shewhomust | Entries tagged with spain

The Guardian reports that Juan Clemente Rodríguez Estévez has spent 11 years studying 68 pictures of food.

Not just any pictures of food, but a set of sixteenth century carvings which decorate an arched passageway in the cathesral of Seville. He has published a book on the subject, 'The Universal Banquet: Art and Food in Renaissance Seville', and at this point in the article I grumbled, not for the first time, Guardian, you run a bookshop, why not make it easy for me to buy books featured in the paper? On this occasion there may be a reason: the only book on the subject of which the internet is aware is El universal convite: Arte y alimentación en la Sevilla del Renacimiento. Which is tantalising, because - I won't copy out the linked article, but do read it - he has clearly found all sorts of interesting stuff about the dishes on display. And while I'm almost tempted to go for it, in the hope of more pictures, my Spanish isn't really up to it.

There is one more article on the subject, which clearly draws on the same basic information, and appears to be having problems with its images -

- in fact, and I don't know if there are issues of copyright involved, there is an overall scarcity of pictures for what is potentially a very visual story. Such examples as we have, though, follow a very modern pattern: an item of food displayed on a circular plate within a square frame, this isn't your traditional still life, this is an Instagram aesthetic.

Which seems particularly appropriate, because of course Saint Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of the internet. He lived a thousand years before this banquet was carved, but here's a random link turned up by my search for more pictures, to a copy of his Etymologies (courtest of the British Library).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/761882.html

A recent 'Long Read' article in the Guardian was headlined: "How a small Spanish town became one of Europe's worst Covid-19 hotspots". That small town is Santo Domingo de la Calzada, in the province of La Rioja. "Have we been to Santo Domingo?" asks

durham_rambler. We have indeed: that is where we impaled the car on a rising bollard, somewhat derailing our holiday plans and very nearly writing off the car.

Despite this, I think with fondness of Santo Domingo, and was relieved to learn that it had not been visited by any worse catastrophe than the pandemic itself (which is catastrophe enough). The article was interesting about the nature of lockdown in small towns and rural areas, since most of the coverage has been about cities. Santo Domingo was just one representative example: the death toll there was high in proportion to the population, but with such a small population the sample is not large enough for the statistics to mean anything beyond themselves. There were various theories about how the virus had arrived in town, none of them provable, one among them that it had been brought by pilgrims on the Camino, the route to Compostella which is the 'Calzada' of the town's name...

When I posted my last photos from Shetland, I wondered where I might revisit next, which of the many other folders of half-sorted photos on my hard disk I might organise? Our Spanish holiday (in 2011, neither the most recent nor the oldest possibility) was one option, but I can take a hint. So I have been sorting my photos of Spain, (with the help of my virtual memory) and enjoying the process more than I expected to.

I seem to have photgraphed the same street scene in Santo Domingo as the Guardian chose for its illustration.

I did not recognise the name Alison Prince, but the Guardian's obituary suggests I should. She wrote, among other things, the scripts for Trumpton, and I enjoyed the description of how that came about. This turned out to be drawing heavily on an earlier 'making of' article (and all you need to know about Trumpton - indeed, all I know about Trumpton - is that it's about life in a small town from the point of view of its Fire Brigade):
...So I was dispatched to a bitterly cold converted church in the East End of London, where Trumpton's creator Gordon Murray was filming a test sequence using stop-motion animation. It dawned on me how quaint the remit was. You can't depict flames using stop-motion, nor can you do smoke and water. So I realised I would have to write 13 stories about a fire brigade that never went anywhere near a fire.

I love stories about how a piece of art is shaped by the constraints of its material - but what made Gordon Murray, working in stop motion animation, choose this particular subject?

