Yeah, but the peppers and wash time will never...
The small thump of the wheels on the runway at Barcelona Airport
jolts me from a dream, reminding me that a gastronomic gut bashing is about to start.
So with scant regard for my waistline, I'm here at last to pay homage to Catalonia.
MUSIC PLAYS
Ah, Catalonia, land of Miró, Jose Carreras, Pablo Casals, Salvador Dali,
delicious sausages and mountain cheeses, wonderful wines, superb churches,
great examples of Romanesque architecture which are scattered around the southern Pyrenees.
But the Catalonians, like the Basques, are fiercely independent
and terribly proud of their culinary heritage and cock a snook at the rest of Spain.
30 years and more ago, when I was a little boy,
at midnights in the summer we used to creep out into the garden,
pluck broad beans from the pods there, nick them back into the kitchen,
fry some bacon, put the broad beans in them and have the most wonderful midnight feasts.
It's a memory which stays with me forever.
It's still one of my favourite dishes.
So imagine my delight when I come up here into the Pyrenees
and find that one of the local specialities is, in fact, broad beans with bacon
or with belly of pork or even with locally cured serrano ham.
And a little bit of black pudding.
So, Clive, into the ingredients here we've got local black pudding,
an onion, wonderful fresh broad beans, a bit of belly of pork, some mint,
the beans already peeled here in readiness, a bit of salt, a bit of sugar, olive oil,
some aniseed and, of course, a drop of white wine.
So, let's pop the pot onto there.
Classically here, by the way, they would cook this in an earthenware dish like this
and then put it in the oven to cook.
But I'm camping, or not exactly camping, I'm pretending to camp,
so I'm cooking on a little calla gas stove.
First thing that goes into the oil are my little bits of bacon or belly of pork
or local cured ham you could have if you wanted.
So, the pork's in. We now need some little slivers of black pudding.
There they are, as much as you like, as much as you feel like.
And they can also go into the pot.
I'll stir those around till they're golden.
So, they're beautifully cooked.
Now, into the oil go the broad beans.
And a blade of grass, if you don't actually need.
But what we do need is a bit of mint.
That goes in. We need a little bit of sugar.
A little bit of salt.
A little drop of white wine.
We need to gas right up.
And a little dash of aniseed, just a dash.
Aniseed, by the way, is like pastis or one of those things.
A grind of pepper.
A quick stir round.
Oh, shit.
Smells absolutely wonderful.
And the lid on for about ten minutes.
Then I shall munch them.
It is rightly said that the how and what of cooking
are determined by the spirit of the land that has created it.
Well, this simple dish takes its character, I'm sure, from the closeness of France.
But Catalonia is famous for its many vineyards
that grow sharply fresh and fruity grapes to make carver.
Wine made by the champagne method
and drunk not only by the rich and famous, but everyone.
It's quite incredible to think that anyone could conceivably want
to blow up a cellar containing 90 million bottles of carver.
But, you know, that's almost what happened here during the Spanish Civil War.
A group of soldiers were staying, hiding down here,
hiding from the other enemy,
because they were all so confused about who was fighting what,
you can't go into the exact details of it.
And they thought, what we need to do, strike a blow for the people,
blow up the capitalists and destroy this magnificent cellar.
So they started to knock a hole into the wall to put the high explosives in.
But then they thought, hold on a second, there's a lot of drinking,
let's just have one before we do it.
Of course, one thing led to another and another one led to another.
And in the end they were also bitterly pooped that they got overrun
by the incoming soldiers and they never did blow it up.
LAUGHTER
Now, that's what I call a proper glass of wine.
Mmm, beautiful.
I find myself today in this superb restaurant, Casa Irreina,
in a wonderful mountain village here in the Pyrenees,
where King Juan of Spain himself, no less,
comes skiing and comes to this restaurant to eat.
He'd probably have this dish, because it is a very typical Catalan dish.
It's called polio a la Catalan, which is Catalan chicken,
and it's cooked with, Clive, please, come in close,
wonderful farmyard corn-fed chicken with prunes,
with raisins, with pine nuts, it's fried in olive oil,
it's seasoned with salt and pepper, and, interestingly,
finally it's thickened with this piccata,
and in French we would call it a pommade.
It is crunched biscuits, pine nuts, toasted almonds and white wine.
At the end of the day, that will actually thicken the sauce.
