Tags: Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Hostal dos Reis Catolicos in Santiago de Compostela. Photo by David Lansing.
I am staying at a nunnery, the Parador Hostal dos Reis Católicos, in Santiago de Compostela. Actually, it’s not a nunnery. It just feels like one (maybe because there are so many nuns walking around here). It used to be a hospital. Does it make me feel better to know I’m staying in a former hospital rather than a nunnery? I don’t think so. My room is elegantly spartan, if there is such a thing—a plain wooden double bed, stone floors, some religious art on the wall—and last night I fell asleep imagining that I was in the room of the former Mother Superior. And who knows? Maybe I was. Even when it was a hospital, there were a lot of nuns living here.
The parador bills itself as the oldest hotel in the world. But that’s using the word “hotel” in a very loose sense. It was actually built in 1499 by Ferdinand and Isabella because they were tired of so many pilgrims sleeping on the streets of Santiago every night (this might be the oldest documented case of a government trying to deal with the homeless). Eventually it became evident that most of the pilgrims sleeping in the streets were also dying. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, bad blisters—you name it. So it became a hospital. And remained so until Franco had it converted into a parador in 1953.
I don’t know. To me, it still feels like a nunnery.
This Trader Joe's "Spanish Saffron" isn't grown in Spain either. But at least it only costs half as much as the so-called Spanish saffron in Madrid.
This afternoon we are flying to Santiago de Compostela. So in the morning Eva and I go to the Mercado de San Miguel. She wants to pick up some Spanish saffron to take home for presents.
“You know Spanish saffron isn’t really from Spain,” I tell her as we negotiate the crowd looking for stalls selling azafrán.
“What?” she says. “Are you crazy? Why do you think it is called Spanish azafrán?”
“Because it is sold in Spain.”
We have found a woman selling saffron in little plastic cases. It is ten euros for one gram, 25 euros for three grams. Eva buys two of the three gram containers. Holding them up in front of my face so I can clearly see the label, she says, “Spanish azafrán—the best in the world.”
“It’s from Iran,” I tell her. “Or maybe Afghanistan. It’s definitely not from Spain.”
Eva is outraged. In Spanish, she tells the woman who just sold her the saffron that I told her it came from Iran. The old woman shrugs her shoulder and looks away, neither confirming nor denying. “Esto viene de España, ¿no?” says Eva, pointing at the containers of saffron.
The old woman points to the label that says Spanish azafrán. “Eso es lo que dice,” she says.
“There,” says Eva. “You see? She said it is from Spain.”
“No she didn’t. She says that it says it’s Spanish azafrán. That doesn’t mean it was grown in Spain. Look it up. No one grows saffron in Spain anymore. The labor is too expensive. It all comes from Afghanistan and Iran. And is then packaged in Spain. So they can call it Spanish azafrán. Even though it’s not.”
“I don’t believe you,” says Eva as we leave the mercado.
“Fine. Don’t believe me.”
Eva puts the packages of saffron in her purse. We walk several blocks without talking before she says, “That was for my mother, you know.”
“It’s still a nice gift,” I tell her.
“Yes, just not as nice as it was before we went to the market. Thanks a lot.”
Okay, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. I mean, it is good saffron. But the thing is, it’s not Spanish saffron. Not anymore it’s not.
Tags: Madrid, Spain, Spanish saffron
Cocido, the dullest dish in Spain.
The following is an excerpt from the excellent Lonely Planet book, World Food: Spain, which, sadly, is out of print:
Now to that other famous Madrid-style dish, cocido a la madrileña. The word ‘cocido’ is simply the past participial form of the verb, to cook. It is a stew of chicken, chorizo sausage, maybe some ham or other cured meat, potatoes, cabbage and chickpeas and macaroni. Eat a dinner of it and it will seem to stay with you for three days. It is typically eaten ‘from front to back,’ starting with the broth along with the macaroni or rice, then you eat the chickpeas, then you eat the meat. You can do this at one meal, or you can do it over a span of three days. We recommend the three day approach. We have never seen anybody stagger from the table having downed an entire dinner of cocido. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘miracle of the loaves and the fishes’ because though there might not seem to be enough as you look at it, in the end everyone is full and there is always some left over.
But this is about the dullest dish in Spain. There are so many good things to eat that we don’t know why any non-Spaniard would bother with cocido except as an experiment in culinary anthropology. It’s not that we think it bad. It doesn’t have enough taste or smell to be bad. Its long cooking in much water seems to strip its good parts of their native goodness. And yet the Madrileños swoon for this stuff. They dream of it when away from home. They even compose songs to it. We tell no lie.
Tags: Spain, Spanish food
Eva pouring the Ribera del Duero wines of Valdubon.Photo by David Lansing.
The Ribera del Duero wine region is an odd bird. In 1864, an intrepid Spaniard with a very long name—Don Eloy Lecanda y Cháves—decided to start a winery in this very isolated section of Spain. The area he chose was well over 2,300 feet above sea level, way up in the mountains where it was very cold and the grape-growing season was very short. Not exactly someplace you or I would pick to start a winery. But his bodega, Vega Sicilia, did surprisingly well. In fact, through most of the twentieth century, Vega Sicilia was the most expensive wine made in all of Spain. Go figure.
But here’s the really odd thing: Nobody else opened a bodega in Ribera del Duero. Until 1972 when another guy, named Alejandro Fernández, decided to give it a go. Things did not go well for Fernández. By 1983, he was ready to throw in the towel. Except that just happened to be the year wine critic Robert Parker came to Spain and raved about Fernández’s wine and the Ribera del Duero in general. A legendary wine region was made.
Now there are any number of wineries in the region, many of which have opened up in the last ten years. Their signature grape is Tinto Fino, the region’s version of Tempranillo, which loves the cool nights and warm days.
Eva and I stopped in at one of the newer wineries, Valdubon, and did a tasting with the winemaker, Javier Aladro. The character of wines from this region are all determined by the weather, Javier told me. “Sometimes our summers are too hot. Sometimes we have a very hard winter and too much rain. When we have a less-than-ripe vintage, the wines can be pretty abrasive. On the other hand, the great vintages are, well, great.”
Ten years ago, Javier said, there were maybe a hundred wineries in Ribera. “Now there are over 250. I don’t know how they all stay in business.”
We sampled some of Javier’s wines while eating a simple lunch of bread, cheese, sausages, and olives. “We must not forget,” said Javier, offering me a plate of food, “that wine is a drink to accompany a dish. In Spain, we never drink wine without eating—even when we are just sampling.”
I like that idea. And I liked Javier’s Valdubon wines.
Tags: Ribera del Duero, Spanish wine
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