Myfanwy Tristram spent a half term holiday in Barcelona, and then she published her sketch diary online. Warning: her website is very ad-heavy; also (though this may just relect the sizr of my screen / state of my eyesight) I did quite a lot of clicking through to larger image / struggling to find my place on the large image. I was really glad that I had read the taster of this and other travel diaries in Two Birds, her collaboration with Zara Slattery. But it was worth persevering to read the full diary, and it made Barcelona look like a great place to visit.

radiantfracture asked about newsletters. One that I not only subscribe to, but actually (mostly) read is Warren Ellis's Orbital Operations. In the latest, he is dipping a toe into poetry, specifically Alice Oswald's Nobody. I was very taken with one three-line fragment that he quotes - the rest of it, not so much, but this, yes:
There is a harbour where an old sea-god sometimes surfaces
two cliffs keep out the wind you need no anchor
the water in fascinated horror holds your boat

Why yes, thar's 'Nobody' as in Odysseus, that talkative, bald-headed seaman: the book is a collaboration with painter William Tillyer (there's just a glimpse of the paintings on his website.).

There was a takeaway pizza menu on the doormat, in among the election literature (only the LibDems so far, which I find odd). Previously unsuspected pizza options are the Northern Delight (cheese, tomato, layers of kebab, onions and jalapenos) and the London pizza (cheese, tomato, chips). Or perhaps it's just a spoof? Can they really be selling a Seefood Delight ((cheese, tomato, garlic, prawns, muscles & tuna)?

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/700944.html

Of course, when I say that now the solstice is past, that it's all downhill to winter, the British weather promptly delivers what passes in there parts for a heatwave. We have glorious sunshine, and I should be grateful, though I don't thrive on heat, and note sourly that Saddleworth Moor is up in flames: there's a reason why I so often head north in summer, and why, if I holiday in the south, I try to avoid the high summer months.

A digression: the Travel section of Saturday's Guardian included a feature on Galicia, with some useful information. Our Spanish holiday in 2011 ended with a dash to the ferry through the green hills of Galicia, and it has remained on my list of places to revisit. There is now also a new walking route, the Camiño dos Faros which looks well beyond my capability to walk, but suggests some tempting places to visit - and confirms my suspicion that the later stages of the Camino de Santiago are just too busy to be enjoyable. Digression ends.

Temperatures here in the north of England are not high by the standards of most of the rest of the world, but they are high enough for me. And that goes double for my desk in the attic, where it is really too hot to work in the afternoons, even if it weren't so bright that I can barely see the screen; so I have been cutting myself quite a lot of slack.

Despite which I have ticked off a number of tasks in the last couple of days, including a couple of medical ones (not entirely satisfactorily, since they result in additional medication, for long-term maintenance reasons; yes, I am grateful that I have no problems that can't be kept under control, but additional pills and eye drops do not cause me to rejoice. And no, I have nothing further to say on this subject). Bills have been paid, orders have been placed, cheques banked and websites updated: some of these plurals may be rhetorical, but I'm still pretty impressed with myself - not quite as indolent as I thought!

Today I shall challenge the heat by turning the oven on: I retrieved the sourdough starter from the freezer, and it was looking pretty frisky, so I am making a loaf of bread (with a proportion of Orcadian bere meal) and we'll see whether I should have renewed the starter first. Do I dare attempt some ironing? Clean laundry is piling up in the basket...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/641623.html

I thought I had written about the food fair in Bishop Auckland, but maybe not. Ah, well. Anyway, one of the things I bought there was some stewing veal, and yesterday I took it out of the freezer and made a blanquette de veau. It's a dish I haven't made in a long time (I don't manage to buy veal very often) and I was pleased with how it came out, the sauce all lemony and buttery, the meat sweet and tender. Since it's classic old fashioned French cuisine, I wanted a classic French wine to drink with it, and chose a bottle that we had bought at the Maison des Vins in Gaillac: the Domaine Philémon Perlé (information about the producer in English, and I wish I'd known about their Jurançon Noir, I don't remember seeing that). My only hesitation was that it might be too light, and I'm glad I didn't check the website which recommends serving it as an aperitif or with fish, or I might have been dissuaded from serving it with the veal. It was light and fresh, and the almost-fizz indicated by the name 'Perlé' accentuated that, but it had enough flavour, a good balance of fruit and acidity, to go well with the veal and its sauce.