Now then, over here, Clive,
hop into this pot here, if you would,
and witness the lovely red colour of tomatoes and onions
and olive oil and chicken stock.
Now, back up to me, if you would,
this is a sauce I had to get on a little bit earlier,
because it takes some time to cook.
It's olive oil with finely chopped onions,
the sweetest, ripest tomatoes, finely chopped,
put into there, sizzle to their golden brown,
then chicken stock is left to simmer away
while I get on with the rest of the dish,
and that starts in the frying pan, Clive.
Lovely pieces of chicken.
Beautifully golden brown, absolutely splendid.
Now for the next phase, push the chicken over to one side.
And little by little we add some prunes into the oil.
Let them take a little bit of colour from the oil
and the flavour from the oil as well.
Stay there, Clive.
A few raisins.
OK, sizzle them up a little bit.
Then a few pine nuts, like so.
And now, you remember the sauce I made earlier, Clive,
back up to me, please.
The sauce I made earlier now has to be strained over this lot
using the chinoise.
We put it on to a slightly lower heat,
so I'm going to move it over to your left.
I now have to let that simmer away for about 40 minutes
so the chicken is completely cooked,
and just before it is cooked, I take this lovely mixture,
as I remind you, the biscuits, the toasted almonds
and the pine nuts mashed up with white wine
will go into this pot, not at this stage,
into this pot later to thicken the sauce.
So, effectively, the dish is finished.
Back on the pot, please.
Savored in the afternoon sunlight,
the dish tasted even better than it looked.
But I had to talk in French because my Spanish is non-existent.
However, they like my dish so much, they actually put it on the menu.
A compliment, I reckon.
It's true, it's a classic Catalan dish,
but with the Moorish influences of nuts and fruit.
And for once, that old cliché, very Moorish,
had some real significance.
No, it's fair enough.
Quite frankly, if he's going to cook it, he can bloody well cook it.
This is one of those little scenes when the director changes his mind
to cook on my show.
Oh, don't be so silly.
I mean, there's more to life than just...
You know, what is it? A two-minute sequence?
No. Just two minutes. And he is Spanish after all.
Cook it yourself.
Well, I don't want to cook it myself. He's going to cook it.
There's more to life than that, all right?
Bueno. OK.
We have the potatoes.
And we have a little bit of garlic.
For the flavour.
And it has to be golden.
Golden garlic.
I knew this would happen. I knew it.
I mean, it's not as easy as it looks, you see.
You want to hear about the birds and the bees
and the bears and the countryside
and fishing and culture and architecture.
It's not just a question of throwing a few eggs into a pan.
They've made omelettes in the
The only thing is to talk and to do it at the same time.
Well, you said you could do it last night.
OK, I will.
I still haven't forgiven him for that time in San Francisco
when he said even a puppet could do it.
People can't, you see. It takes a lot of skill to do that sort of thing.
He'll be losing his rag any minute now. You wait and see.
And we take it on our knapsacks and we go walking up the mountains
and we see the wolves, the bears, the eagles.
And we sit down there, we look at life in the Pyrenees
where nobody's been before.
There are no roads.
And by the river we open the knapsack and we start to eat the Spanish...
Now, you do it as you can do it.
Huh.
Honestly, it's a lot more difficult than people think.
But after José Luis had fried the potatoes in olive oil
and a generous amount of garlic,
he soaked them in some beef and eggs,
about 10 of them, for a couple of minutes.
Well soaked.
And...
What he's trying to say is once the eggs have infused
with the oil, the garlic and the spuds,
he'll put them back into the pan and cook it.
Meanwhile, I was enjoying a frosted glass in the shade
a few k's down the road.
One, two, and three.
Wow, good.
This is the Spanish omelette,
the Spanish tortilla with potatoes and garlic.
I hope it tastes good
and that Floyd and all the crew are not very upset,
very angry because an amateur is, well,
doing something in the kitchen in the Pyrenees.
Well done, José Luis.
We'll let you know.
One thing I do pride myself on is that I have built-in radar
when it comes to finding good restaurants
that reflect not just the food of the region
but also the spirit, the humour and colour of the place.
Fabulous chickens, by the way.
Here in Barcelona, the famous Los Caracoles,
a truly fantastic restaurant
that cooks wonderful Catalonian food.
And for 150 years, it's been a meeting place
for opera singers, artists, writers
and aspiring politicians.
