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Food
Minette Martin - The Spectator, 17 June 1997
FOOD tastes different abroad.
That is one of the many facts of life which used to infuriate my late
mother-in-law. She used to spend a great deal of time in the south-west
of France and each time she went she pointed out to us, with the same
degree of surprise and resentment, that everything tasted not only much
better but also different - even a tomato salad. We would naturally reply
that tomatoes and basil in the south of France are sweetened by the fierce
Mediterranean sun, and are in fact different. But she would insist that
the same tomatoes and basil, grown there and bought there, would taste
different here. More than once she insisted on proving this point, hurtling
down the motorway to Dover, hardly stopping until back in Berkshire, where
she would triumphantly produce some tomatoes, fresh from the Languedoc,
which she pronounced to have changed taste entirely somewhere en route.
It would have taken a brave woman to contradict her; perhaps that is why
I so rapidly came to feel that she was right.
There is something about food in a foreign country which cannot quite
he reproduced at home. Recently I went for the second time on a walking
holiday in Andalusia, arranged by Hugh and Jane Arbuthnott. One of the
many pleasures of this experience, and one for which we came back, was
the delicious Spanish food, much of it cooked by Jane herself, and in
particular her delicious picnics. I have wonderful memories of cold grilled
quails and white almond soup, of tortilla with cardoons (a type of artichoke),
gazpacho, fresh anchovy fillets marinaded in oil and garlic, of salted
almonds and little squares of manchego cheese and quince jelly served
with walnuts, and spiced pears to go with breaded veal cutlets. There
were stuffed eggs and slices of pata negra ham. from the local half-wild
black pigs, which is so much better than Parma ham. And there were olives,
little rounds of chomo, sultanas swollen with powerful Spanish brandy,
crisp little fritters, typical of Cadiz, made with tiny shrimp-like creatures
called camamnes, broad beans long stewed with chunks of jamon. squares
of nougat and, of course, powerful tomato salad with slivers of sweet
onions and a basketful of cherries. All these delicious things are quite
simple and ought to be easy to produce here in this country, when one
can get the ingredients. Yet when I experimented after my first visit
I found, as my mother-in-law so rightly insisted, that everything tastes
different over there.
Still, even if not quite the same. all these things can taste pretty good
over here, and the fitful British picnic season is upon us, so I think
it is worth trying some of them; like most Mediterranean food, Spanish
food seems particularly well suited to picnics and to eating outside.
As soon as I came back from my first trip to Andalusia, I bought Penelope
Casas's book. The Foods ami Wines of Spain', it is beautifully written
and contains all you need to know, in my opinion, though there are many
other excellent writers on Spanish food. Her meticulous description of
how to cook a tortilla is so precise that anyone prepared to follow it
carefully could hardly fail to produce something reasonably authentic,
or at least edible. In fact, as Penelope Casas points out, it is not as
simple to prepare as one might think. It's quite time-consuming too. But
tortilla is perfect for picnics, cooled and cut in large chunks or slices.
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