Sometimes I wish I had asked the internet before deciding which wine to serve with what. D. brought us a bottle of Brana's Harri Gorri, which was particularly welcome as we had not been very successful in buying Irouléguy when we were there (short version: the domain we wanted to buy from was harvesting on the day we called, and too busy to sell; the local supermarket doesn't sell local wine and the Cave Co-op's wines are unimpressive. We bought some, but grudgingly). Harri Gorri (can't say that name too often) is much more elegant than we are accustomed to in an Irouléguy (I don't know how it manages that when it's 50% tannat, but it does), and would have been much happier with the following night's lamb stew, as the Wine Society's website suggests, than with whatever I served it with (don't remember). Then again, the Brana website says serve with game or grilled meat, which suggests something chunkier. It also uses the word "empyreumatique" which was new to me, and I had to look it up (show-off winespeak for the toasty flavours associated with oak, it says here).

One more bottle of Basque wine, this one from the other side of the Pyrenees, On the last day of our holiday we had made the most of our last chance to stock up at a Spanish supermarket. Choosing a last few bottles of wine with no better guidance than whether I liked the label, I picked an elegant little bottle of Beldui txacoli. All the text on the label was in Basque, so there were no clues about how to serve it. Eventually I opened the bottle and tasted it. At cellar temperature it was a little flat, almost musty, and I opened a bottle of red to drink with the chicken. But served chilled to accompany cheese and grapes for dessert, the txacoli's dullness was transformed into a subtle oxidation, an almost sherry-like edge. So that was all right. And oh, look, you can visit the vineyard...

I wasn't consciously nervous about getting back on the horse after that total failure of my baking-fu. But somehow the next loaf didn't happen - that is, as the days passed and it kept being not convenient, and the starter aged, I eventually admitted defeat, used a spoonful of starter to seed the next batch and threw the rest away. The loaf after that, however, is a perfectly acceptable raisin and outmeal loaf: a little fragile, perhaps, but that's what you get if a loaf with a high oatmeal content rises nicely. I might try baking for (slightly) longer in a (slightly) lower oven, or I might not. Anyway, as weegoddess would say, I have toast - and that's the main thing.

Talking of weegoddess, she sent me this penguin mirror: it's a strange sort of mirror, and of course penguins aren't puffins, but we can't all be puffins. The fan is good, too.

I'm not looking for holiday ideas, thank you; and I'm particularly not looking for ideas for walking holidays, not until we've returned to walking more than we have been lately (one regret about our recent tour of the Hebrides is that I'd have liked less driving, more walking); I'd like to see more of Spain, though I was thinking of the north, not the south: despite all of which this looks fun.

The Co-op Membership Services e-mail me to say: "Every day is a picnic - You don't have to plan for a picnic when there's a Co-op nearby, so visit your Stornoway store for picnic inspiration, whatever the weather." And we did, it's true, visit the Stornoway store to buy provisions for a picnic, to be eaten in our B&B on a rainy evening. But "nearby"? Not really...

Other people's holiday shopping is more glamorous. J. invited us to dinner on Sunday, on the pretext that she wanted to empty and defrost the freezer. Dessert, however, was a tasting of Valrhona chocolate which she had bought, after much sampling, at the manufacturer's shop in Tain l'Hermitage: four bars of dark chocolate from different parts of the world, to be tasted in a specified order. I didn't take notes, and the website isn't helping, so all I can say is that they were all good, but that we disagreed with the recommended order, and thought #4 was an anticlimax after #3. All four were 62/64% cocoa solids, which supports my theory about the prevalent fetish for 85% (in brief, that it's a mistake. Or rather, that it's fine for cooking with, when you might as well start as high-cocoa as you can, since you're going to dilute it with other things; but if it's for eating, higher fat gives a better mouth-feel).

The high point of the meal was a dark, mysterious-looking truffle. It was all I've ever dreamed of in a dish. It was a bit like chocolate, but with an acidic quality. It looked like a dessert and was sweet, but also savoury. It had the texture of damp coal dust, and legs like a glass of vintage wine. My face told them I had no idea what I was eating. It was a morcilla, they said, made with sturgeon's blood. A black pudding.

Chris Moss dines out in Malaga, Guardian 24.05.2014

I would be more surprised by this had the not been a high point of our pre-Christmas Argentine dinner with

helenraven - I described it at the time as "like clouds of savoury soot".

