Spanish Food: All the delicious things that can be considered at least vaguely local

Of course the food differs widely in every region of Spain, every city, every neighborhood, and every household, but that isn’t going to stop me from evaluating and describing Spanish cuisine as a whole. So let’s begin with evaluation.

Evaluation: it was great and fantastic and delightful, and I assume that it continues to be so.

Description: (To be honest I prefer description over evaluation—it’s more intellectually [insert adjective form of integrity here:] integrific.(integrous? Integrital?) Plus it provides more opportunities for rambling, gratuitous amounts of adjectives, and unsettling metaphors that don’t necessarily imply anything about the quality of the object receiving the aforementioned description.

Summation: The Spanish diet is not spicy in the least and I saw no tacos. (In fact, some Spaniards see spicy food as a senseless waste of taste buds) (For this example, *one* Spaniard is going to be defined as *some*.) (haHAhaha. Senseless. I get it. Good one Michael.)

It’s a lot like the rest of the western Mediterranean in that they like baguettes, they pour olive oil on everything, and they have a lot of Italian restaurants. (Italy might be economically weak and thoroughly corrupt, but in terms of food popularity and culinary influence, it’s the nearly undisputed king/doge/pope/fascist dictator of the global community. [whatever you feel like labeling the culturally imperial ruler of all pizzas; potato potahmussolinito])

The cornerstones of the Spanish food economy, however, are none other than ham and mayonnaise. Nearly every dish contains at least one of these two as a fundamental building block somewhere near the center of their chemical structure.

You know what mayonnaise looks like, but do you know what ham looks like? Here’s some ham.

Photo credit goes to my dear friend Paige and this poor lady who was visually accosted by tourists. (It was horrible; they took random pictures of her, treating her like nothing more than a piece of meat hooked up on the wall.)

Every Spanish storefront MUST hang ham up, whether it be from the ceiling, the mantel, or a tie rack. This goes for tapa bars, supermarkets, candy shops, hotels and shoe stores. No one is free from this requirement. I believe this picture was taken at a pharmacy; I was looking for vitamins.

It’s unclear whether or not every store is also required to SELL ham, but that’s because I couldn’t find a menu at that H&M and I never felt adventurous enough to try to order without one. (“Do you have these shorts in a less intimidating green? I want something a little violently envious but this is downright sickly. And by the way I’ll have the jamon ibérico with a tinto de verano, and my friend would like an agua; do we wait to be seated or just find a seat? Because we´ve sort of got a good spot in the accessories section we´d like to hold onto--yep, right next to the vintage suspenders and cufflinks.”)

Of course there’s even more outside of ham and mayonnaise, and even the cuisine based solely on ham and mayonnaise can be varied and interesting. I’ll start with the traditionalish dishes and move to less well known ones.

Gazpacho: definitely one of the more unusual ones.  Gazpacho is kind of like a cold vegetable soup, and salmorejo, an Andalusian variant, is kind of a thicker, breadier version of the same thing, usually served with ham and eggs. (By that I mean there are bits of ham and eggs mixed in with the salmorejo, not that salmorejo is just a balanced part of this complete breakfast.)

 My personal opinion concerning these interestingly soupy dishes is that they're great! I just wish they weren't served cold, which is a problem because if they were hot they would suddenly just be soup instead of gazpacho or salmorejo (and a really weird soup at that). The key point is that gazpacho is NOT soup, because it's gazpacho, but I kind of wish it was.    soup.

I can make myself enjoy gazpacho but if I get a moment of free will then I will always make the choice to microwave it, even though that whole hot soup paradox means I'm no longer eating gazpacho. So I'm a culturally ignorant tomato soup junkie with an American culinary bias, what of it?

(The Hot Soup Paradox: a thrilling film adventure about a Castillian gourmet chef and an Austrian astrophysicist, racing against time and the Sicilian mafia as they decode an ancient message from the past and battle the laws of science themselves in order to procure a bowl of room temperature soup. In the midst of the suspenseful and artfully framed chaos, Pablo and Amadeus settle their differences, find love, and develop a profound appreciation for gazpacho coupled with ham.)