It's a place where you get instantly relaxed,
as if under the spell of the great smells
that waft from its open kitchen.
Ah, you've caught me at the bar again.
I don't spend all of my time at the bar.
It's just in between kitchens.
And if you want to see a kitchen which is outstanding,
still coal-fired,
it's like something out of Mervyn Peake's Gorman gas.
It is Svelta's Kitchen.
Come on, Clive, let's have a look at this,
because it's truly... I've seen a lot of them,
but this one has really impressed me.
It's outstanding. Come on.
They do say if you can't take the heat of the kitchen,
get out of it, well, this is one which is outrageously hot.
Look at this, a fantastic huge plate
of chicken and peas,
coal-fired over there.
What's he cooking over there? He's cooking snails over there.
There's some clams here. There's a big fat juicy close-up.
Clams in green sauce with white wine and parsley.
Tempted to taste that.
Absolutely stunning.
Gambas, cigars, salt on the grill, prawns there.
What have we got in here?
And down here, look, bloody fantastic hake.
Is that hake? No, it's bass.
It's bass. What's underneath?
A leg of lamb, just roasted very simply
with potatoes and onions and garlic.
I mean, this is a kitchen to beat all kitchens.
Look, look, look, look!
That is a painting.
Look at those onions, gold...
No, bring it back out.
The white onions turning brown,
the red bleeding tomatoes, the potatoes.
And this fish...
This is a real working kitchen.
This fish goes on top of that potato, onion and tomato.
Pieces of toast, pieces of chicken.
More gambas here.
This is...
For some English eyes, this might not be terribly appreciated,
but it's a very small suckling pig, just roasted whole.
When you could... Back up to me.
You could just munch into that and so enjoy it, couldn't you?
Do what you will, get all the little shots you need,
the chaps working, the things that David, the producer, likes,
and I'm going to eat.
This kitchen is making an artistic statement, too.
If it could talk, it would say,
This is me, this is what I do, and I do it for you.
I make you wonderful snails cooked in tomato sauce
and simmered over my big, heavy, black, coal-fired stove.
I make you stews of gambas and fish and scallops
and clams in white wine and tomato.
I pan-fry beautiful succulent shrimps for you,
again over this fierce heat so my colours really come out of my belly.
And hake simmered in tomato with mussels, olive oil, garlic and onions.
I make my workers so hot, they have to drink cider all the way through the service.
Mind you, they deserve it.
In fact, I got so carried away pretending to be a kitchen there,
I got a bit thirsty and a bit hot as well,
so I did have a jolly good swig of cider.
One of the most popular dishes to start lunch with
is this fish soup made with hake or brine,
langoustines and clams in a slightly piquant sauce.
It's no wonder that great trenchmen make a beeline for the place.
It's a gastronomic opera played every day with Catalonian pride and passion.
So I asked my latest, greatest chum, Agustín,
who's lucky enough to be the owner,
to share his thoughts on Catalonian cooking with me.
I mean, we like the real Spanish food.
The real Spanish food is not a mixture of French kitchen,
Chinese kitchen or Italian kitchen.
No, that's different.
We like the natural meat, the natural food.
I mean, we like the women, like you say, the women.
We like a beautiful woman,
never mind if the dress is beautiful or not so beautiful.
The most important thing is that the woman is pretty.
And that's like the food.
If you decorate a very good plate, a very nice plate, porcelain plate,
a different decoration, but the meat inside is not so good.
We don't like, we don't want to be mistaken about that matter.
An afternoon leisurely eating snails, shellfish and suckling pig,
drinking more wine than I should have with Agustín and his daughters,
made me feel if I'd won one of those lottery tickets
where you could be king for the day.
Sometimes with me, the wonderful state of euphoria can be a bit dangerous,
but I honestly felt that I'd made really good friends here,
not only with the people, but the restaurant itself.
And so, fortified by a great lunch,
it's on to Barcelona's most famous landmark, Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.
What it reminds me of is one of those French wedding cakes.
They make out of little choux pastry balls,
pile up high like ice cream cornets
and then drizzle carameled sugar down the sides
and put them out into the sun to bake for about 100 years
and it's cooked or finished.
In fact, it's not quite finished, probably another 50 years
and they'll have it done.
The sort of marzipan effect of the thing, it's like Hansel and Gretel, isn't it?
