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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Two were left behind with awful colds when we set off for Barcelona, and another was on her way to visit the hospital en route. But wait! While crossing the road to the train station I realised my hip had gone out, and rather than wait to see if it righted itself while doing a walking tour of the city markets, I turned tail and joined the fallen for a day of rest. The hip gradually recovered, and thanks to some strange fizzy Spanish anti-inflammatories, I was upright again by nightfall.

Lucky thing too, because Sunday was a free day, and we transferred to the excellently located Residencia Campus del Mar in Barcelona, where we were handed tickets for the Touristic Bus and set free until Monday morning. We took full advantage and circled the town in our yellow headphones, disembarking at the Miro museum an hour before it closed (early on a Sunday afternoon), so after a sprint round there we hopped back on and then wandered up the Rambla until we found somewhere to eat on a side street. Gazpacho, tortilla and paella did the job nicely and thus fortified we ploughed on to Sagrada Familia and Park Guell.

It was cooling off enough to dare riding the top of the bus, which we did until we reached Parc del Palau Reial de Pedralbes, where we made a tactical error by thinking we could sprint across the city to our hotel at Barceloneta faster by metro.

Not quite. It was so late that, nearly home, we stopped for a small but substandard Chinese meal before rousing the security guard – busy spraying flies in his office – and turning in for our last night in Spain.

We gathered at the bus in the morning, a couple of fallen comrades left to rest up, another taken to seek medical help for a mysterious swollen lip that appeared to be an allergic reaction. The rest of us had an excellent talk from communications and quality director Jordi Tolra about the markets of Barcelona, which number 46 (40 of them food markets) and which aim to allow the citizens to be within walking distance of at least one of them.

Would that other cities could follow this policy! Some of them had even made what seem to me unholy alliances with supermarkets – the one where we had our lecture, Santa Caterina (a former monastery which had been, before the monastery, an ancient food market), had a small supermarket within its walls. Tolra explained that the markets are gathered under one umbrella organisation, which is part of the city government, but that the stall-holders themselves are independent, but joined together by trade associations which organise them by food type. These associations, he said, are a long tradition in Catalonia, which was once an independent state with its own king and culture; after it was annexed by Spain, it kept its culture alive by creating Catalan associations, and trade assocations were the first of these.

The markets have received a lot of money which is used for renovation and modernisation of the buildings, to bring them into line with contemporary needs (logistical, technological, environmental).

A few of us who’d missed the Saturday tour were taken round and shown the foundations of the monastery, the seniors’ housing next door, built at the same time as the refurbishment, and the loading areas where a couple of the market’s delivery vans were parked. Hearing that all the stall holders bought their produce at the same wholesale market disillusioned us a bit. There were, our guide said, a few stall holders who sold their own produce, but they were in the minority, and there were hardly any organic stalls either.

While carefully negotiating a hefty lunch from the organic tapas stand at the well thronged Boqueria market, I mulled over what we’d heard.

So if the food markets are buying their produce at the same place as supermarkets, where does the difference lie? I guess the sales are distributed to more and smaller sellers, who have less overhead and perhaps employ (en masse) more people with better expertise in their area. But Tolra was definite on the point that he wanted to drive traffic away from supermarkets and into the city markets: families that packed the kids into the car and drove to a supermarket for the day should be bringing them here instead. His vision of family entertainment was more wholesome than supermarket kiddieland, though: his programs aim to educate school children and offspring of visiting shoppers on food and nutrition, to counteract ‘hamburger culture’ and to bring kids into contact with food producers and sellers as well as teachers and nutritionists.

It’s an interesting and busy area, and the markets have some impressive communication programs going. How successful the markets of the future will be will depend on whether the political winds continue to blow kindly and generously in the direction Tolra hopes to keep sailing.

We arrived at Viticultors Espelt, a winery in Girona that opened in 2000, and decanted the able-bodied for tour and tasting, while a pair of sufferers and their translators headed to hospital in search of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections.

We were presented with jolly orange sun-hats in which we set off in hot windy sunshine for a look at the vineyards.

It’s a new estate, only aquired three years ago, and the winemakers are busy learning about their terroir, by experimenting with different harvests, agings and blendings. In this baking climate, the plantings are done strategically, matching the varietal to sun exposure, and using stronger vines like grenache to protect more fragile ones like syrah from the wind that blows in from the sea, visible from the hilltop we were standing on. The terraces along the hillside are being restored by dry stone walling, three km achieved in two years, by two people working full time. Global warming is playing its part here, and the harvests are coming earlier each year: traditionally done in mid September, they are now taking place in mid to late August. Such is the heat, the harvest takes place between 4am and 11am, otherwise the grapes would start fermenting in their skins as soon as they were picked.

