What I'd Serve in Spain
A-Z

"One time it is a nibble of Wisconsin Cheddar as big as a pinhead. She likes it. Another time it is a microscopic smear of Camembert or Liederkranz. She pulls away, shocked by its fine odor of putrescence, too decadent for simplicity."  – MFK Fisher, from "J is for Juvenile dining"











A. All Saint's Day (Did de Todos los Santos)

From our veritably land-locked stout northern state of Wisconsin, what do we know of All Saint's Day in Spain? We have a hard enough time, it seems to me, spending enough time rallying around a table long enough to take our nibble at the Wisconsin Cheddar, as Fisher points to above. There aren't all that many references to Wisconsin in Fisher's great canon of food dashes and sometimes trenchant articles, but the reference here does point to a slight problem with older perceptions of Wisconsin food, for example, pre-foodie revolution: we've got dairy, we've got beef, and we've got corn and bratwurst. It is all very fine fare – who of us could see living without the luxury of a thousand award-winning cheddars? We are spoiled in not only choice, but presumably quality, in which all it takes is a brief picking session down any large grocery store to seek out the generic stuff, and we will be able to tell the difference between the five dollar and twelve dollar in a very quick nibble. I find it safe to say, as I read Fisher with one eye and of Spanish cuisine on the other, that to look be a Wisconsinite foodie is by definition to also "look out onto the rest of the world in wonder," in order to see both parallels and certainly differences. As we get closer to our own trip to Spain, this looking abroad while looking within, seems a good strategy to simultaneously fantasize and appreciate where necessary. I already look forward to the moment when we are standing inside a Spanish restaurant, nibbling on tapas, sipping a zuritos, watching the deep golden sun wash over the calloused frontages of buildings in along the Plaza Mayor, I will be asking myself a simple yet most complicated question: what from here would I serve in my transplanted Spanish eatery back home?

Jeff Koehler, in his colorful and familialy researched Spain: Recipes and Traditions from the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucia, makes some of those parallels of geography mentioned above without really knowing it. Spanish food, he regularly suggests, is a product of the modern interplay between rural agricultural traditions and a similarly great migration to the urban centers, so similar as that trend in the US, and no doubt virtually everywhere else in the world. Despite, he says, such a migration, there has been some strong cultural backlash and even though the farming population can now be counted in a single digit where once in the forty percentile, it is not desirable or possible to rid themselves with a food culture that takes its inspiration from small farms, the sea, and the verdant hills. All Saints Day takes place on the first of November. It celebrates Catholic traditions by visiting cemeteries "with chrysanthemums, scrubbing marble headstones, replanting flowers, and tidying up graves. But, like all traditions here, the day is also celebrated with specific foods."

Keohler goes on to show us importance of chestnuts to the tradition, and their attendant "street corner shacks, roasted over squat, charcoal-burning braziers. Scooped still warm into rolled paper cones, they are sold by the half dozen. The blackened shells are peeled away to reveal the soft, nutty-tasting flesh." Who cannot picture these likely family-driven corner shacks, stirring up small fires, the nutty smoke wafting up and around the small roof tops, reminding all of their childhoods? But my own favorite is the reference to the quince paste, quince a fruit that also begins to ripen at this time of year. Koehler's wife's grandmother had been preparing the "stunning combination paired with some wedges of aged Manchego cheese or smoky Basque Idiazabal cheese," for a long time. The ingredients list is a short one, but likely much like the favorite strawberry preserve of the midwest states, a potent sweet and sour, built in this case by nothing more than lemon, two pounds quince, and two cups of sugar. There is a picture of the quince paste laced over the Manchego cheese on the opposite page. If the reader didn't know better, they might claim this was a fine pic from a small cheesery, quartered slices of a good Wisconsin Gouda, strawberry preserve spooned down thick. It could be any day of the year.