similar device, until crispy on the outside. The contrast with the lentils and the soft interior of the sausage would be even better than what’s pictured here.

Almost seven years ago I journeyed from Santillana del Mar to Santa Maria de Lebaña via San Vicente de la Barquera. So many saints, so much devotion, that it was little surprise to learn that beyond the monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana and through the Picos de Europe lies the hallowed ground of Covadonga.

It was at the battle of Covadonga in 718 that Christian Spain under Pelayo, King of Asturias, began the reclamation of Iberia from the Muslim Moors. Nestled deep within the Asturian mountains, Covadonga is as important to the Spanish national myth as Hastings is to the British or Lexington to Americans. However, history defies such over-simplification – the linear narrative of one thing followed by another – and it is too easy to say that simply because certain events turned out the way they did there were no other possibilities. Indeed, a sentence stating that the defeat of a Moorish army by a Spanish king at Covadonga began the reconquest of Spain – which culminated in Ferdinand and Isabella vanquishing Boabdil, Emir of Granada, in 1492 – encompasses more than 700 years and glosses over seven whole centuries of war, shifting borders, switching alliances, inter-marriage, suffering and grief.

It is with this in mind that I wonder if it’s an exaggeration to suggest that had the battle at Covadonga ended differently the whole course of western history, and therefore of the world, would have been affected. Spanish historian Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz does not believe so. “Si los musulmanos no hubiesen conquistado el España en el siglo VIII, los españoles no habrian conquistado America en el XVI.”* For him it follows that what began there in the 8th Century resulted in a militarized and battle-hardened Spain conquering much of the New World.

For me, and my own personal sense of history those seven years ago, a dinner of beans, pork belly, chorizo and morcilla suggested just as plausible a theorem: that had not the Asturian armies under Pelayo feasted on fabada in preparation for the fight the next day, there may have been another outcome. And while personal experience suggests that after a hearty meal of this kind one is utterly disinclined to remaining awake, let alone to feeling lively enough to bum rush a horde of scimitar-brandishing Berbers, I still feel that this notion has validity. After all, how could one’s sense of local patriotism and desire to defend one’s homeland fail to be stirred by such a dish? That the culinary use of saffron arrived in the far north of Spain via these same Moorish invaders and the integral ingredient smoked pimentón wasn’t to be discovered for another eight centuries following the conquest of Mexico doesn’t disprove this hypothesis, rather it merely serves to highlight, once again, the non-linear path of history.

(If the Muslims had not conquered Spain in the 8th century, the Americas wouldn’t have been conquered by the Spaniards in the 16th.”)

Emerging from the cool interior, the scent of carved stone and beeswax mingles briefly before being overwhelmed by the perfume of orange trees, and the holy silence is punctured by the mossy gurgle of a tiny fountain. Large white geese peck assertively at the ragged hands of ferns that decorate this cloister and I am reminded that oranges were brought here by the Moors and that geese make more effective security systems than dogs and fences. Incongruous? Perhaps. But not nearly so peculiar given the context in which I was reminded of this memory of Barcelona: an article announcing that Jennifer Aniston’s favorite country is Spain and Barcelona her favorite city. All of which would be of no interest whatsoever if she made better movies.

I arrived at this location having played that day of nearly six years ago backward in my mind until I arrived at the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, a short walk from where we were staying in the El Born district. Playing it forward I recalled eating a surprisingly good chorizo and canned tuna sandwich with a beer to calm my vertigo after scaling one of the narrow spires of La Sagrada Familia. Venturing onto consecrated ground typically has a tranquilizing effect – especially twice in one day – as if merely stepping over the good Lord’s threshold is enough to encourage contemplation and peace even in a cynic like me, but the views over the city were worth the trauma.

This “surf and turf” sandwich, a somewhat curious mix for us this side of the Atlantic, was the inspiration for the meal pictured at top. Catalan culinary tradition pairs mar y muntanya often in the chicken and shrimp stews of the region of Girona, and baby octopus with fried eggs loosely follows the same line of thinking, just focusing unapologetically on the infantile and gestational end of the spectrum of life.

