Basque History of the World (15 page)

PIMIENTOS DE GUERNICA

Rub the peppers with a cloth and fry them in sizzling oil, turning them so they cook on all sides.

or

Heat the peppers in an oven dish, peel them, and put them whole in a casserole with garlic and oil, simmer awhile, salt and serve them.

B
EANS ARE ANOTHER
American product easily understood by Europeans because of their resemblance to European species, such as the broad bean, grown in Navarra and Alava, and peas, which, until the sixteenth century, were only used as a dried bean. American beans were quickly transplanted to most of Europe. In Vizcayan Euskera beans are called
indibabak
, Indian beans. Every Basque region prides itself on its own beans: red, pinto, black, white, or the unripened, soft, greenish white beans that Basques call
pochas
. Because pochas are picked exactly at the moment they ripen from green to white, Tirso Rodrigañez, a Spanish government minister in the 1880s, called them “pubescent beans.” In Tudela, in southern Navarra, pochas are served with eel for holidays. In the Alava section of Rioja, they are cooked with lamb tail. But because the optimum time for picking pochas coincides with the fall game bird season, these beans are most commonly associated with quail. An article in a 1967 Basque food journal pointed out that pochas are so highly regarded that the dish is always called “pochas with quails” and never “quail with pochas.”

Before the Spanish Civil War, Nicolasa Pradera was the chef of a still celebrated restaurant, Casa Nicolasa, by the market in San Sebastián. This traditional recipe uses both beans and hot pepper.

POCHAS FOR QUAILS, GAME BIRDS, AND OTHER ROASTS

Put water in a stew pot with both lean and fat pork fatback or ham. [Cook the fatback or ham.] Let the water cool in the pan where the pork fat was cooked, and once cooled, add the pochas, chopped onions, raw peeled tomatoes, a hot pepper that is between red and green and is also peeled, a peeled, finely minced garlic clove, chopped parsley, a little white pepper, and a few drops of olive oil, and cook it slowly. Season with salt.

—Nicolasa Pradera
, L
A
C
OCINA
D
E
N
ICOLASA
,
1933

The most celebrated Basque bean from America is the red bean of Tolosa,
alubias de Tolosa
. Borrowing even further from native American agriculture, the farmers in this mountainous part of Guipúzcoa plant beans in the shade between corn rows exactly as Central American farmers do. Busca Isusi wrote in 1972, “In the firmament of Guipúzcoan gastronomy there are many shining stars and
alubias de Tolosa
are generally considered one of premier magnitude.”

These red beans actually are black, but when they are cooked they turn red and produce a thick, chocolate-colored sauce. Tolosans believe the beans must be cooked in earthen crocks. Basques have done elaborate studies involving gelatinization of starches and the breaking down of cellulose to explain why beans should not be cooked in metal. They also believe that Tolosa is an ideal bean town because the surrounding area has noncalcareous soil, soil without calcium or lime, which produces the best beans. But at the same time, the calcareous water of Tolosa is thought to be the optimal liquid in which to cook the beans. Though currently the forty-seven officially recognized producers of Tolosan red beans sell them to be used elsewhere, it is believed that the true dish can only be made with Tolosan water. Busca Isusi suggested that cooks elsewhere try using rainwater.

One weekend each year, Tolosa has an alubias contest. About twenty-five producers make the dish, each with the same recipe but with their own beans, and a panel of judges chooses the best one. The following day chefs using identical ingredients, including the winning bean, have their alubias judged. A famous place for alubias is the Fronton Beotibar, named after the 1321 battle in which Guipúzcoans defeated the Navarrese with the help of seven Loyola brothers. The Fronton Beotibar was built for barehanded matches in 1890. In 1935, a club and restaurant of elegant Art Deco design was built in front of the court. The accompanying recipe for alubias comes from Roberto Ruiz Aginaga, chef of the Fronton Beotibar.

The dish is always served with cabbage. Old-time Tolosans, who recall an era when there was little but beans to eat, believe the heaviness of the bean dish can be moderated by the addition of vinegar, which seems to horrify the modern Basque gourmet, who will nevertheless add guindilla peppers pickled in vinegar.

ALUBIAS DE TOLOSA
(for eight)

1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) alubias de Tolosa

4-5 liters (quarts) water

1/2 an onion

2 tablespoons olive oil

salt

For the frying:

4 cloves garlic

olive oil

1/2 onion

For garnishes:

1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) pork ribs

1 cabbage

3 blood sausage

guindillas de Ibarra (pickled green peppers)

Put the alubias de Tolosa in an earthen casserole with Put the alubias de Tolosa in an earthen casserole with cold water. Add oil and the onion and heat to boiling. Stop the boiling with a litle cold water, and cook slowly over low heat. Halfway through, heat a skillet with oil, add the peeled garlic cloves, and remove them when they are golden. Add chopped onion. After they brown, add the beans from the crock. When the cooking is finished, after about four or five hours, add salt and let the beans rest a half hour.
    
Garnishes: Chop the cabbage fine, and put it in to cook with the ribs over a lively fire for two hours. Salt and set aside. After poking them with a fork, cook the blood sausages for 15 minutes.
   
Serving: Place the cabbage, well drained, in the center of a platter. Cover with beans and place the ribs and blood sausage around it. Serve the guindillas on a separate plate.

A
N INDICATION OF
the Basque regard for corn is the fact that rather than adopt a Castilian word, they gave the grain its own name in Euskera,
arto
.

On his first voyage of 1492, Columbus encountered corn, first in Haiti and then in Cuba. He did not seem to appreciate that the plant he termed a “sort of grain” was a marvel of agricultural breeding. Thousands of years of experimentation by Meso-American farmers had developed a high-yield hybrid more evolved than any European grain. Corn is one of the few plants that has lost the ability to reproduce on its own. An ear of corn fallen to the ground remains sealed in sterility within its protective husk, but that husk makes it adaptable to almost any climate.