When they wander into the woods looking for the witch's cottage.
It's spooky, it's talky, it's all kinds of things.
And also, because he was way ahead of his time, 10 years ahead of his time,
he preempted the whole Art Nouveau movement
and it's so important to Spain and to Barcelona
that I'm going to go and buy some books and really research it
so I can do one of those really thoughtful, philosophical commentaries
in the Dublin Theatre later.
And then you'll know, as much as I know, about Gaudi,
he was a very good Spanish architect.
Salvador Dali, another great Catalan visionary,
used to say of Gaudi's work that his buildings were edible,
that he could just take off bite-sized pieces and munch away quite happily.
As a young man, Gaudi was a bit of a rebel and very critical of the church.
He had a taste for the high life and the looks of a dandy.
Paradoxically, he devoted his time to his art, religion and a Spartan life.
Very often, Gaudi would change his mind about the shape and form of his buildings,
probably after a few glasses of tinta and lox caracoles,
and he would rush in the following morning
and instruct his builders to do something completely different.
They would all sigh, have the odd monumental row, but get on with it anyway.
He never married and was killed by a tram.
Barcelona was, and still is, I think, the bravest city in Europe,
willing to tolerate the excesses of its artistic community
and, by doing so, has enriched the life of the people who live there.
Right, Clive, please.
You have been looking at the beginning of a famous Catalan dish called patacú,
which means potatoes and cabbage,
and it is made, back into this pot for a second, please,
it is made with ribs of pork, spare ribs of pork with a bit of meat on them,
onions and courgettes already simmering away in a lovely, lovely dish of olive oil.
By the way, this isn't my kitchen as usual.
We begged, borrowed and stolen from my great chum Francine,
who I'll introduce you to in a few seconds
after I've spun round the rest of the ingredients,
which are haricot beans that I've soaked and cooked already.
The dish does require cooked haricot beans,
cooked potatoes, cooked cabbage,
and then the other little bits and pieces are tomato, garlic, cloves and a bay leaf.
So I'll pop some of these tomatoes into there straight away, like so.
Salt and pepper at this stage.
And then my garlic, bay leaves and cloves.
Sorry to be... It's a new kitchen.
We haven't ever been here before, as you know.
Garlic, bay leaf and a couple of cloves.
Right, now then, this lustrous Francine that I mentioned,
we should go and meet her and see what she's doing.
So, come and follow me.
Hello, Francine. Hello.
What are you doing? Oh, ramezco de conejo.
That means ramezco of rabbit.
First of all, Francine fried the pieces of rabbit in olive oil,
then she added a load of very finely chopped onions
and sweated them right down to they'd almost disappeared.
Then she added some finely chopped tomato
and sweated that down to it nearly disappeared.
Then she added a little bit of white wine
and some seasoning, salt and pepper and stuff like that.
While the rabbit simmers, Francine is making another kind of piccata.
In Anglo-Saxon kitchens, we tend to thicken stews and sauces
with flour and butter, crude but effective.
Here, however, she pounds cooked rabbit livers,
garlic, hazelnuts, olive oil, the flesh and red peppers
and toasted saffron into a fine paste to thicken the stew.
Now, you may think that's a lot of work,
but it's this very important labour of love
that injects such flavour into the dish,
it just wouldn't taste the same with flour and butter.
Right, by the magic of... Ow!
Ha-ha! By stupidity, I left my little things in there.
By the magic of television, this is now cooked for long enough
and I go on to the next phase, which is to add my beans.
Lots and lots of beans.
Pardon me. Lots of potatoes.
Lots of potatoes.
And a load of cabbage.
And you let all of that simmer away for about ten minutes
before you serve it.
And there, as far as I'm concerned,
with its beans, its cabbage, its ribs of pork,
you have actually got catalania on a plate,
or, in fact, in a pot.
Cheers. Cheers.
Mmm. Excellent.
Now, let me taste this because it looks fabulous.
It's beautiful. It really, really is beautiful.
And, you know, I don't know which part of the series
this programme's actually going into,
but either way, I have actually been here three weeks
and this is the best Spanish meal I've had so far.
It's absolutely heavenly. It's really, really good.
Wonderful. It is.
Now, mine, of course, is a less distinguished dish,
but do try it, see what you think.
Yes.
Yes. It's OK?
I think it's a little more salt.
It's not a bad dish, but it's good. A bit more salt, maybe.