Still, sturgeon's-blood black pudding - who knew?

This morning's Guardian reports that a new book co-authored by a lecturer from the University of León has identified the Holy Grail as a chalice in the keeping of the church of San Isidro in - surprise! - León.

I am disappointed that this is not Saint Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet, but a completely different Saint Isidore. Follow the link to Wikipedia for some sweet miracles, though.

The Guardian reports the story deadpan, but rather gives the game away by explaining that the Holy Grail is "the mythical chalice from which Christ sipped at the last supper".

We seem to have booked ourselves a holiday. We've been plotting it for a little while now, but all the pieces have fallen into place, we have had confirmations from all our chosen hotels, and today Amazon delivered the road atlas - so it must be happening.

Kindly disregard anything you may have heard me say earlier in the year about going to Scandinavia. we were very tempted, and we may yet go and visit some of the locations of the crime fiction

durham_rambler enjoys so much. But we cooled towards the idea when we realised that there is currently no ferry from Tyneside to Scandinavia, and the journey would involve travelling south before we could go north. Eventually, if we must we must, but for the time boing we are sulking.

After that we tossed a number of ideas back and forth, and they all sounded fun, but there was nothing that filled us with "Of course! That's what we want to do!" Until I was leafing through the Britanny Ferries brochure, and found right at the back a few ferry plus hotel packages in Spain: including one which they described as the Camino de Santiago.

Over a number of holidays we have actually walked (almost) the GR65, the long-distance footpath that follows the Chemin de Saint Jacques, the pilgrim route from Le Puy in the centre of France down through the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles. And we'd always told ourselves that one day we would carry on across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela, only maybe - probably - not on foot. From not having thought of that particular trip for this year, I switched in an instant to cetainty that this was what I wanted to do.

We haven't bought the full Britanny Ferries package, which seems more concerned with booking you into the paradors with which they have an arrangement than with following any historical pilgrim route, and certainly doesn't share our passion for completeness. We have put together a mixture of their ferry crossings and those hotels where they offered a good deal, some paradors booked through their own central booking system (which gave us a much better price except on the one that we hesitated over and then decidd to indulge ourselves) and one small hotel which we have booked direct online. I couldn't have done it - neither the planning nor the booking - without the internet.

Broadly, the plan is to sail to Bilbao, drive back into the Pyrenees and pick up not the 'Camino Frances' which we had been following but the 'Camino de Aragon' which crosses the mountains further east. We head west in a leisurely manner (we've allowed ourselves a couple of days in La Rioja) to about the midpoint of the Camino, then turn and head for the coast, with another couple of days in the mountains, just to have a look round.

In a month's time I will be in Spain.

Via weegoddess and cowgrrl, a plausible explanation of the DDoS attacks on LJ (that LJ is home to a number of Russian anti-corruption blogs). I can't say how reliable this information is, but the latest LJ News post says "These attacks are against multiple journals worldwide, several of which are political in nature," which is consistent.

The Census again: the Guardian trails an article about the Suffragette boycott of the 1911 census (the full article in History Workshop is online, but I admit I haven't read it). Arguing that "if women don't count, neither shall they be counted," some women spent the night outside, to avoid being listed as on the premises; others simply refused to fill in the form. Emily Wilding Davison spent the night in a broom cupboard in the Houses of Parliament; Miss Davies of Birkenhead listed only a male servant on her form, adding "no other persons, but many women."

There's a new release of the WordPress blogging software. The release comes with a (not very) explanatory haiku:
Only the geeks know
What half this stuff even means
Don’t worry — update

Speaking of poetic forms, Wendy Cope demonstrates the villanelle; I have no idea what Hugo Williams had done to deserve this.

Also from the Guardian, some suggestions for highlights of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The paper version ran alongside a piece by Tim Moore, whose book convinced me that I never wanted to walk the Spanish section, but I'd like to see it some day. But now it seems there's a movie, so we'd better give it a year or so to blow over...

As I said, the journey home from Pusiano was in every respect easier than the outbound trip.

