The purpose of travel is to expand your horizons. Whether you travel to the museum in your hometown or whether you wake up dry beneath the African sky, just you and your Swiss Army knife, you’re stepping outside of your normal life and learning a little more. Maybe you learn about a new culture, a new political perspective, a new life philosophy, or maybe you just learn something new about food in a new country.
When I travel, I have a tendency to stick mostly with foods that I know and like, but I make a conscious effort to try to eat something new and different at least once a day. I generally don’t like cooked fish, but I will always try it in a new country, in the (so far futile) hope that I’ll find a preparation that I like.
I find myself in Spain right now, and the food, for the most part, has been really good. I was at Gran Bar in Córdoba, Spain the other day, and I saw on the menu “gulas con gambas al ajillo.” Well, I know what gambas al ajillo are; they’re shrimp sautéed in olive oil with a lot of garlic. There’s a restaurant in New York City that does them very well, although they’re not that hard to do. If you can sautée shrimp and you can avoid burning garlic, you’re about 90% of the way to making this dish. (The other 10%: throw in some red pepper flakes for a little zip and serve with fresh bread rolls). Knowing that I liked most of the words in that entree, I ordered it. It turns out that ‘gulas’ are thin and short strips of sautéed fish (see earlier comment about not liking fish).
As you can see from the picture, unless you look closely, they look a lot like worms. They’re fish, so they had a bit of that fishy smell. The fact that they were still hot only made things worse; as they started to cool and settled in the dish, they actually moved. I could not make this up if I wanted to. So I was then faced with a bowl of what looked like, smelled like, and wiggled like sea worms of some sort. Taking a long drink from my wine, I fortified myself and dug in. It tasted better than I expected (I went in expecting to taste like sea worms, so a cow patty would have been a nice surprise), but it was still rough going. I ate all of the shrimp and got about 1/3 of the way through the fish before I called it quits.
More recently, I was at Lo Güeno in Málaga, Spain. Browsing the menu, I found something called “pajaritos.” My limited Spanish knowledge tells me that this word means “little birds.” To me, that sounds like a local colloquialism for something. And if the locals have slang for it, it must be good. Think “hot dog” or “pigs in a blanket” or “shit on a shingle*”. Well, 2 out of 3 at least. So I ordered the pajaritos.
Yep. They’re little birds. There’s two of them in the dish (sorry for the blurry image). The menu said that they were grilled, but given the amount of oil in the dish, they might well have been drowned. Plucked clean, these birds are still whole. That means the innards are still in ’em. As brave as I may pretend to be on the internet, I wasn’t about to eat these little buggers whole, a la the ortolan**. I carefully cut the breast meat from them and ate it. First of all, the meat was so tender that it fell off the fork, leading me to believe that I was supposed to eat them whole. Second, there was way too much oil and rosemary to taste the meat itself, but I could see their little bald heads looking at me while I brutalized the meat and attempted to eat them. Saying it was disconcerting would be downplaying it.
As I said, the purpose of travel is to expand your horizons and to learn something. What I’ve learned is that I need to start using Google Translate when I read menus. And I’ve also learned that I should stick with Burger King when I’m traveling.
* Shit on a shingle is a term of endearment in the military for biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were usually as hard as a brick, and the gravy, well, it wasn’t tasty. Ever. So biscuits and gravy became “shit on a shingle” or SOS for short.
** For those that can’t be bothered to click the link, the ortolan is a small bird that was used in a dish in France. The traditional recipe was to drown the bird in brandy and then cook and pluck it. The bird is eaten whole, feet first, traditionally with a napkin held over the bird (not under) to hide your decadence from God’s eyes. Because the bird was drowned in brandy, there was apparently a nice little ‘pop’ of brandy goodness when you got to the bird’s lungs. Lest you think that this was a medieval tradition, this practice was finally banned in 1999 in France due to low ortolan population numbers and the law started being enforced in 2007. The ortolan was apparently François Mitterrand’s last meal in 1996. And you thought you wouldn’t learn anything on my blog….
