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At their house, his partner Rosa prepares something very Catalan. It's what everybody eats in this part of Spain. The basic version is toasted bread with tomato, salt, and olive oil. But she's using roasted vegetables, sweet red peppers, onions, and oberines, all softened and skinned. Then she puts in a couple of anchovies and more olive oil. And that with a glass of dry cherry makes a very agreeable eleven's. Antonio though is making something much more substantial for lunch. A dish from his childhood. So what's it called? This Antonio.
This is called Favas Al Catalana. Raw beans on Catalan style. So this is a typical Catalan country recipe I guess. Absolutely typical. Typical mainly in the country because this is product of the farms you know fresh even the onion you know we are using fresh onions because if we have fresh the flavor is the aromatic so you used to be a rock and roll drummer why you I used to you used to ah because I don't know you know it's a mystery passion I mean cooking is an artistic thing. I cannot paint a nice picture but I can do something here full of color. But not only color, smell, taste, everything. Everybody must do that. Why not?
He bought the new season's garlic from the market that morning and he uses the green stem as well as the bulb. Now this is the ham bone. When you finish eating the American ham, you put this. This to me is very important because this reforms the flavor and give you the oldfashioned flavor like granny used to do. I remember when I was child and give this special taste. Put a ham bone. Now fresh broad beans. This is the centerpiece of his dish at the start of the season. They're highly revered and quite rightly I just love them and they go so well with ham and fatty bacon and some fresh mint.
So what's that? Is that going in now? The secret. And what is it? Uh this is anet. Oh yeah. That's a new one on me. And now stock. Chicken stock. How long are we going to cook it for then? Uh 25 30 minutes. Okay. They used to put piece of paper on top. Uhhuh. And this. And leave it minimum fire. Yeah. Chop for 25 minutes. 10 minutes before we put the sausage. And that's I'm finished.
Great. Chip chop. Antonio, while we weren't looking, puts in a couple of thin slices of belly pork. And now the black pudding, the moria. And he cooks it for a further 10 minutes. Finally, it's time, thank goodness, for lunch. It's time to drive into the very center of Spain. Well, I'm here in Lancha, and um most of the people I know that know Spain well just said to me, "Keep going when you get to Lancha. It's it's just somewhere unless you have to stop, just keep going." Um, but I rather like it because it's just these vast planes and I think there's something rather magisterial about big open spaces and also I think it's something that one has to experience if one's really to take on
board the real Spain mainly because of Donkeyote because of course this is where the book was written about and what I like is everywhere you go in La Mansion there's reference to Donote as if he was a real character, but to me it gives it makes it live because I've read the book and it is an essential part of Spain to me. But also, I'm quite impressed. I've only been here a day or so, but I've tried the wines and they're really good. And when I arrived in Lancha, I kept seeing these look like giant water bottles lying everywhere and I just thought they were, you know, for irrigating the land. But then I discovered that they were the old way of making wine, big concrete vessels. and it was al always cooked.
But now they've leared to make the wines using refrigeration. They're really good. For years, Lancha produced largely cooked wines. In those stone vats, it overheated in the sun, so it tasted almost stewed. Virtually all the grapes were tempano for red and aren for white. But now they're growing other varieties like Cabernet serving, which goes really well with tempano. We're not talking about highriced wines here, but good wines worthy of anyone's consideration. I've come to meet up at the Campo Decryptana vineyards with someone who knows about these wines, Haimey Bua, who's a wine writer from Madrid. right
now uh being the largest vineyard in the world as it is uh it was about time that some uh curious people or people with passion said no I'm going to make good wine here and here they have something that is unique is you have all the sun that you can get you can achieve that and this has been like this for 400 years the main producer in Spain is the core of Castillia the core of Spain and the core of Spanish wine. You speak really passionately about lancha and you obviously not only care about your wine making but also this country where you live. What does it mean to you?
Lancha is dry, is flat. Lancha is a place that is very far from the mountains, very far from the sea, but very close to the sky. And you see that we have sky all over. That's our main weapon. We have the sky and the sun and this flatness and with that possibility then the only thing you have to do here as a way maker is to tame the sun and this has been like this for 400 years. Haimey talks about taming the sun. By that he means the pickers start at 5 in the morning and finish before the sun reaches its height. Then they'll start again when the grapes are cooler. So if you're going into a supermarket back
home and you want a good deal, you want something that's really good value, lancha every time. Castillia, I often wonder about the ingenuity of mankind when it comes to food. Who'd have thought that the stammans of this little flower could enrich the dishes of the world? They call it the red gold of Lancha and the harvest takes place in October. Usually it's carved up by family groups. Sometimes there'll be three generations and each family would hope to get something like 8 lbs of pure saffron a season. That's worth its weight in gold.
More in fact. The stammans are dried very gently over an ordinary domestic heater and then they're ready to use in such classic dishes as fabada. And where would pyella be without saffron? Another culinary icon of lancha is manego cheese made from used milk. Traditionally, the cheese was eaten by the shepherds to sustain them. The thing about manego is that it's amazingly tasty and keeps for a long time. Anyone from Lancha disdains elaborate accompaniment with their prize cheese only membing the shepherd Donosio Sanchez about growing up in Lancha and what he ate as a child.
Basically, he said in the morning they'd have hot, which was slices of potatoes fried in olive oil. Then at night it would be beans cooked with chito and bacon. This would be on the stove gently cooking all day while they were out with the sheep. Oh, and wine. So to those friends who told me to give Lancher a miss and head straight down to the coast, I say unto thee, I think you've got it wrong. This place is utterly magical, and it fits the Spanish love of myths and legends. With halfclosed eyes, you can see why the courageous but slightly mad Doniote thought these were giants. Of course, they're giants. What do you think they are? Windmills?
I can't think of a fictional character more important to a nation so loved and cherished and understood by all that at the very mention of his name over here a knowing almost loving smile appears on the face of whoever you may be talking to at the time. I like this. This is what first greets you when you come into the inn. The sun began to usher in the mourn when Don Kiotei salied out of the inn, so well pleased, so gay, and so overjoyed to find himself kned, that he infused the same satisfaction into his horse, who seemed ready to burst his girths for joy. In the book, it was the landlord of this tavern who nighted Donkeyote while he was very, very drunk. But the famous novel is peppered with culinary anecdotes because food
played an important part in the conversations between the knight and his fat squire. Kiote said, "While I'm eating, I know nothing, but when I finished eating, I begin to understand." One of the most famous dishes mentioned in the book is Pisto Manchego, a dish of fried vegetables in a sauce topped with a couple of fried eggs. Well, I really don't think Lancha would be La Mancha without Doniote and without Santi's enormous imagination. I mean, I feel we all feel very personal about Spain. I mean, I was just watching all these Japanese tourists going through here and there was they Well, do they know that it was a work of fiction? Do they know
that this in was only a fictional idea of where a donkeyote received his knighthood? They probably don't. I don't know. Does it matter? Because I think sort of Spain to me, my Spain is the same sort of place as Doniote Spain. It's a sort of lost world of idealistic people, of innocence. I mean Doniote himself was gentle, was idealistic, was altruistic and he was lost. I mean he was mad and he was deluded. But somehow that has enormous strength to us all really. I think we we yearn for a world where those values existed and sadly it's vanishing from Spain today.
