The Foods and Wines of
Spain – A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency – Part 1 – By Savvy Mom Ruth
Paget
After
receiving my first freelance assignments to provide recipes and menus for the
Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992, I became a frequent library user at the
Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) in Paris, France where I lived at the time.
The
Centre Pompidou was a reference-only library with an extensive gastronomy
collection in addition to collections for engineering, sociology, anthropology,
and art history.
I
wanted to learn about Spanish food for the entire nation for future writing
assignments. I had written about Catalan
food for the region that surrounds Barcelona in northeastern Spain, but wanted
to broaden my knowledge on the topic.
At
the time, the most comprehensive book about Spanish cuisine in English was The Foods and Wines of Spain by Penelope
Casas. My local bookstore on the rue de
Rivoli did not carry the book, and I wanted to use the book now.
Not
being able to take home the book was a challenge, but I worked with it in the
following way to make Spanish meals using Casas’ recipes with ingredients you
could find in any Parisian or Californian supermarket.
I
made more than one visit to go through The
Foods and Wines of Spain and ended up memorizing its contents before I
finally bought a copy of the book on a trip to London.
The
following method helps with reference-only situations when you need recipes:
1-Look
up sample menus to know what kinds of food go together and in what order in a
Spanish meal
2-Look
up recipes in the index, which has a page number where you can find the
recipe.
3-Write
down recipes you want to use in your own language
4-Read
the introduction to get an idea of regional foods and ingredients
5-Spend
at least 2 hours working on the hors d’oeuvres and appetizer chapters
alone. Eating 3 or 4 appetizers often
makes a vegetarian protein combination, which lets you buy high quality fish
and seafood for the weekend.
6-I
have eaten a pretty Spanish Med Diet from the Pyrenees region for 3 decades
with the overriding theory that you have to have the combination of
protein-carbohydrate-vegetable present at each meal.
The
portion size and number of vegetables changes with scientific research, but
that general idea helps me do vegan meals up to prime rib ones thanks to
protein combinations that you can read about on the Purdue University online
page on that topic.
My
“Med Diet Plan” for Spanish food follows on my next blog.
End
Part 1.
To
be continued…
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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