Jamon

Spain is interesting. Its Gaelic culture, originally, then overrun by the Romans, then diluted by time, then overrun by those bastards from Africa, the Moors, who did the usual slaughter and slavery and rape and pillage stuff that lead to the Crusades, then Spain got freakishly xtian and we get the Spanish Inquisition in response.

Of course.

Time passes and Spain tries to take over England by cutting down their 500 year old forests to build the Spanish Armada and it sinks in a storm out of the North Sea. The Brits claim the Fairy Flag was waved and the Supernatural was called to their aid. In the Brits Defense, a similar thing happened in Japan when the Mongols boarded ships and tried to invade Japan. Sunk in a storm. I think the moral is: don't put horses on ships.

Anyway, the cuisine is the part I'm getting to. Spain is a Gaelic country at heart, deep down, and Jamon (Ham) is a national pleasure at bars. Carefully cured, dried nearly hard, and shaved off in mouth watering thin slices with a very sharp knife by an expert. You pay premium for that too. Like good sushi in Tokyo.

When I took a class in Spanish at Las Positas College, my professor taught us Spain spanish rather than Mexican or Central American or one of the more common derivatives. She also taught us Spanish cooking, which bears a strong Gaelic influence because while the language changed, the veggies didn't. The Gaels had a HUGE impact on the veggies grown in Spain, to the point that onions, leeks, parsnips (a relative of carrots) and beef get to be the same stew they eat in Britain, Portugal, and Japan is served in Spain. All those have Gaelic influence, Japan through the Portugeuse Catholic missionairies. Japan eventually tortured them all to death, btw. Japan was not fond of manipulators. I think this was short sighted, but the stew the Missionaries brought remains popular under the ridiculous name of Hot Pot. That's what they call it. No translation necessary. Meat and veggies with onions, leeks, parsnip or carrot. They don't seem to have celery so its not full French Trinity like you get as the base of most Provencal cooking that ended up dominating all French cooking. Again, Gaelic influence at work.

Any recipe that calls for bacon or even prosciutto (cured bacon) can be replaced with ham, even Jamon. In America, the closest approximation to Jamon is Virginia Salted and Smoked Ham, a meat cured to the point it will keep a decade. Of course, you want to eat it sooner because proteins break down over time, no matter how they're cured. Frozen avoids this and keeps literally forever, but at room temp, even salt cure won't protect the proteins from denaturing and lose their nutrition value. Eventually they're just filler and salt source. The Russians love America, even under Stalin, for air dropping Spam to them during WW2. No really. Not kidding. It is now part of their culture to eat Spam while drinking Vodka. Much like olives cured in olive oil. The fats react with the alcohol and you get less drunk. It also makes the fat more digestible so you can use the energy better. Better living through chemistry, even in Russia where horse rides you!

One of the really funny bits in learning about Spain is that the tiny pepper stuffed into olives, pimentos, which ground up become Paprika? Those are from Central America. Which means pimento stuffed olives and anything involving Paprika... those dishes come AFTER Columbus. Chile peppers are from America. They grow in many places, but they're from here. Like Potatoes. This is one of those things that you see even in Lord of the Rings that's a goof. Tomatoes too. There was no tomato sauce before Columbus. The Romans had pretty unpleasant cuisine. The high point was garlic and olive oil. It kinda goes downhill from there. Pasta came from Marco Polo, brought back in 1400 from China. Before that? No pasta. No idea. The soft southern wheat was low protein so made bad bread so Italy was stuck with mush. Flavored with garlic. And olive paste. How fun is that? Kinda like hell. Yes, they could put Jamon in it, and that helps, but after Pasta, Italian cuisine got so much better. We get fettuchini, lasagne, all those spiral and egg noodle and casserole recipes with butter and cream sauces, and throw in the nice herbs like basil and rosemary and life stops being so horrible and gross. It starts being good. Good life is measured in food flavor after all.

Which gets me back to Spain. Jamon is delicious. Thin sliced with good red wine, something spain has but rarely exports, and then you get to the bull fighting. Normally, bulls are for breeding cattle. About 2000+ years ago, the most dangerous animal you could run into in a forest was a wild bull. I am NOT kidding. They would happily rip your guts out and stomp on them. Incredibly vicious. Like Sharks without the diplomacy. Bulls were mean, often huge Auroch size (8 feet at the shoulder, 3000 pounds or more), and aggressively territorial. They killed any human they found, man, woman, child. Eventually the Spanish killed so many of them they started to regret the emasulation of bulls, of how meek they'd been bred. And they decided to start a eugenics program. They would fight them, and the bulls that were most vicious, capable of killing a man, would be bred, put out to stud instead of killed. Thus we get bull fighting. This is an incredible honor. Normally, when an animal kills a man (or woman), we slaughter it and its whole family and eat its flesh and dance on the ashes as a warning to others. In Spain, bulls are fought. The most aggressive that manage to die are bid upon in restaurants, fetching high prices and served, eaten by the viewers, honored in a very old way. The high levels of testosterone are also believed to be a local aphrodisiac so the women end up very pregnant afterwards. Whole generations are created after bullfights of great renown, and the feast that follows. This is a big deal culturally. Do Americans honor the cow that falls down a chute and gets punched in the forehead with a hydraulic ram before getting mechanically dismembered, perhaps still awake? NO. Our hamburgers are just meat. There's no honor there. When a bull dies in a bullfight, there are a thousand witnesses, and they joyfully eat and celebrate the animal's honor. And start 500 new children. Ponder that before you pretend to care about the bulls fate. That cow in a St. Louis slaughterhouse gets no honor at all and is just as dead. Some pothead is going to stuff that burger in his face and not give it a moment's thought. Spain is better. They know and very much care where their food is coming from.

I explained this to my Spanish class and my teacher gave me a C instead of an F for the semester because I get it. I may be terrible at new languages, but I understand foreign cultures and context quite well, thank you. This is the essence of anthropology, something place as my 3rd major if I were still in school. 2nd would be archaeology, fyi.