Crunchy, with the toothsomeness one finds in octopi, dipped into runny yolks and eaten with crusty bread, this is as incongruous a dish as one may find. Texturally and flavor-wise it was a success, if not exactly a symphony. Eaten off Hefty(R) Basics(TM) Tableware biodegradable paper plates – another departure from convention – fitting given the inherent greasiness of the two components, it felt rather like a the kind of thing one might enjoy at a casual beachfront tasca, along with pink Cava and sunburn. Happily, the plates withstood the grease and sharp knives admirably, a stern challenge indeed.

Those of you who raised your eyebrows at the very idea of lentils mixed with chocolate might be forgiven for thinking that we have lost our tiny minds, that too long around infant children, cooing and a-goo-goo-gooing, has softened our already mushy brains beyond repair. Indeed, had we not gone out on a limb ourselves and given this a bash, I daresay we would be right there among you sucking our teeth and rolling our eyes, but, like many foods that turn out to be extra delicious, a small leap of faith is necessary.

Rather like the sensation you experience shortly after realizing you put on your underwear inside out, eating lentils with chocolate is initially unsettling. That something as earthy and savory as lentils can work with luxurious chocolate is certainly a surprise, but a very dark, high cocoa-solids chocolate does have a distinctly savory quality, and I don’t have to remind you that until some bright spark mixed it with milk and sugar, chocolate was an exclusively savory product for centuries.

The origins of this unusual dish are unclear, or at least we were unable to discover them using Google Translate, and we cannot lay claim to being its inventors, but a recent flick through some old photos reminded me that I had been intrigued by it a while ago. Those among you with long memories, may remember that back in the fall of last year, when we made the traditional Argentine dish locro de mondongo, we mentioned having eaten some Buenos Aires’ favorite empanadas at La Cupertina, a charming little cafe in the Palermo Soho district of that glorious city. And the especially keen-eyed may have noticed that in a photo illustrating said post featuring the window of said cafe the specialties of the house were listed, including lentejas al chocolate.

Certainly not a common dish anywhere, lentils with chocolate can be found on both sides of the Atlantic in northern Spanish, especially Asturian, and Portuguese cuisine, as well as throughout Latin America. The lentils are usually served soupily with a humble garnish of fried, garlicky croutons and a good glass of red wine, but in our own unique, whimsical manner, we paired them with a monster pimenton-spiked pork chop, and attempted a strange kind of winter scene as a garnish, decorating the plate with steamed asparagus tip “Christmas trees” gaily adorned with festive ribbons made from roasted red pepper strips. In quite what role the roasted pearl onions were cast remains uncertain. Perhaps they resemble over-sized tree ornaments, perhaps not. Maybe we are going soft in the head after all.

Towards the end of what is, in my opinion, his finest work, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell tells of the bitter street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War when the delicate alliance between communist, socialist, and anarchist factions of the Republican army finally collapsed. While certainly not the bloodiest scene in a war that cost around a million lives, it was one of the most significant, sounding, as it did, the death knell for the Republican cause against Franco’s Fascists. Never after this internicene strife were the respective Republican parties able to trust one another enough to wage a successful war.

Even prior to the Spanish Civil War, anarchist and regional-nationalist groups in Catalonia were making trouble for the shaky Spanish state (then under Republican rule). Indeed, it was during this period of the early 20th century that Barcelona became known as la rosa del fuego, the rose of fire. Modeling their destabilizing tactics on the exploits of Italian anarchists and revolutionaries under Giuseppe Garibaldi, the weapon of choice for Catalan anarchists came to be a round iron ball stuffed with explosives ignited with a string fuse. [Anyone who has ever seen a Tin-Tin or Felix the Cat cartoon will immediately recognize what I'm describing.] In Barcelona, anarchist activity centered around the-then hard-scrabble, now beautifully redeveloped waterfront, neighborhood of Barceloneta, where the mazy streets and crumbling slums provided ample cover for clandestine activity and proximity to the port offered easy access to contraband goods and shady characters.