To begin with, our trip across Milan from the Central station to the commuter line had been quite unnecessary: we could have caught a train direct from Centrale to Lecco, and from there caught the bus we had taken, but in the opposite direction. Homeward bound, we didn't even have to do that, as our hostess Anna kindly drove us to Lecco.

Lecco station is tiny, but we didn't have a long wait there: I barely had time to snatch a photograph of the panel outside the snack bar: 'I Panini del viaggiatore'. Sandwiches for travellers, that's obvious enough, but this was a menu of sandwiches designed for famous travellers: Marco Polo (prosciutto crudo), Ulysses (prosciutto crudo with cheese and salad), Attila (salame and cheese), Captain Nemo (ham and cheese). I don't entirely believe that last one.

Milan CEntrale was as magnificent as I remembered it, and I had enough time to entertain myself by taking some photographs, of which I like this one best. It's taken looking towards the trains, so it doesn't give any sense of the height and magnificence of the hall of the station, but I like the sheer disconnect between the mosaic eagle and the preoccupied travellers.

The rail journey to Paris seemed much longer than the southbound journey; and may really have been longer, since the train stopped in Lyon. And we set off in the dusk, it was dark and I was increasingly weary. But nothing worse than that, for which we were grateful.

I'd like to post about the next day in Paris, but later. The following day we caught the Eurostar to London, and from there the train back to Durham, and while it would have been more comfortable if the trains had been less crowded, still, when it works, rail travel covers the ground at quite a speed.

Which makes this as good a place as any to file a link to a Guardian Travel article about El Espreso de la Robla, a train-hotel tour of the Basque country: you visit a beret museum! you eat railway stew (putxera, or in Spanish, olla ferroviaria)! Who could resist?

This year's holiday plans are firming up nicely - as they should be, since we set off tomorrow week. Meanwhile, I continue to find things in the Guardian travel supplement - in among all the 'wild horses wouldn't drag me...' suggestions - which seem worth noting for future reference.

Last Saturday brought a new suggestion for a trip which we have actually contemplated: the Spanish section of the Camino de Santiago, by train: we've walked - give or take, over a period of time - the route through France from Le Puy to the Pyrenees (and

durham_rambler has completed the last leg from the pass down into Roncesvalles. And I'd love to see some of the locations along the Spanish, route, not to mention Santiago itself. But the more I read about the route through Spain, the less inviting it sounds: packed with walkers whose motives are either heavily spiritual or hard core athletic, and for much of the way either seriously challenging walking or too close for comfort to major roads. But narrow guage railway could be a fun way to travel (the railway's web site is in Spanish, and worse, it's heavy on the animations; Explore - or possibly, Explore! offer a package).

An earlier article about destinations near ferry ports recommends the Wadden Sea - with islands! - (via Esbjerg). This was new to me, but the description sounds good: Denmark, seaside, islands. Poking a bit further around the internet identifies the Wadden Sea as that coast of Denmark that faces the Channel, and the islands as the Frisian islands, which sounds more familiar. Still looks good, though not necessarily better than a seaside holiday in Britain...

But not before extracting all the juicy goodness from them! So we have:

Walking in Spain's volcanic region (just across the Pyrenees, in Catalonia).

The white villages of Andalucia - perhaps a Carmen-themed converted olive mill is a little precious?

The Vallé Française, in the Cévennes. Lucy Wadham, who lives there, writes: "Part of me is still wondering why, at the age of 43, I suddenly decided to uproot from a comfortable life in central Paris and move to a part of France so wild and so remote that even my best-educated Parisian friends, who had no difficulty rattling off the obscurest capital cities, were unable to locate it on the map. They knew that the Lozère, the part of the Cévennes where I would henceforth be paying my taxes, was the most sparsely populated départment in France... It is therefore of little surprise to me that, two years on, none of my Parisian friends has paid a visit." I love the Lozère, which reminds me in many ways of Weardale - here, have a photo...