As we walked back for our tasting, we passed a charming but unremarkable farmhouse, which the winemaker told us was by night a very exclusive and popular disco, Ranch Frank, started by Salvador Dali and his American girlfriend.

We dashed through the tasting – Mareny 2006 (Sauvignon Blanc and Muscat), Quinze Roures 2006 (Grenaches gris and blanc); some nice full-bodied reds, Saulo 2006 (Grenache and Carinyena) and Terres Negres 2004 (Carinyena and Cabernet); and finished off with Airam 1998, a sweet wine made in very limited quantities from Grenache grapes, using the Solera (“fractional blending”) method, which is also used for sherry. It’s aged in half full barriques using a complicated method of adding partially aged wines to the new (in a process I’d be reminded of when we learned about balsamico tradizionale) all of which allows controlled oxidation to leave its mark.

The bus with its slowly reviving occupants arrived and whisked us off to a lively seafront town called Roses,

where we had an excellent tapas lunch – sweet shots of gazpacho; mussels both in a cold vinaigrette and hot stuffed; a gorgeous but too-small school of anchovies in garlic oil; quail eggs;

calimari; octopus; patatas bravas;

and then some noodle-style paella with, of course, allioli, and strawberries and ice cream to finish, all washed down with lots of sangria.

A lucky thing we’d eaten well as we weren’t offered so much as a speck of foam at El Bulli where all hands were busy preparing for supper.

A spectacular and slightly terrifying cliff-side drive from Roses, the much revered restaurant is only open six months a year, and they begin taking reservations from October.

The numbers involved are revealing… of something. In order to assure newcomers a place in the experience (which is around 30-35 small and ever-changing dishes for 185 euros per head plus wine and taxes) they have a policy of booking half the total 8,000 seasonal seats in repeat business and half new diners. There are 1,700 items on the book-like wine list, representing some 19,000 bottles in their cellars, and so the sommelier recommends you consult online before they start pouring into one of the 60 different wine glasses and 5 types of decanters. They have an electronic menu which you can use to filter your wine selections through your 30 food items if you want to complicate your life further; and of course there is a water list to choose from too.

The staff (67) outnumber the diners (50) but are not all paid employees, since there are 45 trainees (4 this year will be selected from 4000 applicants).

Ferran Adria stepped out of the kitchen long enough to engage in a bit of verbal ping pong about what is art (El Bulli is officially known this year as Pavilion G in the German art festival Documenta) and revealed he spends about 30 percent of his time talking to media and conferences.

After one last look at the dandy view from El Bulli’s courtyard, we hopped back on our bus and arrived at Mataro, which Carlo explained was another word for Mourvedre, very appropriate. It was a nice hotel in a bad location – across the road from what I heard was not a great beach, and a couple of kms from town, so taxis were needed for any expeditions. After we tried the first night’s hotel restaurant fare, we concluded these would henceforth have to include supper. Gazpacho in a wine glass? Phooey.

With one down (massive cava hangover) and a few more beginning to falter (3 head colds, 1 sore back), we set off for Reus (birthplace of Antoni Gaudi!) where we had a tasting of DOP Siurana olive oil (made from small arbequina olives) at the beautiful art nouveau (modernisme) building housing the Consell Regulador de la Do Suriana:

and heard about various other geographically designated products, including rice, hazelnuts, potatoes and tangerines.

Next stop Cambrils, at the Cooperativa de Cambrils y Borges, where we observed the packaging of peaches, destined entirely (or maybe 90%, depending on who you asked) for external markets. Not an organic or artisanal coop, but a very busy one. We visited the agricultural museum which is part of its headquarters, and had a lunch of salad, spaghetti (Spanish local specialty?) and fried fish.

Off we sped to the docks, where we watched a fish market in action. Instead of an auction, like the one we’d seen in Puglia, here the prices are pre-determined, and buyers gather round a conveyor belt where they drop identifying tags on boxes of fish, and then pay the going rate at the end. Anything not sold off the boats in this way goes to the bigger markets at Valencia and Barcelona. We heard about the EU’s method of conserving fish stocks (they buy back the boats and licenses of small fishermen, removing them permanently from the sea — unfortunately as we’d learned elsewhere the slack is being taken up by large scale trawlers). We stepped onto a fishing boat to see the cleaning and sorting involved. The men were hand-sorting the takings from their dragger nets, which scour across the sand and bring up all manner of crabs, crustaceans and smaller sea life. Larger enterprises would chuck these back in the water, dead, but here they were hand-sorted and sold.

