The One About FOOD - 1: The Shops

A whole month since writing the last proper blog post! We've both been extremely busy with work, plus we've moved to a new flat and had several people to stay (which has been really enjoyable). But now back to serious blogging....

I have been putting off writing about our experience of food here just because there’s so much to write about! In fact, this is going to have to be split into several posts, and I'll write about various aspects of eating and drinking out (which is the Spanish National Pastime) in the next posts.

The Basque Country is of course famous for its gastronomy and passion for food It has an extraordinary number of very acclaimed restaurants that do posh food at very high standards, quite a lot of it awarded Michelin stars. Those in the know about these things say that the Basque Country is where it's all happening in terms of cutting edge gastronomy - and indeed it do all look very interesting. That’s all well and good, but we’re not really into (and in any case can't afford) the expensive haute cuisine thing. So this is mostly about the wonderful food that we find in the everyday shops and cafes and ‘tabernas’ and ‘restaurantes’ around the Casco Viejo and in other parts of Bilbao and the Basque country. The passion for food here is NOT just about eating at expensive restaurants: it's virtually impossible to find anywhere, including the very cheapest places, that doesn't serve wonderful, lovingly prepared food, even if it's dead simple. And the shops are full of great local produce, usually much cheaper than the UK, to eat at home.

The first thing to say is that shopping for food is a huge pleasure here. Within three minutes’ walk of our front door are half a dozen greengrocers ('fruterias'), half a dozen grocers and delis ('ultramarinos'), half a dozen bakers ('panaderias') and cake shops (‘pastelerias’), 3 or 4 butchers ('carnicerias' and 'charcuterias') and a fishmonger ('pescaderia'), and the largest indoor food market in Europe, as well as various other specialist food shops. Living in the Casco Viejo, we are a little spoilt for choice, and it’s all rather quainter than in many suburbs – but nevertheless the presence of small traditional food shops selling a lot of local produce is absolutely typical of the food economy here, and it’s pleasurable in all the ways that food shopping back home in Tesco-land is not. Of course many people shop in smaller supermarkets here, too, and big supermarkets are becoming more popular in the suburbs - but it’s much more of a mixed economy, and the little food shops here are full of local residents. People also come to the Casco Viejo from all over Bilbao to shop in the market and at the shops in the old streets.

After just a few weeks, we have got to know our local shops and shopkeepers, and been reminded of the humane nature of this kind of shopping, where both the shopkeeper and the shopper care about what they’re doing and the personal transactions that take place, and are part of a neighbourly community. And this is not just middle-class romanticism. The Casco Viejo is not quite typical, but here and in various other parts of town, and in other towns and cities too, we’ve seen many examples of the way in which small shops are at the heart of their communities. Knowing that when we buy our food here the money goes straight into the pockets of the shopkeepers and circulates in the local economy, rather than into the pockets of Terry Leahy makes it all the better. In addition to all that, most food is pretty cheap here for us, compared with back home, especially fruit and vegetables.

As well as stocking the usual items, grocer’s shops and delis (‘ultramarinos’ or 'almacenes', as well as 'charcuterias') here are distinguished by the presence of many or all of the following things, which are the staples of the Basque diet, and which everyone eats at home:

·      sacks of ‘alubias’ (dried beans) and lentils of various kinds – mostly grown locally – from which you help yourself with a little shovel, filling a little foil-strengthened paper bag with as much as you want

·      a counter-full of ‘bacalao’ (dry salted cod) – sold in grocer’s shops not fishmongers, note – which you have to rehydrate for 48 hours, changing the water three times to get rid of the salt, before you can cook it. (It's difficult to over-state the importance of bacalao here - it's deeply engrained in Basque culture and connected with their extraordinary seafaring history: they were fishing cod (and whales) in the North Atlantic and off the coast of America 1000 years ago - see Mark Kurlansky's books 'Cod' and 'The Basque History of the World').

·     hundreds of jars (everything comes in jars) of all kinds of locally produced stuff in oil and/or vinegar and/or water  - especially ‘atun’ (tuna), ‘guindillas’ (green chilli peppers), ‘pimientos del piquillo’ (sweet red peppers),  ‘fabes’ (broad beans), ’pepinos’  (little gherkins), ‘aceitas’ (olives), and ‘esparagos’ (asparagus).

