Having just carried a 7-foot high bitter orange tree down the road from my former abode to adorn my spacious new terrace, my thoughts naturally turn to matters culinary (if you haven't yet grasped the connection, it's bitter orange = marmalade), and to something of a rite of passage that I went through some weeks ago now. For I, Peter Ashby, he who has been heard to assert on many an occasion with vigour and determination that never would such a comestible pass his lips... I have finally succumbed and eaten snails!
How did this extraordinary turn of events come about? Well, it happened like this. Disembarking one Friday evening from the Granada bus after a tough afternoon's labour at the rock face of English teaching, I ran into some good Spanish friends of mine who insisted that I accompany them to the nearest watering hole. Naturally, I vigorously declined this invitation, which is how I found myself a very few minutes later in a riotous bar surrounded by a varied collection of partying witches, zombies and vampires (this being Hallowe'en, you understand).
Maybe sorcery was truly in the air that fateful eve, for long before the witching hour came to pass, my life had changed forever and I had taken one mighty stride along the road towards "hispanisization" (oh, give me a break, word check! Per-lease!). For on the menu that night were caracoles (snails), and not the almost unobtrusive little ones that slip almost un-noticed into many an Andalucian broth. These were great stripey-shelled monsters, proudly reclining in a miniature sea of steaming russet broth with their broiled feet hanging out enticingly, begging to be skewered on cocktail sticks and devoured.
I'll spare you the intimate and gory details of how I impaled not one, nor even two but three of those grey and wrinkled molluscan bodies on my little wooden spear, removed the vaguely disgusting oozy bit at the end as instructed, and swallowed them down without chewing. But I did it and have endured to tell the tale. And I have to say that the accompanying broth, made with hot paprika and ground almonds, was delicious.
Snails are common fare in Andalucia and indeed throughout Spain, although they are by no means universally popular. Whenever the subject of food crops up in my English classes, I can guarantee that two out of three of my students will recoil at the idea of eating snails while the remainder extol their gastronomical virtues and recommend such and such a bar in Granada that does the best snails in the city. Every country has its culinary oddities and while snails may not be particularly unusual in European spheres, there are some local Spanish dishes that certainly cause the eyebrows of the uninitiated to raise - such as, for example, the raw sea urchins eaten in Cadiz or the sugared sheep's feet (I kid thee not!) from the villages of Aragon.
But it's easy for us Anglo-Saxons to home in on the extreme end of gastronomy as "something that foreigners do" (even though many a Scotsman - sorry, you're Celts and Picts, aren't you? - swears by a concoction of oatmeal and veg shoved into a sheep's stomach and boiled, does he not?) and to remain ignorant of the delights that await discovery just beyond the virtual electric fences and gun turrets that shackle the minds of many a tourist of the sun-sea-sand brigade. If you have never ventured beyond the stereotypical, package holiday versions of paella and chorizo (and these are often not the real McCoy) then you are missing out on a fabulous cornucopia of tastes and textures and sensations that in my books, rivals anything that all of that faddy, fiddly French cooking has to offer, and can hold its head up proudly as an equal to anything the Italian dinner table can boast of. Here you will find pungent and aromatic sauces laden with herbs and spices and garlic, a selection of fish and other seafood unrivalled anywhere in the world (Spain is, after Japan, the greatest international consumer of fish), jamon serrano from the dehesa of western Andalucia to knock the spots off any Parma ham, refreshing cold soups such as salmorejo, warming winter cocidos and a host of wonderful cakes and sweets inspired by Spain's Arab legacy... I could go on and on but I have a lifetime's blogging, not to mention a Part Two, in which to emphasize the point.
And the point is? The point is, that Spanish cuisine is every bit as good as that of France or Italy or China or India. But I throw down the gauntlet to you, oh bold gastronomical adventurer, and I present you with the following challenge. Next time you visit New York, London, Sydney or the like, count the number of Italian restaurants you see there. At the same time, keep a tally of the Spanish restaurants you come across and I am pretty sure that you will very quickly become aware of a certain imbalance on an order of (at the very least) several dozen to one.
Why should this be so? Well, my typing fingers are in need of a rest so that is a question I am going to leave until Part Two. In the meantime, happy eating wherever you are.
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