Paella is basically a rice dish that is usually served in large quantities in a huge pan with assorted meats and seafoods, but this is a fun-sized paella with chicken in a tiny little snack bowl because that's the photo I have access to.

You basically pile a ton of rice in a huge black pan and cover it with spices and mussels and shrimp and entire lobsters. The best paella is when it's homemade, (in huge quantities like I'm describing now) but it's widely available in much more inferior forms. (And I'm not even talking about the snack-size chicken paella--that wasn't all that bad.) Just like chili and orange push-ups in the United States, (ominous beginning to a sentence) frozen and mass-produced versions of paella are widely available in Spain. In fact there's even a standard mass-produced billboard, featured outside nearly every single mediocre cafe, tourist restaurant, supermarket, and fruit vendor, which essentially tells people that "8 varieties of crappy pre-packaged paella can be purchased for eye-gougingly extreme prices inside"

("eye-gougingly" is an adverb that I plan to start using much more often.)


Now, feast your eyes upon the infamous Spanish Tortilla....

If I were to anglicize it (*scoff*) or try to simplify it for your more inexperienced culinary sensibilities, I would just say that the Spanish Tortilla is literally just an omelet that you sometimes put potatoes or ham or chorizo sausage into--BUT IT'S MORE THAN THAT.

I would say here that la tortilla española is more than just an omelet--it´s a way of life, and although that wouldn´t be far from the truth, it would be dreadfully trite and fearfully cliche, and thus I am not going to say it. But I did.
 

You'll notice that the bottom picture of the tortilla is enormous; that's basically an entire meal for about three people; not only that but a delicious meal consisting almost entirely of eggs, potatoes, and salt. (and probably olive oil, but that goes without saying)

The top left picture is a beautiful picture of two perfectly created artisan tortillas. (lolartisan) On the right is a picture of tortilla sandwiches and a bowl of random veggies and beans which has been titled "a chickpea salad." Yes, tortilla sandwiches is a thing. And yes, it's just pieces of tortilla on pieces of bread. And yes it gets pretty thick; it's sometimes easier to just eat the tortilla and the bread separately. Yes I know that's nonsensical and pointless.

Also yes, you can label any pile of random food a salad if you just pick one of the ingredients to be the essential "title ingredient." (and THAT'S how oatmeal, with the strategic placement of a few scraps of dried fruit, suddenly becomes "cranberry salad." All pasta dishes ever can just be "grain" or "tomato" salad, but it'd be even funnier to name it after the specific species of noodle, like "linguini salad" or "salad of vermicelli" [inverting it into a more foreign language adjective style makes it even more classy.])


Those are the main three really uniqueish traditionalish Spanish things that I encountered, so here's a list/photoessay/rant about other stuff I ate!

SEAFOOD. There was lots of seafood. This is fried calamari, and it was everywhere.

Does calamari mean anything specific besides "cooked squid"?  It seems like it's a word like ham: a word that  was invented solely to separate the food in our minds from the little cute pig or adorable baby squid in our imagination.



One of my favorite dishes Marisol served us was a pretty simple one that was just pasta, olive oil, condensed milk, and a light sprinkling of bacon. Crazy delicious. (I'm pretty sure you could put olive oil, condensed milk, and "a light sprinkling of bacon" on anything and make it crazy delicious. It's like she broke the idea of food down to its core constituents and isolated the "crazy delicious" factor. Although let's be real, all you *really* need is the light sprinkling of bacon. At that point the condensed milk and olive oil are just garnish.)

 (A Light Sprinkling of Bacon: I'll spare you the whole exposition, but it's basically Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs but with lighter, more appetizing precipitation. Not to mention everyone's Italian. Also it ends with a big dramatic face-off between the Sicilian mafia and the FBI which erupts in the middle of a hugely fancy tense banquet where the two sides manage to stay civil until an FBI agent drops some bacon.)

