Food V

            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.