Things ain’t what they used to be: Food

I WAS slim as well as young when I arrived in Spain well over half a century ago.

Food was fuel, something to eat when it was put in front me, and as my mother was a good cook what she put in front of me more than acceptable.  Better still, I’d played no part in its preparation.  Nor did I have the advantage of domestic science lessons at school as the good nuns who taught me believed our time was better spent on more academic pursuits.

That was a relief but not a lot of help when I was expected to feed not only myself but a man.

At first we lived in a hotel where we sometimes ate.  Other times, especially if it was late, we would go to a nearby tasca where I ate all manner of things that I had neither seen nor heard of before.

Chorizo was wonderful, so was Serrano ham and so were the dishes both hot and cold – which I now know as tapas – that were harder to identify.

What, I asked, were the lightly battered little morsels we ate sometimes, that had such a delicious and tender filling?

I was informed that they were the lower part of a lamb’s hind legs and it was some time before I discovered I’d been eating brains.

Then we moved into an apartment, which was when I had to start looking at food from another angle, that of providing it.

Fortunately, the future mother-in-law I had yet to meet wasn’t a good cook, Andrés assured me, but that didn’t alter the fact that late 60s’ gender assignment assigned me to the kitchen.

I didn’t know where to start and very often didn’t.

Food was cooked from scratch then, and shopping meant the municipal market where my Spanish advanced rapidly because it was either that or go hungry. A few self-service grocers were beginning to call themselves supermarkets, although at that time there was only one in Benidorm that could really lay claim to the name.

It didn’t help that I would have been perfectly happy with a tin of Campbell’s soup I bought there, but Andrés firmly believed the right place for Campbell’s soup was in an Andy Warhol painting, not a Spanish kitchen.

I did my best with meat but steered clear of fish unless it was tinned tuna or sardines, which were a godsend. If there is nothing else doing, most Spanish men then – and now – will happily eat a large section of barra, or even the entire barra, filled with the contents of a tin of sardines, plus some of the oil.

There was also the get-out clause of a spit-roasted chicken – still a standby in many a household today – but that was a far as fast food went,

Then my mother sent me an updated paperback version of Mrs Beeton and I was on my way, although neither of us was ever as slim as we were during those first apartment months.