Episode 31: My Pijamas

This Was Then
Most of what I know about food I learned in Spain. After all, Spaniards eat just about anything that trots, swims, sprouts, crawls, flies, or germinates. (Nearly anything, at least. They aren't fond of corn or hot peppers.) That isn't a revelation. Most of the world's great cuisines began as peasant food, and poor people have to make the most of the ingredients available to them.
When I first arrived there in 1955, a temporary refugee from a cocksure and sanitized America, Spain was of the Third World, not a Europe on the mend from total war. I was soon to learn how elastic the definition of "edible" could be.
A newly minted Private First Class, I wandered slack-jawed through Barcelona's ancient barrios. Foreign visitors were still rare in the midst of that long winter of Francoism, so this Yankee soldier in high-water chinos and whitewall haircut provoked constant stares and some tentative approaches. One of these was a stooped old man in a beret who came close as I puzzled over a street map. He offered to help, gazing up at this towering young norteamericano (back then, 74 inches were sufficient to tower.) I made the universal hand gesture for eating. With a gap-toothed smile, he led me off with a lurching gait into the bowels of the medieval Gothic Quarter, chattering incomprehensibly all the way.
He deposited me with a flourish in front of an unpromising bar-restaurant with fly-specked windows and displays of octupi as big as melons. I thanked him and entered, warily. Heads swiveled in the shadowy high-raftered room with a drifting blue haze of pungent odors. All the patrons were men, for only men went into bars then. After a communal up-and-down examination of the interloper, they went back to drinking red wine from squat tumblers and shouting orders and opinions at each other.
A waiter in a frayed white jacket scurried up to me. He guided me through the crowd to the staircase in back. The floor was covered with shrimp skins and mussel shells casually tossed aside as their contents were consumed. They crunched and clattered beneath my feet.
The dining room upstairs was far quieter and tidier, for I was the only patron. It was barely noon. I was on G.I. eating time, but no Spaniard even thought about lunch before two PM. The room was not decorated so much as it was layered - with shellacked bullfight posters, photos of the owner with customers, yellowed press clippings, garlands of garlic and dried peppers, and mounted bulls' horns. Hanging overhead was a bloated brown wineskin that used to be a pig - it employed every part of the animal but its head and hooves. It looked like a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon that was a cruel joke on Disney.

The handwritten menu made no sense, but I stabbed at gazpacho, sangria, and paella. Oh, sure, chuckle now at such lack of sophistication, ye who nightly graze on the likes of blue corn tortillas and oysters in jalapeno pesto. But this was then, and those three Spanish gifts to the world were decades away from becoming culinary cliches. This was a time in America when tomato soup was served hot and it was Campbell's. Rice was for pudding and wine was for sissies.
Gazpacho wasn't bad, though, if odd, and the sangria suited the taste buds of one weaned on Pepsi-Cola. Until that day, however, and to the despair of my Nova Scotia-born mother, no fish but that interred in seven-ounce cans had passed my lips. It was my untested conviction that organ meats and squiggly things tasted exactly as they looked.

But here! My very first paella was aswarm with tentacles! Claws! Liver chunks! Tripe! Parts of undisguised marine creatures! And right in the middle, staring balefully at me, was an eyeball...of what origin I had no idea.
I took seriously the role of unofficial ambassador my Army superiors impressed upon me, and the waiter hovered to observe my reaction to his national dish. I smiled a sickly grin, ungritted my teeth, and moved in on the pizza-sized pan. Somehow, I ate it all.
All except the centerpiece, which rolled around the rim when the waiter picked it up. He expressed approval of my appetite.

That called for dessert. The menu listed a dozen possibilities, but only one item looked familiar: Pijamas. I groped for my pocket dictionary. The one-word definition read...pyjamas. So, one more adventure. I pointed at that. It arrived soon after, a huge, multicolored, many-textured heap of whipped cream, sorbets, tarts, cakes, custards, and fruits. Pyjamas, it turned out, meant a portion of every dessert in the kitchen, all piled in one bowl.

Paella was strange, but good, I eventually decided. Curiosity begat passion - for baby eels, kidneys in red wine, squid in its ink, mussels, crayfish, prawns, sea bass baked in salt, roast kid, rabbit, wild boar. I even screwed up the courage to try percebes - goose barnacles that look like the miniaturized feet of Godzilla.

Spaniards eat to get ready to dine. Food and wine are almost hourly lubricants for social, commercial, and familial intercourse. An abundance of each is essential to the honor of the hosts, and edibles and drinks must be hearty and lusty and straightforward in both flavor and portion.

This Is Now
So what happened? Spanish chefs got serious. They were tired of slighting comparisons of their native cuisine to those of Italy and France. They aspired, they got competitive, they got cred. Now chefs from around the world make pilgrimages to the kitchens of Catalonia and the Basque Country to genuflect at the altars of a cuisine so new it doesn't have a name. Kitchens are closer to labs than places to cook, with beakers and test tubes replacing skillets and pots. Listen to this blather out of the mouth of Andoni Luis Aduriz, an avatar of this movement:

"Mine is a 'tepid' cuisine, a cuisine of whispers, a cuisine where I seek insipidity in every sense. Diners at Magaritz (his Basque region restaurant) have to tune themselves in, to make more of an effort to understand than has been asked of them up until that moment. It's a new tone, as if the melancholy of the products was emerging."

Goodbye, it appears, to food as pleasure or nourishment, let alone to romance or fun or gratification of the several senses. Now we are directed to attempt to divine the gustatorial meaning being communicated by the chef while paying dearly for the privilege.

I'll take paella and pyjamas.

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Vegetable Paella
Serves 4 to 6

Paella isn't a single dish. There are scores of variations in the overarching category of arroces (rices), including some that don't even involve rice, widely thought to be a basic, unalterable component. Here's a version that makes fine use of the fresh vegetables of late summer. Serve by itself or as an accompaniment to grilled chicken or fish.

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 small jalapeno, seeded and minced
1 large Spanish onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1 large red sweet pepper, cored, seeded, and sliced
1 large green sweet pepper, cored, seeded, and sliced
3 large cloves garlic, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons smoked paprika, preferably Spanish
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
1 medium zucchini, scrubbed, trimmed, and cubed
4 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1-and-a-quarter cups arborio rice
2 cups chicken broth
One-half cup frozen peas, defrosted quickly under warm water
Flat-leafed parsley, minced, for garnish

Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a large (preferably iron) skillet with a lid. Add the jalapeno, onion, and red and green peppers. Lower heat and cook uncovered until onions start to turn golden.
Add the garlic, paprika, thyme, zucchini, and tomatoes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Adjust heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 15 minutes.
Stir in the rice and chicken broth and bring to a boil. Simmer for another 20-25 minutes until rice is tender. Taste and adjust seasonings. Garnish with the peas and parsley. Serve.

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