·      hundreds of tins of tuna and sardines, in tins of all sizes, much of it much better quality than that found in tins in the UK

·      lots of the local Basque sheep’s cheese, Idiazabal, and maybe some cheeses from Cantabria and Asturias (further along the North coast) too

·      fresh or frozen ‘croquetas’ – like potato croquettes but made with thick béchamel rather than mashed potato, and containing pieces of cheese or fish or meat

·      many different varieties of ‘jamon’ (ham) and chorizo sausage (also sold in specialist ‘charcuteria’), sliced with special knives and slicing machines

In the drinks section, some more staples:

·      'vin blanco': the local young fruity white wine, ‘Txakoli’, the standard drink here

·      'vin tinto': various red wines from nearby Rioja

·      'sidra' ('sagardo' in Basque): bottles of local cider – massively popular in the north of Spain, apples apparently grown mainly around San Sebastian and Santander rather than Bilbao

·      the Basque ‘digestif’ spirit from Navarra, ‘Patxaran’ – similar to sloe gin but made with anisette instead of gin

·      ‘mosto’: bottled grape juice, a popular non-alcoholic alternative to wine

As in other southern European countries, one thing you will not easily find is fresh milk. I’ve never understood why this is, though perhaps it has something to do with the increased risk of the milk going off in the relatively warm climate. Anyway, generally only UHT in cartons is available.  Fortunately for us, there’s a little dairy shop nearby (‘La Casa del Yogur’) which sells produce from a dairy farm in Cantabria, just along the coast. They provide a bottle, which we take and fill up twice a week from the milk machine in the shop!

Greengrocers, as one might expect, are stocked with fantastic fruit and vegetables – but two local staples stand out to the foreigner particularly:

·      most greengrocers have boxes of fresh ‘nueces’ (walnuts), ‘avellanos’ (hazelnuts) and ‘almendras’ (almonds), (and now ‘castanos’ – Chestnuts – too) which you shovel into bags along with fruit and vegetables

·      there are sometimes a dozen different types of ‘pimientos’ (red and green peppers) –  of which most are still a bit of mystery to us – though we regularly cook a favourite Basque dish, ‘pimientos de Gernika’, tasty little green peppers (not hot) fried whole with garlic, olive oil and salt.

There are also many bunches of dried red 'chorizero' peppers - similar to paprika - which are what give 'chorizo' its red colour and flavour:

Also melons (which I love) are plentiful and cheap and very good indeed – in fact I virtually live off them. There are also lots of excellent plums (‘ciruelas’), including the ‘ciruela verde’, which is a sort of large greengage, very tasty – and  wonderful stewed. (We buy a kind of stewed ‘ciruela’ conserve – under the brand name ‘Mermefruta’ (a cross between ‘mermelada’ and ‘fruta’) which we have with our yogurt for breakfast each morning!) Now that winter is here, though, oranges and satsumas and apples have replaced the peaches and plums of the summer.

For fresh fish and meat one is best to go to the amazing indoor market, known as La Ribera (‘the riverside’.)

Built in 1929 on the medieval riverside market place at the bottom of our street, it has recently been beautifully modernised and people flock there to buy from the dozens of fishmongers {‘pescaderias’) and butchers (‘carnicerias’) there.

The most popular fish here are ‘txipirones’ (squid (urgh!)), ‘merluza‘ (hake) and ‘bonito del nord’ (tuna), but there’s a huge variety of other types available too. Buying fish is tricky: the first time we went, Pietro bought something whilst I went round writing down all the Spanish names so we could look them up and find out what they are in English! There are endless disgusting slimy things like octopus and squid and prawns and crabs and so on, many of them still alive on the stalls - which are massively popular here and a staple of the local diet, but the idea of which turns my stomach.  Fortunately there are lots of 'proper' fish too, which are also very popular. And it's cheap.

A particular local speciality is 'Kokotxas' - cod or hake cheeks:

On the meat front, the  very popular local speciality is ‘morcilla’, a kind of blood sausage (urgh!), and a mildly spicy sausage similar to the North African merguez called ‘txistorra’.

There are also one or two other types of stall. One of the best stalls on the market is the mushroom stall, which sells around half a dozen different types of ‘hongos’, of which the common or garden ‘champinon’ is just one.

All these things – plus eggs, bread and potatoes – make up the essential Basque diet, and it’s combinations of these ingredients that one finds in the many bars and restaurants around the city, almost all of which serve traditional Basque food…. And that will be the topic of the next post.

I leave you with a picture of the Christmas window of our local specialist croquette shop: