From Sevilla, Culinary Lessons 1 on 1

During my year as a college student abroad, I was fortunate to live in Sevilla, a beautiful, historic city in southern Spain, which is one of world's best food destinations. Because my landlady's cooking was not the best feature of her charming pension, I frequently sought alternatives to dining at home. Sevilla’s bewilderingly curvy streets are home to an endless array of tapas bars, serving up simple, savory food that was like nothing I had ever tasted growing up in the bland Midwestern United States: spicy chorizo and rich morcilla sausages, tiny green peppers scorched in the pan and drizzled with salt and olive oil, patatas bravas drenched in romesco sauce, and entire legs of rich Serrano ham hung from the ceiling, with a small plastic cone at the bottom to stop the acorn-scented fat from dripping onto the patrons.

And everywhere, tortilla. Small golden slices were served up by the thousands, the perfect accompaniment for a cold Cruzcampo beer before everyone moved on to the next bar.

The tortillas I ate in Barrio Santa Cruz - - the old Jewish quarter where the streets were so confusing that I would find amazing tapas bars and flamenco joints once and only once -- were altogether different from those prepared in my little pension. Out in the city, egg was always cooked just enough to form a velvet bond between the slices of carefully fried potatoes, and onions and olive oil combined in an alchemy that went far beyond the basic ingredients.

Eventually, at the semester break I moved with two friends to an apartment near the bus station and across the Guadalquivir River from the ghostly, abandoned site of the World Expo, home by day to rollerbladers and by night to huge throngs of teenagers sucking down Chesterfield cigarettes and getting sloppy on red wine mixed with Fanta soda.

My roommates were content to eat at our neighborhood café, dining on pan con tomate for breakfast and serranitos – a sandwich made of pork loin, serrano ham, and green pepper – for lunch and dinner. I went to a bookstore, bought a book of tapas recipes and got to work. I had never cooked much before, but my mother had drilled the most important part into my head: if you can read, you can cook.

I fried breadcrumbs, saffron, garlic and almonds, pulverized them with a pestle and mortar, and cooked the paste with potatoes in a giant pressure cooker until they were soft and yellow. My roommates and I ate them right out of the pan, crowded around the stove.

I slowly simmered red peppers in olive oil until they almost melted and the oil became clear, throwing in a clove of garlic at the last minute and tipping them into a large glass jar to cool. We ate the peppers on toasted bread rubbed with a raw garlic clove, and quickly it was time to make another jar.

But mostly I made tortilla. For such a simple dish, there were endless ways to screw things up. There was a crucial step near the end of the recipe that involved sliding a plate over the pan, quickly inverting it and sliding the tortilla back in to cook on the other side. This highwire act almost always resulted in burning oil on my wrists, or eggy particles shooting into improbable nooks and crannies throughout the kitchen.

Happily, even a botched tortilla resulted in mostly edible scrambled eggs and potatoes. The rare success – which slowly became less infrequent – was a celebration and a thing of short-lived beauty.

I learned to cook that second semester in Sevilla, learning skills mostly from necessity but also out of a desire to replicate the amazing food I was finding in the town, and a need to understand the magic that transformed eggs, potatoes, onions and olive oil into a crowd-pleasing marvel that was far greater than the sum of its parts.

Several years later I landed in London, which is lucky enough to have three restaurants that make exemplary tortillas: Moro in Exmouth Market, where they must cook the onions for hours to get them so liquidly sweet; Brindisa, a spoton Spanish tapas bar transplanted into London Bridge where I have been known to take a detour on my way to work just to have a bite; and Soho's swank Fino, where the chorizo tortilla inspired me to tinker with my tried and true recipe.

I think my tortilla tastes better than ever, but there is of course room for improvement. And when my friends and family dig in, inhaling slice after slice, I'm sometimes tempted to tell them: "¡Com' má!"

Adam Pasick lives in Brooklyn, New York, where good food of all kinds can be found but good tortilla is rare and jamón Ibérico was illegal 4 months ago. He has previously lived in London and Sevilla, and is a reporter for Reuters.

via: Foods from Spain news