Spanish Meals and Spanish Time

It’s common knowledge that people eat dinner late in Spain, especially compared to Americans.   Dinner starting at 10 pm leaves us wondering how on earth they do it.   What no one mentions is that the whole day shifts forward in time.   And there are reasons.

Three weeks in Spain in the winter have given me a little insight into how things work.   To begin with,  there’s no daylight until after 8 in the morning, so why rush to get up?   It’s dark and chilly and nothing is open.  Well, true, there are some people who have to get to work by nine or so.  We saw them on our way to the train station one morning.  Otherwise, looking out the window of our apartment, storefronts remained shuttered and pedestrians sparse until close to 10 am.

At our favorite breakfast spot in Seville (8 tables, 4 stools at the bar, and help yourself to the olive oil and tomato), we went early the day we were leaving – around 8:30 am – and did encounter a few other customers.   But usually we got there around 10 or 10:30 for breakfast and sometimes couldn’t get a seat.  At the places with outdoor seating, lots of people seemed to be relaxing over breakfast around 11 or 11:30, just about when French waitiers would be setting out the lunch couverts and giving you dirty looks for having a mere coffee.

Of course lunch in Spain doesn’t really start until 2 pm.  Foruntately you can have tapas before that, and before that 10 pm dinner as well.

So, while in France you’d be hungry waiting for lunch (and waiting for dinner), the Spanish have solved it by just adding in a few extras meals.  So what if you’re ready to go to bed at dinnertime.  With no effort, you can nibble your way through the day as follows:

Breakfast – whenever you get up

Second breakfast – when you find a nice café in the sun

Tapas – with a nice glass of Rioja

Lunch (if you’re hungry)

Merienda – afternoon snack, preferably with pastry, to fill in those hours (in Granada, this is also time for chocolatta con churros)

More tapas – for as long as you like

Dinner  (if you’re still awake)

Moorish Designs and Escher Patterns

 

I had been to the Alhambra twice before, and what I mostly remembered was being unable to stop long enough to focus (one reason I don’t always suggest guided tours) and being unable to see much beyond the heads of taller people surrounding me.   This trip, however, in early Feburary, sunny and cool, was blessed with relatively few fellow travelers.  In fact, it was downright empty, which suited us just fine.  Time to meander, time to look, time to absorb, with no guide to hurry us along and no crowds.  I highly recommend Spain in winter for time to study historic buildings.

The variety of decorative patterns in the Alhambra is astounding and the ones that fascinated me most are the tessellations. 

Tessellation is a mathematical term for a pattern made up of repeating shapes that fit together perfectly on a plane (geometric, not airborn) , leaving no empty spaces.  They can be rotated or reflected. Repetitions form larger patterns.

They made me think of M.C. Escher drawings – patterns that repeat or gently morph into changed patterns that repeat.   And sure enough, Escher was here, in Granada, back in   1922 and again in 1936, and took home drawings from which he struck out and designed his own original works.

The original designs, in the Alhambra, repeat themselves in tile and wood, in plasterwork, and even in light filtering through filigreed windows.   Your eye can follow the pattern and see one shape or another, depending on how you look at it, and where you focus.

The patterns also bring to mind American patchwork quilts, and some of them are quite similar.  What’s the connection?   Where did frontier women learn about Moorish patterns?  Patchwork quilts are made of blocks broken into squares, rectangles, diamonds, triangles– a very similar geometry.

Other designs weave strands together in knotted patterns that bring to mind Celtic knots and interweaves, and ornate letters in Irish manuscripts, especially the Book of Kells.  Did St. Brendan the navigator stop off in Andalucia on one of his voyages?   Don’t know, but it seems as if, like the patterns, it’s all connected.

"Olives on Legs"

I’m staying with the food theme for a little while longer, because this second Spanish specialty deserves attention.  If there’s another food that’s everywhere in Spain, it’s ham – jamon, in all its many forms.

There are various hams produced in Spain (over 40 million of them a year!), but foodies know that the Holy Grail of ham is the jamon iberico de bellota.   The ‘de bellota’ part is important.   Hams classied as iberico, made from the black iberico pig, are really good and limited to those produced in only 4 regions of the country (a DOC classification, like that for wine),  but the very best are allowed to graze the dehesa and fatten on ‘belotas’, the acorns produced by the holm oak in this traditional pastureland.

Not only does the acorn feast give the ham a wonderful sweet melt in the mouth flavor and texture, but those acorns are also full of oleic acid, the same found in olives, (hence the ‘olives with legs’ nickname given to the pigs) and means that this is, in fact, healthy ham and healthy fat.

 Jamon iberico de bellota doesn’t come cheap – our sampling in the local shop in Seville was 9 Euros for 100 grams (a nice serving for two),  twice that in a restraurant or bar, but worth every cent for a taste that really is what all the food fanatics claim it is – a sweet nutty melt-in-the-mouth delight.  It’s served in small paper-thin slices and needs no accompaniment, except a nice glass of Rioja.