It being the fourth of July, and our class more than fifty percent American, we celebrated their holiday by first visiting Freixenet, the market leader in cava (a word meaning sparkling wine produced in a cave). It’s a massive enterprise, with three areas: traditional, mostly manual production; mechanised production; and fully automated (robotic) production.

The scale of the cellars is awesome, as you would expect from a company that exports 140 million bottles a year of this serious competitor in the sparkling wine market. Such a company also requires a high degree of standardisation, so unlike some of the smaller wineries we’ve produced, who accept that the grape is a growing thing that will differ in quality and flavour each year, Freixenet has had to marshal many techniques to standardise its product, and relies therefore on cultivated yeasts (artisanal producers use wild ones, whose flavour will vary) and blending the three base wines they produce from Macabeo, Xarello and Parellada grapes.

The Spanish grape varietals they use are what makes the wine distinct in flavour from French champagne, which is made from blends of Chardonnay and Pinots (Noir and Meunier). But the same method of production is used: methode champenoise, which must now, because of geographical protection legislation for Champagne, be called methode traditionnelle. The basic technique involves crushing the grapes, filtering and fermenting the grape juice in vats or barrels, and then putting it through a secondary fermentation in the bottle: to each is added a bit of sweet liqueur (made from yeast, sugar and wine); the bottles are turned by hand (in the manual production area) or by machine or robot in the other areas, at intervals until the fermentation is complete, between one and four years at low temperatures.

Later that evening, one of us already sporting the most exotic injury of the trip (a jellyfish sting), we laid into the cava and an excellent spread including tortilla, cold chicken and (what American party would be complete without it) Lay’s potato chips, as well as a chocolate cake. Despite the airborne arrival of one randomly thrown egg (which missed hitting celebrants) the party went well and included rousing versions of Star Spangled Banner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The grand finale was a surprise appearance from the Freixenet bubble girl…

On our second day in Spain, we headed to the University of Vic, also known as UVic (- and I guess, fair enough, they have more claim to the name than Victoria, which lacks a school of idioms).

On our way across campus, we passed a steely statue commemorating Catalonian poet, the letters of whose name had been picked off the base, so I can’t tell you who it was. But perhaps we can assume a towering intellect?

We had a presentation by a nouveau baker called Francesco Daviva who runs Forn de Pa Altarriba, where for 25 years he has been trying to radicalise bread. He talked about the shape of bread (there are only three: round, baguette, loaf/square), its presentation on restaurant tables, and the various ways of making it divisible for diners. Mediterranean tables seldom have bread plates, so there are issues about crumbs and cutting that quite naturally have to be considered: the sorts of things I suppose bakers used to instinctively incorporate into their work instead of giving a stand-up lecture. Although we passed a few rolls around to look at shape and colour and aroma, we were not offered anything material to chew on, and wandered off for an hour or so before reconvening for lunch in a campus cafeteria. (The bread at lunch was, well, unremarkable.)

It was blistering hot when we followed the leader to our next destination, Casa Riera Ordeix, to see some more sausage-making. Curious emblem over the door…

Fuet, (Salchichon de Vic) the sausage of Vic , has been made for about 150 years in the centre of Vic, run to this day as a family business. This was high quality meat: nothing but prime cuts of pork (well trimmed legs and pork belly for fat). They produce 3000 kg of sausage per week from January to July and then double the volume between September and Christmas, as it’s a product traditionally eaten at Christmas. They have a strictly scheduled week: Mondays they fill the casings; Tuesdays through Thursdays they trim the meat, as we saw:

Fridays they grind and season the meat, which is left to macerate over the weekend. The sausages are hung from nails in aging rooms where the temperature and humidity – much like prosciutto di parma – are regulated by opening and closing windows; the local flora of course play a part in the curing.

The sausages are brushed and re-hung periodically until they have done their two to three months’ stint. The product was absolutely delicious: spicy and peppery, firm and chewy. They sell the sausages everywhere in the world — except Canada and the US whose hygiene regulations exclude these and a great many artisanal products. (Hey y’all: the Europeans eat this stuff every day and are still standing…!)

(Except for the one who fell ill during the tour; perhaps heat, perhaps an early symptom of the flu that would catch up with her later.)

We packed our bags and headed to our next destination in Calafell, where we checked into the weird and somewhat horrible Hotel Solimar, a massive complex where we got to witness European-style mass tourism close up. Luckily our university escorts reviewed the offerings at the hotel buffet we were supposed to eat from that evening and realised it was in fact an inedible wasteland of fried and processed foods, prefixed by stacks of badly washed plates, and so we got to choose our meal in the somewhat better offerings along the seafront.