Another
life-changing food experience was our first trip to Spain in 1983. I started keeping a journal
during this trip. Katharine and I took a
swing north from Madrid through Leon,
Cantabria and the Rioja and then back to Madrid. Later we were joined by three close friends
for a drive down through La Mancha to Jaen and
then on to Córdoba, Seville, Granada and the Mediterranean coast. My journal records sightseeing, but it mostly
talks about what we ate. And the meals
were worth recording. It was my first
exposure to many foods: my first baby eels, eaten as a first course for lunch
in the basement comedor of the Alfonso XIII Hotel in Seville
(eels Bilbao, with garlic and a trace of
peppers), my first suckling pig, at Botín in Madrid, a restaurant famous for the
dish. At El Caballo Rojo in Córdoba I
had my first taste of the meaty vegetable from the thistle plant, cardos,
or cardoons in English. Cardos
are the bottoms of the European wild thistle, Cynara cardunculus, like a
miniature artichoke heart, sweet and tender, served in this case in a cream
sauce flavored with jamón serrano.
“Cardoons with ham’s cream” was the quaint translation on the menu for
the English-only speaker. Cardoons
sounds distinctly Scotch, and I suppose Scotland is known for its thistles,
but the cultivated cardunculus is a southern European phenomenon. Other foods that I had disdained before, I
found prepared in magical ways on this trip.
The homely eggplant in the hands of a cook in Almagro became a savory
appetizer; elsewhere, prepared with ham or with cheese it had inspired the
sixteenth-century poet Baltasar del Alcázar to sing its praises. Spinach, never a favorite of mine, was
transformed by sautéing with a little olive oil and pine nuts into a delicious
side dish. In a marisquería in Madrid’s tapas zone around the Plaza Victoria my
friend David Earnest introduced me to percebes, goose barnacles, steamed
and requiring a fair amount of unwrapping of tough hide to get to the tender
meat, juicy, salty, and with the slightest hint of iodine. The many novel
tastes overwhelmed the other novelties of this trip.
NEW BOOK: THE GOLDEN ERA OF SHERLOCK HOLMES AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Michael Cohen, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries (Milwaukee: Genius Book Publishing, 2024).
In 1891, a new London magazine, the Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures. An enormous flowering of this kind of tale followed, with stories that featured female and male detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and con men. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before. Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew, such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.
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