The men who traveled to America with Columbus, the Basques and Andalusians, brought corn to their farmers, who quickly realized what Columbus had not. Through trade and exploration, corn was spread around the world. Basques took corn to Asia, and by 1530, corn was growing in China.

The first mention of corn in France dates to 1523, when the governor of Bayonne complained about the husks. Apparently, Basques had been eating corn for some time by then because the city demanded that people stop throwing corn husks in the Adour, where they were accumulating by bridge pilings, posing a threat to navigation. Fishermen also learned to use corn husks to mask a hook, creating a squidlike lure. Labourdine tuna fishermen used corn husk lures until the 1930s, when a collaboration between a lighthouse keeper and a jeweler in Biarritz produced the spoon, a curved metal lure.

North of the Adour, the French eventually accepted the grain for livestock but would not eat it themselves until the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike almost all of the rest of Europe, Basques used corn not only to feed livestock but also as a staple of the peasant diet. Every town had its own corn mill. Peasants made, and still make, a flat bread similar to a Mexican tortilla but slightly thicker. Farmers wrap this Basque tortilla, known as
talo
, around the food they take with them to the field, much as a Central American farmer does. The talo was also eaten by miners and later by factory workers.

I
N
1502, on his fourth voyage, Columbus sailed to Pino, an island off present-day Nicaragua, where he was offered a drink that the natives called
xocoatl
. He was not impressed, even when it was explained that it was made from beans grown by gods in the Garden of Life. For the sake of thoroughness, he took some
of these small, hard, brown, bitingly bitter beans back with him.

The Castilian court agreed that the beans were unusual but of no particular use. Then in 1519, the year he conquered Mexico, Hernán Cortés negotiated the release of a Spaniard, Gerónimo de Aguilar, shipwrecked in the Yucatán and held slave to a Mayan chief. Aguilar told Cortés of many curious foods including cocoa, and Cortés, apparently blessed with a greater gastronomic curiosity than Columbus, had the locals demonstrate how to use it. In 1528, when he returned to Spain, he had the foresight to take with him not just the beans but also three recipes: a drink, a “soup,” and a paste. Understanding very well how to attract the interest of the crown he served, he pointed out that the local tribesmen so valued these beans that they sometimes used them as money.

The soup was a sauce known in Mexico as
mole
, and it had enough appeal so that the Basques still have a tradition of cooking game birds in chocolate, just as the Aztecs had made wild turkey in mole. Basques in Alava sometimes make hare instead of game birds with chocolate, which may explain why the Caltagirone region of central Sicily, once occupied by the Spanish, has a tradition of rabbit in chocolate.

In the 1980s, a noted Guipúzcoan chef, José Castillo, decided to document the recipes of elderly Basque women. Seventy-eight-year-old Emilia Sáenz de Vicuña from Alava gave him the following recipe.

HARE WITH WALNUT AND CHOCOLATE

Cut the hare in pieces and fry them. In the same oil, fry an onion cut in slices and a few garlic cloves. When the onion is tender, add a sliced apple, a little flour, a little chocolate, a glass of red wine, a glass of white wine, another of water.
    
Shell a dozen walnuts and crush them in a mortar, then throw the paste into the casserole with the hare. Simmer together very slowly, and when the hare is tender, remove it to an earthenware dish. Run the rest through a food mill and pour it around the hare. Let the whole thing simmer a little, then toss in a little chopped parsley and serve.

The drink that Cortés brought back also quickly became popular in Spain, and when both Louis XIII and Louis XIV married Spanish princesses, their brides brought the drink to the French court. Louis XIV’s bride, María Theresa, the same bride who was served macaroons at her St.-Jean-de-Luz wedding, did little to dispel the belief that chocolate was a toxic and evil addiction. She could not stop drinking chocolate every day, and this was thought to be the reason that she lost all of her teeth.

Chocolate’s bad reputation may have come in part from reports from Mexico, where chocolate seemed a potent drug because the Aztecs mixed it with hallucinogenic mushrooms to drink in religious ceremonies. In any event, for chocolate’s first European century, its unsavory reputation grew along with its popularity. In 1628, the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo wrote, “There came the devil of tobacco and the devil of chocolate, which . . . avenged the Indies against Spain, for they had done more harm by introducing among us those powders and smoke and chocolate cups and chocolate beaters than the King had ever done through Columbus or Cortés and Almagreo and Pizarro. For it was better and cleaner and more honorable to be killed by a musket ball or a lance than by snuffing and sneezing and belching and dizziness and fever.”

Time has shown him right about the tobacco, though more than a little unfair to chocolate. But in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both were regarded as vile habits the Basques had picked up in America. A seventeenth-century Englishman in San Sebastián wrote that the locals “wake up and have a chocolate, and wouldn’t leave without it even if their house were on fire.”

What happened to Cortés’s third recipe, the paste? When he returned with beans and recipes, the court entrusted them to a monastery. The monks of Guajaca softened the beans and mixed them with cane sugar, which was itself a new food at the time. The Spanish crown immediately realized the commercial value of this new confection and attempted to keep the formula secret. For almost a century the Spanish were able to keep chocolate making exclusively Iberian.

Their secret chocolate was a peculiar brick-red block. Since chocolate was American, the Spanish seasoned it with other new American foods including hot peppers and vanilla. The reddish color came from annatto, the dye that Caribbeans rubbed on their bodies, giving birth to the term
redskins
. And since chocolate was an exotic food, they added other exotic foods to it such as cinnamon, anise, and nuts.