It was during these unsettled years of the 1920s and ’30s that a Barceloneta bar owner by the name of Maria Pla, during a moment of whimsy with mashed potatoes to hand, created what is now the signature tapas dish of Barcelona, la bomba, the bomb. Potato croquettes with aiolli or a spicy dipping sauce is about as common a tapa as you can name, but Pla’s genius was to shape the croquette and plate it with these two sauces in a way that resembled the anarchists’ favorite weapon.

Today, la bomba can be found in tapas bars and tascas throughout Barcelona and beyond, and its origins in that murky political underworld are mostly forgotten. In fact, we ate it first at Tapa, Tapa a rather touristy tapas bar on the Paseig de Gracia in Barcelona knowing nothing of its fascinating history.

More than its political significance, la bomba is remarkable both as a relic of a turbulent time in the city’s history, and as a statement of the enduring gastronomic playfulness of Catalan chefs. Where today their creations run to rather more extravagant creations — like Ferran Adria’s trick olives (in which olive oil is sealed inside green agar-agar shells, set using a chemical reagent, and served in a ramekin looking for all the world like a simple tapa of olives) — Pla’s invention was just as, if not more so, adventurous, because it was poking fun at the potentially hazardous world of political terrorism.

Perhaps this quality of not taking life too seriously and finding time to play with ones food even in periods when one might be blown-up at any minute speaks to the broader philosophy in the Iberian peoples that George Orwell found both frustrating and alluring in equal measure — and this is not to reduce Spaniards of any stripe to the caricature of gluttonous Sancho Panzas, but rather to celebrate that such is possible even under the greatest duress — that, though they may cling tenaciously to opposing political viewpoints, which in that era, they fought tooth and nail for, nothing is taken quite so seriously as eating and drinking.

Being the innate pessimist that I am, watching a small boat being knocked around like a dodgem car on the rollicking, blue-grey seas at the normally placid Jersey Shore this past weekend put me in mind of the Costa de Muerte, the coast of death, on Spain’s north-west coast, where Galician fisherman have taken their lives in their hands for generations. [In a quirk of editorial fate, I may, unwittingly, have taken inspiration for this flight of fancy from the cover (then unopened) of this month's Bon Appetit, but as you will see, if you persevere, there is a mite more detail below than Barbara Fairchild typically provides.]

The ocean’s bounty has never been translated into material riches in that part of Spain, and even in modern times, in spite of renewed interest centered around its albariño and mencia wines, artisanal cheeses, and gooseneck barnacles, it remains comparatively impoverished. Consequently, Gallegos have, for generations, cast their fortunes in the wind and sought better lives for themselves in other parts of Spain and the New World, including Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba.

Interestingly, and this is mostly unrelated, during researching this post, I learned that Fidel Castro’s father was one such Galician emigrant. His mother was also of Galician descent. In fact, Castro is a common Galician family name that is derived from the circular stone-built houses or “castles” of the Castreña — the Celtic Bronze Age culture that left a number of characteristic walled villages across the region. [Ironically, of course, Galician heritage is perhaps the only thing that the communist Fidel shared with his fascist counterpart Francisco Franco, but it was enough for the former to take up an invitation from the-then leader of Spain to visit their shared "home" region in the 1960s.]

The late 19th century marked the beginning of mass Galician emigration to the New World, and an unknown, but significant, number of Gallegos emigrated to Argentina and Uruguay during this period. Today, the two New World cities with the greatest number of people of Galician descent are those countries’ respective capitals, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, so much so, that it is not uncommon for Porteños to refer to all Spaniards as “Gallegos”.