OK? Yes. That's not bad.
I've never cooked that dish before, you know,
but this is Catalania and Britain uni, or unicardo,
or something like that, united, isn't it?
So we haven't done too badly.
Great. Brilliant. Excellent.
Barcelona by night, the people throng the streets,
and if you can't afford to go to the opera,
there's always some exciting and free entertainment.
You just stand and stare while they spin manically round.
They're mad music from a really cheap stereo system.
If you're feeling a bit lonely and the big city gets you down,
you could just drift into a square,
sit down by a fountain or under the trees
and think and wonder, did he say 8.30?
Do you really know what old Antonia was up to last night?
It's true, you know he did.
And she may have discovered the same spark
that ignited the talents of Dalian Picasso
here in this city of lovers,
a city that becomes richer as the night goes on,
and it's constantly changing gear and never runs out of energy.
I could have happily stayed all night just watching,
but I have a busy day tomorrow,
so for me it's back to the hotel for cocoa and an improving book.
Ah, we are in Barcelona's cookery school,
where they specialise in teaching young and not so young students
how to prepare typical Catalan dishes.
They're all busy working away preparing things.
I have a chicken dish to do, it's called capo facet,
which is stuffed chicken, that's in Catalan,
it's a lovely maize-fed farmyard chicken,
which I'm going to stuff with, spin round the ingredients,
some apricots, some currants, some diced pork, diced bacon,
spicy sausages and pine nuts.
And if you can wander round here,
I can show you the first bit that I have to do,
which is, first of all, I must fry these little bits of...
little bits of pork.
OK. And the little bits of bacon.
And the sausages, hold on there, after a sec.
Now, while those simmer gently away,
back round here, old beanies,
because I have to chop up the apricots.
Now, this strikes me as a very...
This has got to have something to do with the Moors, with the Arabs.
It's bound to be. These dried fruits are to do with Arabs
in North Africa somehow.
This must be emphasising our point that without geography
and without history, food doesn't exist.
This is clearly an Arab-influenced dish.
Right.
And while I chop these apricots, the students busy themselves
taking the hard skins off these little broad beans.
By the way, there are about 100 aspiring chefs here.
Oh, and this, a splendid dish of boned-out loin of rabbit.
What you do is roll the loin around the liver
with a julienne of carrots and leeks and beans,
and then it's neatly tied and roasted in a medium-hot oven until tender.
In fact, it's a very simple, peasant-y set of ingredients,
yet prepared in this stylish way,
you could call it sort of Catalan nouvelle cuisine, I suppose.
It looks good and I actually thoroughly enjoyed tasting it.
Exquisite.
Anyway, back to my Arab-style stuffing.
Wouldn't this be...
Wouldn't this be a thing to do with your goose or duck at Christmas time?
I mean, it's a very festive sort of stuffing, isn't it?
It doesn't have to go just into a chicken.
You can put it into all sorts of other animals, other birds.
Anyway, we'll pop all that in there.
Well mixed up.
Well pushed in.
I've incidentally salted and peppered the chicken on the inside.
That's about as much as I can get in there, I think.
Thank you.
When I finished stuffing the bird, I set about stitching it up.
With the rock-steady hands of a skilled surgeon, Ahem,
I took the needle and under watchful eyes,
I finally managed to seal the bird up
and popped it into the oven for about an hour,
where it roasted all its lovely aromatic flavours.
Excellent. Thank you, sir.
Now.
And now, the proof of the puyul.
And marks out of ten, before no doubt,
I'm awarded with a certificate and an honorary degree
from Barcelona's Cookery School.
Thank you very much, sir.
Just a basic glaze.
Made, as you all know, from chicken bones and root vegetables
until wine allowed to simmer for quite a long time
and then thicken with a little tiny bit of flour.
Now.
Will I taste it?
The chicken with the fruit and the pine nuts
and the sausage and the ham and the bacon...
Mmm!
It's almost Eastern. It's mystical.
It's a fabulous dish, a mystical little dish.
Would you try it, sir?
Again? Please do.
Here you are. Cheers, everybody.
Good health. Thank you very much.
Set the table. Absolutely splendid.
Thank you. A lot of drinking glasses, drinking to all of us.
Oh!
Bath. What?
Acidity. And this is Barcelona's School of Photo Encatering.
I return you to the studio.
Go!
MUSIC