And the sea turned to rock and the rock, to ice

 

As seen in Mercado de Maravillas, Madrid.

Essentials

1. A packet of toothpicks.

2. A drum of olives.

3. A leg of ham.

4. A whole watermelon.

5. An oil canister with filter.

6. A crate with six cartons of milk.

7. A bunch of grapes wrapped in light cardboard.

8. Two different bottles of wine, half empty and corked.

9. An octopus.

10. A kilo of prawns with their heads, tails, and shells on.

Ten items you may find in a Spanish kitchen that you are unlikely to find in an Irish one.

Single shots: fish slicer

Look at how the forearm traces a single line and meanders around the wrist bone to break into the five deltas of the phalanges. Look at the knuckles like small mounds clustered around its handle until human and tool become one indistinguishable whole.

Nothing bad ever happened, when intent on the sizzling pan, the fish slicer flipped a fried egg, a pancake or a fillet of fish. Not one single bad thought crossed anybody’s mind as they pushed them to the edges to make them tastier, crispier, ready to eat. Nobody ever seized a fish slicer to make any food beyond their means or above their neighbours’.

Reverse the journey from the fish slicer up the hand and wrist, back to the forearm, upper arm, shoulders, neck, and land on the face: you will see a look of benign self-absorption; the nurturer day dreams.

The sound of clams

The fastest way to a Spaniard’s heart is through your own stomach. This is why there is no greater social faux pas in Spain than refusing an offer of food when you visit somebody or being difficult or squeamish around a well-stocked table. In this regard, I am as Spanish as they come: I have greater tolerance for a multitude of pecados and peccadillos than for pickiness when it comes to food. I am willing to make exceptions for health and ethical reasons but, otherwise, as far as I am concerned, unless it has three eyes, it shakes your hand and can talk, if somebody cooked it for you, you better eat it and be thankful.

Irish culture is far more tolerant of squeamishness and individual quirks around the dinner table. I put it down to the inoffensive quality of traditional flavours in an Irish kitchen. Nowadays you can eat very well and very variedly in Dublin, but until the nineties an Irish palate went largely unchallenged way into maturity. Until very recently Irish diets revolved around sugar, blandness, and nothingness. Over-boiled vegetables? Check. Beef cooked to the taste of Ash Wednesday? You got it. Industrial biscuits in need of a splash of tea to offset their mediocrity? Have two. The blandness of the diet produced generation after generation of fussy eaters easily upset by the smell of fish; the sight of raw meat; the texture and sci-fi appearance of seafood; the brininess of olives and even the rinds of citrus. Thus, since moving over to Dublin, I have been exposed to the sorriest prejudices around food I could possibly imagine; and, let me hasten to add, these came from people who generally far exceed me in intelligence, creativity and humour. One friend cannot abide mushrooms; another detests pork unless it comes in the shape of a sausage; yet another one will not stand the sight or taste of fruits of the forest; there is one that will not eat lamb and hates garlic. And just when I thought I had heard it all, an acquaintance confessed not to like cheese. Let me repeat this: somebody in this isle does not like any kind of cheese. You may as well tell me that you do not like breathing, good sex or world peace.

You may think I am lucky to like, or at least tolerate, all food, and you will be wrong. I am not partial to the texture of muscles or clams (although I love the flavour they add to rice and soup) but if I am partaking of a communal meal and they are on the menu, I will grit my teeth and bear it, even look for the added ingredients that will make me forget their dreaded texture. A couple of years ago I visited a friend in the idyllic island of Farol off the coast of the Algarve in Portugal. It’d be a pity not to eat fish and seafood in this island and my friend told me they had a tradition of preparing clams with garlic and coriander for a dinner with fellow holidaymakers every year. I was not looking forward to dinner the night of the traditional meal but like everybody else around the table I grabbed the clams on my plate, slurped the contents and washed them down with vinho verde. I am not going to lie: I still won’t cook clams at home but I realise that sometimes a meal is more than the sum of its parts. And that night in Farol Island the clams were more than slimy molluscs: they were my friend’s hospitality, generosity and lack of pretension. Eating them was like listening to a really bad singer sing with feeling: you’d be a fool to cover your ears.

Market rules

You would not expect a child to grow to appreciate art without supplying her with a good box of crayons spanning the colours of the rainbow and beyond. Nor without taking her for regular walks where you may marvel at the shape of a tree, the light in the sky, the translucence shine of a stream or the expressiveness of a face. In years to come, as the child grows, you will take her to galleries and museums and point at how the masters move you to a deeper enjoyment of the world.

Yet we expect children to appreciate food without bothering to expand their horizons beyond the hastily perused shelves of a local supermarket. My experience of food in childhood, thankfully, was far richer than most thanks to a culture that still had the market at its heart and a mother who had her daughter at hers. On a Saturday morning my mother used to take me to the market: she would trail her shopping trolley (her carrito) behind her with her right hand, I would hold on to her left and an hour or so before the afternoon we would walk the fifteen minutes to the indoor market in my quarter: a mini labyrinth of stalls manned by rambunctious men and matronly women wearing blue aprons and coats.

In the market my nose would almost brush the cloudy surface of purple grapes piled on crates in September; in November, the pomegranate would shine with its leathery blush promising a bowl full of sugary rubies garnered by my mother; the spring would bring the promise of strawberries and cream. A child in Spain is always feted and I would invariably be handed a cherry stem or a fig by a kindly fruit seller. This blog is called a fistful of olives in celebration of the offerings of dry good sellers on market days, who would scoop their olives in their marinade out of wooden barrels, handing a few to young helpers like myself out with their mothers. The early exposure to the complexity of flavour and texture of the olive –bitter, tart, salty, oily, pulpy, rough at its core, a proof that in eating the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts– will do more to educate a child into the richness of food than a thousand programmes by the well-meaning Jamie Oliver.

A visit to the butcher was a sobering experience: rabbits skinned out of their pelts, their teeth frozen to a macabre rictus, jostling for space with piglets lying on their side as if plucked out of their slumber in a fairy tale. The impossible bloody redness of the hunks of beef contrasting with the pink opalescence of lamb and pork chops. Impossible to ignore that what we eat was once as alive as we are. A clear-eyed exposure to sacrifice and slaughter that is missing from the out of the battery line into a vacuum-packed abstraction that rules our current relationship with meat.

Above all, for its wonder and stark strangeness: the fishmonger. I will never forget the shallow stare of hake and sea bass flattened on their side, nor the science fiction sideways crawling of crabs in their crate, and the slow motion of the pincers of crayfish and lobster still alive in the submarine antechamber to their death. My mother always became a hero when –fearlessly, not a flinch– she tended her hand to pick up the cardboard wrapped to a cone brimming with pincers, antennae, and extra-terrestrial shells.