Regular visitors to this blog will, perhaps, recall last April’s post about Argentine pizza which ventured a sociological theory on the impact Italian immigrants have had on the culture and food of their adopted country. It is just possible that I overstated things a little. You see, beyond its magnificent meats, Argentinian cuisine’s next most famous item is not, as I said, its pizza or pasta, but its empanadas. To explain this, I had originally intended to embark on a lengthy discussion of how Galician immigrants were behind the development of the iconic Argentine empanada. Sadly, I could find no evidence whatsoever to support this hypothesis, especially since Argentine empanadas resemble more closely the typical Spanish empanadilla than the much larger Galician empanada, and were likely to have been popular in Argentina long before Gallegos arrived en masse. Instead, a brief description of how we came across Galician empanadas in a veritable sea of Argentine-style pies during our stay in Buenos Aires last year will have to suffice. Sorry about that.

We snacked almost constantly on empanadas with a variety of fillings throughout our ten days in Buenos Aires, and began taking their quality and ubiquity mostly for granted. It was only later on in our visit when we came across Pizzeria la Americana (aka La Reina de las Empanadas), an established bakery and cafe a block from the Palacio del Congreso de Argentina, that we realized not all empanadas are created equal. In this giant place that takes up most of a city block, a bevvy of savory pastries, large and small, sat glowing warmly under spotlights behind glass screens. These piles of regular small empanadas beckoned, crustily, at us, and we would have reverted to habit and ordered a slew of them had we not spied some giant pies on individual cake stands next to them. We hadn’t seen anything like these before — two or more inches thick, baked to a shiny golden patina and filled with, among other things, greens, boiled eggs and ham — yet they were also described as empanadas. What were they?

Even more confusingly, one of the large ones was labelled “pascualina”, a moniker for pies we had come across only once before, and then in Genoa, to describe that city’s special Easter variation of the spinach/chard and ricotta torta de bietole. Could these pies be variations on that? We weren’t sure, and couldn’t summon enough of our tourist Spanish to ask what might turn into something of a lengthy and garbled question about nomenclature, semantics and gastronomic anthrolopology.

Argentina’s ethnic mix has contributed to a unique South American melding of Iberian and Italic culture and cuisine, in which a pizzeria could quite legitimately describe itself as the queen of the empanada, while simultaneously serving Genoese-influenced Galician specialties without breaking stride or encouraging skepticism from potential customers. We were momentarily confused by it all, but decided there was nothing to do but roll with it, and so ordered a couple of giant slices of the empanada Gallega de pollo, which turned out to be a delicious, if over-generous, appetizer for our subsequent lunch at one of the city’s oldest Italian restaurants.

Neither of us had ever had a pie quite like this before. It didn’t really resemble the free-form tuna and sardine empanadas I’d tried in Santiago de Compostela and Vigo years ago, nor was it like an American-style pot pie we’re so familiar with, brimming with sauce and chunky vegetables. With a bready, pizza-like crust, top and bottom, and baked in a dish about the same dimensions as a deep-pan pizza, the filling was a moist and peppery combination of chicken, sauted greens, onions and red pepper. It was absolutely delicious and we have both been raving about it ever since, but everytime we’ve tried to make any of the many variations on Galician empanadas, we’ve failed to produce anything similar, nor have any recipes for Argentine empanadas worked out the right way.

In truth, the, what I’m going to call, Argentine-style empanada Gallega that we did make, wasn’t quite as good as the one we ate in Buenos Aires. The dough was too firm, not bready enough, and I should have tried using a modified pizza dough instead, but the filling more than made up for its shortcomings. In place of chicken, we slow-roasted half a Long Island duck that we had left over in the freezer from the hand-rolled Tuscan pasta with duck ragu and mixed it with sauted kale, green pepper, garlic, smoked paprika (pimenton) and lots of onions.