These appear to be little bagels with some kind of ham, which were probably amazing. I've already mentioned that ham and mayonnaise are as ubiquitous and peanut butter and jelly over there (which, I've learned, is a weird and incredibly foreign combination to them, especially because peanut butter in general is weird and foreign to Europeans. So in reality peanut butter and jelly counts as "American cuisine," and thus it is just as legitimate and fancy as hamburgers and biscuits have the potential to be (by virtue of actually being "cuisine"))

But my point here is that there are tons of different types of ham.  Lacón is some kind of dried ham, there appear to be a number of different adjectives you can add onto bacon in Spanish to make it mean completely different kinds of cooked pig, and Iberian and Serrano ham are both very common. (That sentence was literally "a series of hams," which is an entertaining concept.) All different kinds of cured or dried ham usually; some are incredibly chewy and not of a color of pig meat that is usually eaten in an American diet, and some just look like ham or prosciutto or something. 

(A Series of Hams: Scottish banker and part-time chef Brett McDowell moved to continental Europe looking for a better of life, but all he found was trouble. Trouble, and more ways of serving ham than you can shake a stick of Turkish kebab at. (By far the grossest way of serving ham) To save his wife from the Sicilian mafia, Brett must follow a series of clues across the continent, interrogating a series of exceedingly dramatic and sickeningly cheesy ex-con turned stage actors with a series of leading questions as to his wife's whereabouts, before he finally discovers that all the while he has been working as the private chef for the Sicilian kingpin himself. Fortunately, the kingpin has quite the taste for ham, and Brett's going to serve him a series of ham-based courses that he's never going to forget.)

 This is some kind of delicious seafood salad, in all likelihood being served at a tapa bar.  One big wonderful bowl of crab, corn, and mayonnaise.

 These are patatas bravas, which means strong or brave potatoes. And while they may in fact be courageous tubers, it feels to me as if describing the virtues of your food before you eat them is counter-intuitive and a bit of a depressing turn-off. "Mr. Piggy was determinedly independent, and always a strong proponent of better living conditions on the farm--for all animals. He was a noble pig, and he constantly served as an inspiration and a reminder to others that they too can do better with the lot they're given. May we all fully enjoy his hamhock; it looks pretty greasy."

Beaaaaaans! and potatoes.

A mildly different kind of beans, potentially with some beef and/or potatoes.

 And now an intense chicken sandwich with an entire huge green chili pepper thing. (There was this whole unique tactic for removing the stemmish thing of the pepper before eating it)

 They have pre-packaged chocolate-covered WAFFLES with pictures of SCOOBY-DOO on them in the supermarket. Frankly, I don't know how this country could get any more perfect.

 Ruffles: ham flavor.  Never mind, it just did.

 If you thought I was a coffee-snob BEFORE I went to Europe.....

 pollo a la almendra: almond chicken. Of course it's covered with potatoes too, which is just something chefs tend to do in Spain when a plate doesn't look *complete* enough.

 Solomillo con Whisky!  Which is pork tenderloin... in some kind of whisky sauce I suppose?  And naturally, drenched in potatoes and entire cloves of garlic.

 Forget fire, I'm pretty sure goat cheese and jelly are what Prometheus stole from the Gods; I don't think there's any other explanation for how this became a thing.

 Doritos and canned guacamole. Yay Spain?

 This is me being a bullfighter, dancing for the crowd before I daringly stab the weak and tortured bull (nuggets.)  Bull nuggets. Bull tail nuggets.

 Some kind of italian-ish cake!

 Churros and chocolate...

 This is what you get when you order a hot dog? If this was a Picasso painting it would be a picture of a murder scene.

 I'm also a bit of a hummus snob, so you'll have to forgive me for that too.

 One of these is gross and nasty and deathly and filled with a liquid so pungent and terrible that gods themselves shrink back and cast it to the ground.  The other is a recently living animal off of which you have to tear its skin and head and eyes and intestines before you can eat it, BUT IT TASTES SO GOOD.

a'yup.

Fried food!  empanadas with tuna and some foreign red sauce, some kind of fakish tasty pork nuggets, and croquetas (croquettes?) which are sort of fried ham and cheese mush nuggets. All wonderful, except I have a very limited daily allowance of tuna before my stomach starts to reject everything I put into it and my body starts to retaliatorily throw itself at large but generally cushion-y objects. .

Huzzah for food!  I feel like I've used a gratuitous amount of exclamation points in this post and I apologize for that.  Next time I'll actually honestly really I promise start to talk about actual things in Spain I saw (that I didn't eat.)