Tom and I and our friend Hope recently held one of our periodic cookathons – a full afternoon in the kitchen, composing dishes from some particular cuisine followed by an evening of eating them. Typically, we overextend ourselves, make far more than we three can eat, and have a grand, messy time.
For this dinner we looked to Spain, choosing four recipes from three cookbooks: Teresa Barrenechea’s The Cuisines of Spain, Penelope Casas’s The Foods and Wines of Spain, and The Cooking of Spain and Portugal from the Time-Life Foods of the World series.
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Coca con Pimientos y Tomates
Crusty Flatbread with Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes
This starter was a real star. It looks like merely a pizza-type crust with a vegetable topping, and technically so it is – but that description doesn’t do it justice. The yeast dough was rich with egg, olive oil, and lard. After a 30-minute rise, we patted it thinly into a pan, topped it with strips of roasted red and yellow peppers, quartered grape tomatoes, and more olive oil, and baked it to a warm golden brown with crisp edges. It was utterly delicious.
With it we drank a sparkling Cava.
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Merluza y Almejas en Salsa Verde
Hake Fillets with Clams in Green Sauce
Shopping for the fish dish was a teense iffy. Hake isn’t always available in the markets; could we use halibut? or, if necessary, scrod? Happily, the fish counter at Citarella had beautiful hake fillets that day, as well as perfect little manila clams. In a large pan we sautéed minced garlic and red pepper flakes in olive oil; stirred in flour; added a lot of liquid from steaming open the clams, along with wine and parsley; and simmered until it thickened slightly. The fish fillets went in and cooked for two minutes on each side, then the clams for two minutes, and that was it.
As you can see, the sauce was not actually green, but the dish was excellent. (Confession: the recipe also called for a garniture of a few white asparagus spears and hard-boiled eggs, but given everything else we were eating, we decided to skip them.)
The wine for this course was a white Rioja, which actually didn’t work well with it, because it turned out to be a modern-style, heavily oaked one: just plain wrong for the delicate fish flavors.
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Arroz con Pato de Braga
Roast Duck with Sausage-and-Ham-Flavored Rice
Acelgas con Pasas y Piñones
Greens with Raisins and Pine Nuts
This was the easiest roast duck I’ve ever made, and the most complicated rice preparation.
The duck was simply rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with salt and pepper, stuffed with some lemon peel, and roasted undisturbed until done. A combination of high heat followed by lower heat rendered out much of the fat that plagues Pekin ducks.
Meanwhile, the rice. That was a whole other story. We boiled it until almost tender, drained and kept it warm. We put chorizos in a skillet, added cold water to cover, simmered five minutes, drained and sliced them in thin rounds. We melted lard in a very large casserole, cooked the sausage in it briefly, added finely chopped carrot and onion, softened them, added julienne strips of Serrano ham, and finally stirred in the rice, lemon juice, and parsley, cooking just long enough to heat everything through. This could have been a whole dinner in itself.
Here’s the duck, waiting atop the rice while we made a gravy in the roasting pan.
For a “lighter” vegetable to accompany this elaborate concoction, we made Swiss chard with garlic, onion, olive oil, raisins, and pine nuts. Rich as that was, it was indeed lighter than the rest of the course.
With the duck we drank a red Tempranillo, which accompanied it very nicely, the acid of the wine cutting cleanly through the lushness of the duck. Need I say that we were not finishing each bottle of wine with each course? We’d have been pie-eyed by this point if we were. But we did very much enjoy the progression of the different wines – and an opened bottle doesn’t last long in our house.
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Monte Enebro, Garrotxa La Bauma, Amarelo de Beira Baixa, Roncal, Queso de Valdeon
Five Spanish cheeses
You might well wonder how we could go on to cheese after all this. So did we. But the cheeses were fascinating. When you buy from Murray’s cheese shop in Greenwich Village, the wrapper of each cheese includes a label with a description of it. I transcribed those write-ups for us to look at as we tasted, so if you’re curious about those varieties, look here.
With the cheeses we drank a gorgeous 16-year-old Prado Enea, a Rioja wine from the very traditional producer, Muga. In its richness and harmony it can only be described as Burgundian, overworked as that word is. We actually finished that bottle.
After all that, we neither needed nor wanted dessert. Espresso and a good Spanish brandy (Gran Duque d’Alba in this case) finished off the meal – and us – nicely.