Experimentation on this front will continue because I could usefully spend some more time beautifying my rather scruffy attempt at a decoration, but also because one empanada fed the both of us for dinner that night and for lunch three subsequent days, and it just got better with each passing meal. Feel free to mess around with the dough recipe to your heart’s content, just as we will when we make this again, and, of course, the filling is entirely up to you too. Duck is kind of a luxury, and chicken, tuna, sardines, boiled eggs, a variety of vegetables, or plain old ground beef, would be absolutely fine. You should also feel free, should you feel geeky enough, to develop your own specious theories about the development of various global cuisines. They probably won’t be any less likely than mine.

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Sitting around the table last night with gusts of strong breath coloring our domestic atmosphere, Amy and I were considering the profound effect garlic has on Spanish cuisine, and we wondered aloud whether any other national cuisine makes such abundant and varied use of the perfumed rose. Certainly, French and Italian food incorporate garlic with spectacular results, as do Greek, most other Mediterranean cuisines, as well as Chinese and Indian, but if there’s a cuisine that, to us, is characterized by garlic, it’s Spanish.

All of which is great, unless you happened to be sitting next to us this morning on the subway, as last night we ate two of the most highly odoriferous dishes in the Iberian canon – patatas a lo pobre and pollo al ajillo. The humble, peasant roots of both these dishes (the former translating as poor man’s potatoes) rely heavily on large quantities of garlic to elevate the otherwise prosaic ingredients to a higher plane. The garlic somehow acts both as a spice and an acid, flavoring the dish while simultaneously cutting through and balancing the olive oil.

We recommend you make enough of both these dishes to share, not just because they make delicious tapas-style small plates, but because you’ll want to surround yourself with similarly pungent folk to avoid people covering their faces and shuffling away down the train as if you had the plague. On the other hand, you do far worse than gain a little extra personal space in this congested city of ours. Maybe we’ve hit on a smart new commuting tactic?

It is no coincidence that, in the 30 years since Franco’s death, Spanish creativity in the arts, architecture, business, and gastronomy has blossomed. It is also no coincidence that it has been, predominantly, though not exclusively, Spain’s sub-national and regional groups — who were repressed most viciously by the Fascist dictator — that have led this rebirth. Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, designer of some of the most stunning buildings of all time, and Catalonian Ferran Adría, who runs what is, almost undisputedly, the world’s best restaurant, are but two whose genius has prospered in the post-Franco era. One could also point to more general trends of economic prosperity (prior to the recent global meltdown) in formerly moribund provincial cities like Bilbao and the resurgence of regional languages as evidence of this Spanish renaissance in recent times.

The Basque Country (País Vasco) has always been somewhat removed from mainstream Spanish affairs, even prior to the 20th century. Linguistically, ethnically and culturally unique, and surrounded on all sides by Indo-European speakers, the Basques have survived millennia of both active and passive discrimination, keeping their traditions alive with stubborn tenacity. One might be forgiven then, for assuming that these remarkable and unique people are a population of stolid conventionalists, unable or unwilling to change their habits. One would be wrong.

Historians trace the epicenter of today’s wave of Spanish gastronomic innovation to a small kitchen in San Sebastian (Donostía) in the mid-1970s. At his eponymous restaurant, Arzak, Juan Mari Arzak pioneered New Basque Cuisine (nueva cocina vasca) virtually single-handedly. Taking inspiration from the French nouvelle cuisine revolution of the late 60s — especially from Michel Guérard, whose spa-restaurant at Eugenie-les-Bains between Bordeaux and Biarritz was a particularly fine ‘local’ example — he began creating lighter and less rustic dishes from the finest traditional Basque ingredients and time-honored Basque techniques. Arzak has been so extraordinarily successful in this that not only do world-famous chefs Ferran Adría and Karlos Arguiñano credit him with heavily influencing their cooking, but his restaurant has retained the 3 Michelin star-rating it achieved in 1989, and only last year it was named the 8th best restaurant in the world.

