Imperative cooking: sin in Andalusia I
"Loi°14/Ljfk—AL-42 Almeria I'VE HAD several letters wanting more advice on tapas. Some wish to know what to look for in Spain. But there is also a pre- dictably indiscriminate enthusiasm for tapas bars in London of all places. Tapas bars divide into two classes good and bad, and all the London ones I have encoun- tered are bad. The distinction is not about `ambience' and tiled walls festooned with bunches of castanets. It is simple: good tapas bars serve lots of good tapas: bad ones sell only bad ones or more had than good. In Spain, there are even sinful tapas bars. Sin is everywhere in Spain now, not the old forgiveable sort but new sin. In what was the best tapas bar in Almeria there, in between the dish of small cuttlefish, ink sacks still in, awaiting the plancha (you can tell a good client, he has black finger nails) and shark slices in adobo ready for flouring and deep-frying, is a nasty thin spout brazenly offering 'Sin'. Sin is Don for 'without' and the abbrevia- tion of 'beer without alcohol'. And in come the Dons, equally unashamedly shouting for it, 'One sin, and a tapa of mussels', then a larger party insisting on 'six sins'. This in the country which until two years ago clas- sified its beers (and some reach 5.5 per cent alcohol) as a non-alcoholic drink. So all is far from well in the tapas bars even in Andalusia. With people like that, it is not surprising that several of the tapas are pret- ty awful. Most disgusting are the confec- tions of chemical mayonnaise: the Sinners seem especially keen on Russian salad. Then there are disgusting novelties: Rolli- tos Primavera (work it out yourselves) and Hamburguesas (you don't need to), callos (tripe) which has nothing to do with the `casa' and everything to do with an enor- mous catering-size tin and the new, debased versions of older tapas; potatoes covered not in crushed pepper and spiced sauce but in ketchup, anchovies not fresh or in a home-made sauce but out of a tin, the same with, tuna, ex-frozen mussels, `cocktail' olives.
Last, among the bad tapas are ones which are simply boring, Girls' tapas, the things which are good but so often the same wherever you go; jamon (not black foot) and Manchego cheese or those dreary bits of boiled cod's roe with chopped onion and tomato sitting in a tablespoonful of vinegar and half a pint of water.
Good tapas are the earthy meats, above all when of the house; morcilla (blood sausage), sausages of all sorts, dishes with sangre (congealed blood), tocino (salt belly), higado (liver), rifiones (kidneys). Even better are the fish. Here and in Alge- ciras one can find raw on the counters and ready for cooking: chopito and choco (small cuttlefish), sardinas, jibia (large cut- tlefish), salmonete (red mullet), small rape (angler fish), pulpo (octopus), pescadillas (small hake), mejillones (mussels), lengua- dos (tiny soles) gambas (prawns) and quisquillas (shrimps), chipirones (used for squid and cuttlefish in places), canaillas (sea snails), boquerones (not quite anchovies), small hesugo (red bream), sev- eral sorts of bacalao (salt cod), atun (tuna), three sizes of almejas (clams), jureles (horse mackerel), brecas (pandora), mero (grouper), tiny pez de San Pedro (Dory), bacaladilla (whiting), aguja (Davidson gives garfish but the name is used for others), cazon (shark), coquinas (wedge shells), and the eggs of cuttlefish. There are fish ready to eat: pulpo in sauce, mojama (dried tuna) and tuna roe, dried jureles; home-made vegetable dishes, potatoes and garlic shoots, paella, black (squid inked) rice, var- ious versions of the Spanish ratatouille, pisto, tabernero; tortilla (omelettes) and quails' eggs.
Above all there are snails, at least three varieties in as many sauces, stewed, in tomato and garlic, in almonds. Compared to the Spanish, especially around Algeciras, the French haven't heard of snails. A cou- ple of dozen large a day and more small is nothing and that as tapas before eating. So cut out this list. I've tried it out on a couple of young people keen to get to the tapas bars before the Sinners ruin them. But you can use it on the London tapas bars and see how they score. Yes, yes, there are a few things on the list they cannot get, but if they bothered to get up in the morn- ings and went to the fish and meat markets they could find many of these things and good substitutes for the others. Oh, and they might take a lesson from the Dons on price. In Almeria a tapa and small beer is as little as 60p. The price of sin, I wouldn't know.
Digby Anderson
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