Where to eat well in Spain
On Friday, after buying Crime and Punishment in Penguin’s orange-and-white edition, translated by Rafael Cansinos Assens, I stopped by Casa Labra.
My memory of those otherworldly croquettes is not an idealised childhood recollection: I ate them in the late 1990s, when I was seventeen; I ate them again shortly afterwards, in the early 2000s, and they were still the same as ever. It was only a few years later, in the second half of the 2000s, that the change came: the filling had become runnier (in keeping with the new fashion for croquettes and Spanish omelettes with a liquid centre — which is not necessarily a problem), and the flavour was far worse. I particularly remember the excessive nutmeg.
Those I had on Friday had neither the overpowering nutmeg nor the runny filling of my previous visit, nor were they creamy, flavoursome and perfectly balanced as they had always been. They were simply nothing: a dense lump with the faintest hint of cod, buried beneath a broad, overwhelming flavour of nothing at all. Even the breadcrumb coating was no longer the original.
The good news is that the old duck houses by the River Manzanares really were duck houses. A few of them are still there.
The Casa Labra affair is all the more serious because, if there is one thing that is genuinely difficult to find in this world, it is a really good croquette.
I would not quite swear to what I am about to say, because it has been many years since I last went to a wedding, but if things have not changed in that respect either, and a newcomer asked me where one eats well in Spain, I would tell him that the first step is to get invited to a wedding.
At every wedding reception I attended here, the croquettes were always magnificent. So was the jamón, the beef fillet, the roast fish, the molten chocolate cake: everything. But all of that is comparatively easy to find, or even to cook at home to an excellent standard. Croquettes are not. The critical point is the croquettes, and until recently the only reliable way of guaranteeing success was to go either to Casa Labra or to a wedding reception. I hope weddings are still as dependable.
At my sister’s wedding, or my brother’s, or perhaps a paternal cousin’s, sometime in my early teens, one of my father’s sisters-in-law came up to me and, I think without so much as saying hello, said:
‘You don’t like weddings, do you? Your father didn’t like weddings.’
I had no settled opinion on the matter, but had I been asked a few years later, or many years later, I would have replied that I adore weddings.
At every wedding I have ever attended there have been exquisite croquettes and, probably under their influence, I would become sociable and cheerful during the celebrations and the dancing, happily talking to absolutely everyone, before ending up wonderfully drunk. And I emphasise that final state of drunkenness: everything else came first, and only then the great, good, proper drunkenness.