Anyone who has eaten Basque food knows that it is characterized by simple, unadorned dishes with a weighting towards the maritime, like Marmitako (a tuna and tomato stew), Bacalao al Pil-Pil (salt cod in a spicy garlic sauce), and Txangurro (stuffed crabs), and Juan Mari Arzak’s signature dish — his hake in green sauce with clams — is of this same ilk, featuring very basic ingredients and unfussy technique.

Two things make Juan Mari Arzak such a revolutionary and this dish so seminal: (1) when he first made it, the dish demonstrated exquisitely, and for perhaps the first time by a Spanish chef, that Iberian dishes, Iberian ingredients and Iberian traditions could constitute haute cuisine — an idea that, today, resonates globally; (2) he showed in this dish that the cooking of the future would be as much, if not more, about what you didn’t do to the food as what you did do to it — a truly revolutionary notion at a time when the elaborate and time-intensive dishes of classic French gastronomy were still considered the pinnacle of the culinary arts.

Hake (merluza) is a staple of Spanish seafood cooking, and indeed, so influential has Arzak been that versions of this dish are still, 35 years later, pretty commonplace in Spain. I first ate it at a hole-in-the-wall tasca behind the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca years ago and I can still see its beautiful green color and feel the silkiness of the fish in my mind. Sadly, and for no good reason I can fathom, hake is difficult to get hold of on this side of the Atlantic and obtaining other white fish with similar properties is also problematic for the ethical consumer due to issues of over-fishing and scarcity. Nonetheless, sustainably managed Pacific cod is fairly readily-available, and most mild-flavored white fish, if left skin-on to keep it intact, will make a perfect substitute.

Juan Mari Arzak’s revelation of allowing the ingredients to speak for themselves is taken to its logical extreme here as he hardly applies his hands or any heat to create what is a fully cooked dish. Understanding that white fish can dry out and quickly fall apart if not dealt with delicately, all he does is gently caress it around a barely warm pan with garlic, olive oil, parsley, clam juice and wine. The emulsion created by this careful preparation is as sweet and elegant as you would expect from a three Michelin star chef, but with a flavor as robust as the ancestral Basque fare from which it comes, and as spirited as the revolution it began. Vivá la Revolucíon!

I remember the night in Madrid Jonny and I thought it would be a good idea to do a tapas crawl after having many, many drinks. We weren’t yet at that “I’m so drunk I must shovel food in my mouth now” place, but were maybe a few bottles of Mahou away. It was a great idea at first, but as the drinks piled on, the tapas were looking smaller and smaller and smaller to me. This girl was getting hungry!  But we had to soldier through. We had to follow the pact we had made after that bottle of rioja that we would have a drink and a tapa, then move to the next bar and have another drink then a tapa.  We would never surrender to buying dinner that night.  Tapas and drinks. Tapas and drinks only.

After the fourth “drink and tapa” run I began to have that feeling in my stomach. You know how it goes. The feeling that if a whole pizza was put in front of you you’d eat it all in one sitting. Or that you could die for some double crispy fries with a vat of blue cheese dressing (as a dipping sauce, of course… come on, it’s good!). Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll get to that next tapas joint only to find that the raciones are four times as large as they usually are?

Well, we stumbled upon the next bar and my prayers were answered. There on the tapas menu was everything I was searching for – a bit greasy, a bit spicy and a bit crunchy with a bit of starch and plenty of protein. Soon a rather large cazuela was placed in front of my salivating mouth containing Picadillo de Carne con Huevos y Patatas. Happy happy joy joy, happy joy joy.

Like two rabid dogs attacking a carcass, we dug in. It was amazing. A flavor sensation. But as quickly as it was put on the table it was just as quickly  lapped up and in our bellies. I still remember that day well and we love to make our own version of that tapa at home. Of course, we eat it as a Saturday brunch dish instead of a drunken bar snack. We substitute the beef picadillo for minced chorizo and use the rendered fat to cook the potatoes in. Yes, not the lightest meal to start a Saturday, but you’ll definitely smile while you’re eating it (and then crawl back into bed to sleep it off).