The same issue of The Guardian prints readers' recommendations of vineyards to visit: La Brillane, in Provence, is organic and offers B & B; the Domaine de la Citadelle, in Ménerbes, has a corkscrew museum; Château Villerambert-Julien is in the Minervois; Trois Terres in the Hérault has a very attractive web site - don't be fooled by the offer of an English text, the button leads to an 'under construction' message (odd, since the proprietor is English...), but the photographs work in any language; Domaine Mousset, at Le Fel in the Aveyron takes us back to the south west, which works for me...

All of which is irrelevant to our immediate plans: on Wednesday we set off for the Northern Isles - train to Aberdeen, overnight ferry to Lerwick, smaller ferry (the Good Shepherd) to Fair Isle. I should have internet access some of the time, but I may not have much time to use it...

Thanks to lamentables for telling me about a project to photograph all of China's ethnic groups: wonderful formal studio groups against carefully arranged props. It's impossible not to imagine the photographer in Victorian dress, with a big plate camera - except that oh! the colours! There's an article about it here in English, but for bigger pictures go to this Chinese site.

Cooking like a moomin: SelfMadeHero are planning to publish a recipe book containing all the secrets of Moominmamma's kitchen. Reading between the lines, it sounds as if what they plan is a collection of Finnish recipes, including things mentioned in the books, and with Tove Jansson illustrations. Still sounds irresistible. (More information on the Forbidden Planet blog, including a picture of a gingerbread moominhouse).

Sunday's walk took us from Sunderland Bridge along the Wear almost as far as Page Bank, then turning uphill to Tudhoe, where we had lunch at the pub - and back along the bridle way. (map). The morning was a long haul, partly because some of the paths, particularly through the woods, didn't exist, or weren't where we expected them to be. There were patches of snow on the ground from Friday's fall, but the sun was bright; a tiring walk but an enjoyable one.

Saturday's Guardian magazine was a food & travel special. I particularly enjoyed Jeannette Winterson in Mantua (picture gallery here) and Matthew Fort following the Ancien Canal du Berry.

And in the Travel section of the paper, this Spanish holiday sounds wonderful (the Casa Olea has a web site, with very pretty pictures which are a bit slow to download), and so does Macedonia: so many places to go!

In Saturday's Guardian Travel section, a description of walking routes in Spain, converted from disused railway lines. The route described is the Via Verde del Aceite, in the province of Jaén: I wouldn't want to walk 50 kilometres in two days myself, even on the easy gradients offered by disused railways - but perhaps that bit is negotiable? For reference, then, the Green Ways network has a web site,

For some reason, searching the Guardian's site for Via Verde del Aceite didn't find this article; but it did turn up an article published in the Observer in 2002, which considers the Green Ways as cycling (rather than walking) routes. The two writers also disagree about whether the viaducts are actually by Eiffel himself - now, that's an incentive!

Saturday's Travel Guardian has a feature on walking holidays - described as "short-haul", though I'm not convinced that anything involving air travel really deserves that label. Still, these look interesting:

walking as an introduction to Basque culture, billed in the Guardian as preneanexperience.com, but this URL reverts automatically to www.spanishlanguagewalkingholidays.com - Spanish language is optional, on this holiday at least, and they pick up from the airport at Biarritz.

In the footsteps of Dali in the western Pyrenees - not because I'm a huge fan of Dali, but because walking from France into Spain along the coast sounds good. It's described as 'introductory to moderate', but then so is this Corsican package, which makes me wonder...

ETA: Another article about Pyrenean Experience and the Basque country.

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Pictures of food
What do you mean, it's not about me?
Clearing my desk five things at a time
That summer feeling
Food and wine and food-and-wine
Five things...
Chef's surprise
Poisson d'avril!
On the Camino again
Linkety-link
The romance of the railways
Holiday plans
Discarding some travel supplements
Five things make an LJ post
The Olive Oil Greenway
Not this year - or next...

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with spain

Pictures of food

What do you mean, it's not about me?

Clearing my desk five things at a time

That summer feeling

Food and wine and food-and-wine

Five things...

Chef's surprise

Poisson d'avril!

On the Camino again

Linkety-link

The romance of the railways

Holiday plans

Discarding some travel supplements

Five things make an LJ post

The Olive Oil Greenway

Not this year - or next...