El producto
They are not making my return to cooking easy, either in terms of the dishes I end up with or in terms of my food budget.
Above all, we have a problem with the ingredients. And since Spanish cooking, like Italian cooking, is based on the quality of the ingredients, this is a very serious problem. Hence my growing interest in spices and all sorts of complications that might save the end result despite starting out with mediocre ingredients, if not downright bad ones. This emergency measure still makes sense, but I would not rule out the possibility that before long the spices themselves will be just as bad as what we call el producto (the ingredients), and that the cost of electricity will eventually make cooking more expensive than ordering food or eating out.
A little while ago, I published a post about where to eat well in Spain. People are always talking about grandmothers and legendary restaurants, but the truth is that some grandmothers are bigger than others, and there are legendary restaurants that have let their food go downhill. The conclusion is that the surest way to eat well when visiting Spain is to go to a wedding banquet. At weddings, at least until about ten years ago (when I last went to one), one could always count on eating well, and the most telling proof of this is that croquettes, which are rarely any good almost anywhere, are always good at weddings.
Returning to the original subject, if we are talking about eating well as a resident of the country (as yours truly is), things become even more complicated.
Yesterday I bought some cherry tomatoes and, despite their having been awarded the Sabor 2026 label by consumers, I do not have much faith that they will do the job in my next spaghetti al pomodoro fresco (with olive oil infused with garlic and fresh basil). I think I understand the dish. When I was little, a tomato salad with vinegar, salt and olive oil was a regular feature at home; the juices left at the bottom of the bowl were wonderful for mopping up with bread, and I suspect the idea behind the Italian dish must be something very similar, with the spaghetti doing the job of the bread. This would have been easy enough to achieve back when I was little, but nowadays one can only find good tomatoes in a handful of places, paying a fortune for them, and sometimes not even that does the trick. The same goes for olive oil. As for basil, suffice it to say that years ago I ended up trying to grow my own, more out of desperation than any enthusiasm for gardening. But we should be grateful, still, when it comes to herbs such as basil and rosemary, because in this case the ingredient is not deficient, or good but unacceptably expensive, or expensive and deficient on top of that: it simply is not there. It does not exist. Sometimes one can find parsley or coriander, sometimes mint, less often and in fewer places basil, and almost nowhere, ever, rosemary.
Yesterday I went to buy tinned piquillo peppers from Lodosa, and every single one I found in the supermarket was from Peru. This is another strange, sinister, revealing detail of how our present-day economy operates. The average German, with money to spare, must be delighted with Spanish piquillo peppers and tomatoes, while we impoverished Spanish have to make do with piquillo peppers and tomatoes from Peru, Morocco or God knows where — from Germany itself would be quite something… But we should be grateful (this time with rather less irony) that at least the piquillo peppers are still good.
Here we can, then, get decent piquillo peppers at a reasonable price — from Peru.
We can also get decent mushrooms, chicken and beef, even from Spain — if we pay a fortune. And we should be grateful for that too, because last Friday I paid a fortune for a fish as traditionally humble in price as cod, and on top of that it was not even remotely good. I am afraid this was not an isolated incident; it has happened to me often. It is the norm, unless, for instance, one knows an older person who has been buying from the same fishmonger for many years, or has oneself been a regular customer of the same fishmonger for many years — which is difficult, not so much because it takes time to grow old, but because it is so unlikely that one will be able to live in the same place for many years, and have the same job for many years, and, in any case, have enough money year after year to buy even a humble piece of cod. And I do not mean just the person buying the fish, but the person selling it too: these days, it is not unusual to go to the same fishmonger’s and find that, after just a few months, even the fishmonger is no longer the same person.