Not that ordinaary ham (jamon iberico, not bellota, jamon serrano, just jamon) is bad in Spain, and there’s ample opportunity to taste it.   Lots of tapas consist of ham on bread, or the great universal ham and cheese sandwich.   Ham shops abound – there were three on our street in Seville, not counting the little supermarkets, and virtually every bar and café has at least a few hams hanging from the ceiling.  You can tell the iberico de bellota hams by the black hoof (pata negra).  

In Madrid, ham shops have wonderful names (the Palace of Ham, the Museum of Ham, the Parador of Ham, etc.)   And you need never be caught without – our local ham shop in Seville had an automatic dispenser so that you could even buy your ham after hours (not the bellota though – that was individually sliced from the ham when you ordered it.)

 

Of course jamon iberico was, until recently, one of those foreign products that the USDA was intent on protecting us from, and I still wouldn’t risk losing an expensive amount of it trying to come through customs, no matter what the Spanish deli owner tells you about vacuum packing.   However, in only the last few years, Spanish hams have become available through some specialty food importers.   A whole one costs about $900, and that’s without the professional stand that holds it in place and the sharp carving knife.   

Olives and Olive oil

 

"Except the vine, there is no plant which bears a fruit of as great importance as the olive."

Pliny (AD 23-79)

From the windows of the high speed train from Madrid to Granada, rows of olive trees stretch to the horizon.   Up and down hills, curving around bends, marching off into the distance.   Small fields of knarled misshapen old trees, long fields of young uniform trees, newly turned fields of stick-like baby trees – olive trees everywhere.   On the bus between Granada and Seville, same thing.   On the train from Seville to Malaga, ditto.

 Spain grows olives – more than France, more than Italy. In fact, Spain is the world’s largest producer and exporter of olives and olive oil, with 300 million trees. and 92 percent of the 5.19 million acres of olive groves is allotted to olive oil production.  According to the following article, only 20 percent is exported, which means that 80 percent is consumed in Spain.   Which explains a lot.

For more than you probably want to know about Spanish olive oil, olive trees, etc, here’s the link.

http://www.iberianature.com/material/olives.html

Spanish olive oil has been making its way over the Pyrenees and down to Italy since Roman times; archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of huge amphoras used to transport the oil.   Turns out a lot of the ‘Italian’ olive oil in your grocery store may be bottled in Italy, but the olives that produced it came from Spain.  

Olive oil seems to be lifeblood here.  Café tables hold a bottle of extra-virgin, rich and greeny-gold, just like American restaurant tables hold bottles of ketsup.   I watched people at breakfast dousing their tostadas con tomate (my favorite) with at least a quarter cup of olive oil.   It comes on sandwiches and nearly everything else.   It tastes great.   What more could you ask?

Well, you could ask for some of the olives before they get turned into oil.  Every beer and glass of wine in a bar or café come with a small dish of olives, olives come with tapas (or they are tapas), and the grocery shelves have more kinds of olives than Americans have potato chips.  Most of these are green olives, and delicious – not salty, but with a meaty quality I’m still trying to figure out.  The most toothsome ones I tasted were in Malaga, but both Seville and Granada had fantastic ones as wel

Our local olive store in Seville, just down the street from the apartment, let us taste before buying, but we never did find exactly the one we were looking for.  Have to keep trying.

Alhambra

Think of Granada and it's the Alhambra that comes to mind.  A fortress, a palace (several in fact), a citadel, a landmark, a UNESCO World Heritage site - all that.

The Alhambra towers over Granada, and you can see it best from the Albaicin, the old Arab part of the city, which has its own hill.

It looks medieval, as indeed it is, with additions and extensions built over several hundred years.  The best known parts, the Nasrid Palaces and the Generalife (gardens with the summer palace) were built between the 13th and 14th century.   It's a long and complex history:

http://www.alhambradegranada.org/en/info/historicalintroduction.asp

Inside the walls, the gardens and the palaces have a totally different character -serene, elegant, beautiful.

We're here in winter, when it's warm in the sun and chilly at night.   But the gardens here are clearly designed to provide cool restful spots from the heat of summer, along with the music of fountains,

Inside, the rooms and courtyards are decorated with dizzying detail, walls, ceilings, windows, floors - with tile, with wood, with plaster, with stone -

Every doorway and window frames a view, patterns repeat and vary endlessly, and no matter how long you look, you can't take it all in.

Breakfast in Spain

We've escaped the Great Maine Winter for a while and are hiding out in the south of Spain, a wonderful place full of street life, colorful shops and markets, historic buildings and friendly people, who cheerfully put up with my limited Spanish vocabulary.

After all the years of traveling to France, I can't help making comparisons.  Surely the Spanish share the Mediterranean love of good food and eating.  Unlike France, you can find something to eat here almost any time of day - that is, after 10 or so in the morning!

Well, there's no daylight till around 8 am, so even though there really are people heading out to work early, shops and bars and cafes don't really get going till midmorning. 

So in various little places nearby we've sampled a local breakfast - coffee and toast - wonderful crusty Spanish 'baguettes', spread with tomato, dribbled with olive oil (more about the olives later).  Mmm!