Gastronomy 1: Restaurants

On one of our first nights here, Abbie remarked that the Spanish worship the pig. I replied that, generally, if a culture worships an animal, they refrain from consuming its meat at every meal. She laughed with a Spanish friend and replied that the pig is so upheld because of its importance in the Spanish diet. Indeed. I quickly learned that pig (this is what it is referred to, rather than ‘pork’) is included in essentially every meal.

Here in Alcalá, people will drink their morning coffee or tea and eat lightly, perhaps a toast with tomato and jamón (thin-sliced cured ham). Lunch is the biggest meal; it is taken around 2:00 in the afternoon. In restaurants, the standard lunch is two courses, perhaps a rice or pasta dish followed by a meat plate: sliced lomo (back meat) and sauce, albondigas (ground pork meatballs) and sauce, or another combination of pork. This is generally accompanied by fried potatoes and bread, a drink, and a dessert or coffee. People then take their siesta and return to work at 5:00, so dinner time does not roll around until 9 at the earliest. Dinner is meant to be light, thus the tapas tradition, which promotes bar-hopping to sample a wide array of what I can most easily explain as snacks. Occasionally, one might find a tapa constructed from smoked salmon or fried egg or canned tuna, but generally speaking, at least in Alcalá, tapas consist of lomo, jamón, chorizo, thick sliced salami, or another accented word that indicates pig, on a hard roll or toasted piece of baguette, sometimes with a bit of cheese. Sometimes one might find an option for calamari or pan tumaca (toast with a tomato-garlic-olive oil spread). As a salad and vegetable lover, I have struggled with this diet plan.

The important thing to realize is that when a pig is slaughtered in Spain, the entirety, minus perhaps the skeleton, is consumed; the ears, the stomach lining, the skin, the hooves, the blood, EVERY body part, can be found on a menu in this nation. It is a matter of pride! My approach is to give every dish a chance once. At the insistence of a local, in fact, Craig and I recently sampled black pudding. For this dish, meat is ground into sausage and pushed into intestinal lining, then injected with the drained blood of the animal, cooked, sliced, and squished into a pudding that is eaten on bread. It is, according to both my mind and my tongue, a giant, dark, thick scab. Yummy! A friend noted that the restaurant we tried this dish at does not prepare it wonderfully and that if we did not like it, we should really try it again at a different place. Right.

Dessert is, generally, a lunchtime luxury. Think custard and cream based cake or a caramel pudding like flan. Late at night, though, the chocolate appears. To a night-life adventurer, there is nothing better than a gofre, a waffle smeared with whatever topping you could imagine: chocolate sauce, whipped cream, strawberry jam, caramel, whatever combination thereof. Or perhaps you might prefer a napolitana, a pastry similar to a croissant rolled around a thick chocolate sauce. Or simply a chocolate croissant, a croissant sliced down the center, filled with chocolate, heated, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Gofre shops are quite popular from, say, 3-5 am, when the night life is winding down on the weekends.

It’s a difficult schedule to adjust to. We, as Americans, are accustomed to small lunches and large dinners, for example. Here, Craig and I have had to learn to remember to eat lunch, to wait until 9:30 to head out for tapas, to expect a call at midnight or later to meet a friend, to expect everyone to show up much later than planned, to not question the ingredients of a dish set before us. I haven’t learned to love every cut of pork yet, to eat without peeling off strips of fat, to ignore dripping grease, to accept chunks of sausage as a meal. But I sure can appreciate and respect the whole consumption of a slaughtered animal, and I can understand the love and reliance on an animal that give itself up wholly to the nourishment of a nation.