The Spanish embassy regularly sends me a publication called Gourmetours. I don't know why. I don't speak Spanish, I don't know where the Spanish embassy is, and haven't met the current Spanish ambassador. Kevin Myers writes
Moreover, I don't have an opinion on the dispute with Morocco over some small rocks. However, like most Irish people, I think Spain should get Gibraltar, though God knows why it wants it. It's a horrible place, its identity apparently based on a parody of 1950s Britishness, which is itself predicated on rejecting Spanish muck in favour of Spam and beans, followed by tinned fruit salad with condensed milk, washed down with Nescafé.
Ah well, there's no accounting for territorial taste. We laid claim to Lurgan for about 60 years, and Ahoghill, and bloody Ballymena too. Others are as bad. The Argentinians get emotional and start plucking their hair out over some sheep-infested islands, even though there's not a single Prada or Gucci boutique there, and it's impossible to get a decent manicure.
However, my pro-Spanish feelings about Gibraltar are no reason to single me out as a target for Gourmetours, with which I am regularly tortured. (Yes, yes, I know, I've written about this before, but you can't write a regular column without sometimes returning to the same theme).
Every time the wretched Gourmetours arrives, it prompts me to ask the same damned question: Why? Why have the Spanish such an exotic and vibrant culinary culture, and we have almost none at all? Certainly, whatever little we have, it's not enough to sustain a regular magazine; journalistically speaking, steak and chips and rashers and eggs only go so far, you know.
I'm not just talking about haute cuisine, nor even restaurant food; I'm talking about peasant food as well. The poor of Spain were inventive in their poverty: they ate snails, and fish offal, and sea urchins. There wasn't any such desperate scraping around for nourishment in Ireland. We have no folk recipes for caterpillar stew or frog rissoles, or brain pie or jellied sweetbreads.
Why? If famine was such a regular visitor, as our obsession with building famine vessels and erecting self-pitying famine memorials would suggest, why did our coastal communities not eat the seafood which is so abundant along our shores? Why is there still such a pathological disdain for shellfish that there are two Galway Oyster Festival banquets, at neither of which are oysters served? Why have we not turned offal into delicacies? The latest Gourmetours to be driving me demented contains an article about the sobrassada, the native sausage of Mallorca. It is made from local black pigs which are traditionally fed on figs, pulses, carob and barley. When the pigs were slaughtered, the women would make sausage casings from the pigs' intestines, washing them in lemon and orange scented brine, while the men minced the meat. This was mixed with sea-salt and fine red pepper, and the resulting sausage was hung up to dry.
The sobrassada comes in six different forms, according to its size and curing time. It is fried or grilled and usually eaten with honey on unsalted wholemeal bread. The sobrassada is so revered that there are two different denominations to protect its purity. One insists that the sausage is made only from the meat of free-range Mallorcan Black pigs which stay with their mothers until fully weaned, and are then reared in open fields or woodlands for nine months. They are finally fattened on figs, pulses and barley. Sobrassada sausages are regularly analysed by the denomination for their meat, water and fat content.
And that's just on one island. You could probably travel all over Spain and find comparable denominations for countless sausages and cheeses. In Ireland we have not one single comparable system of policing traditional foods, simply because we have almost no such traditional foods. Quite the most extraordinary aspect of this was that in the 19th century we apparently needed German sausage-makers - Hafner, Olhausen, Youkstetter - to teach us how to make sausages. We have absolutely no regional variation in sausage, nor any cured or smoked variety, nor any tradition whatever of a sausage-making cottage industry.
This is breathtaking. Moreover, we have no traditional cheeses: no blue cheeses, no soft cheeses, no goat cheeses, no sheep cheeses. All of our admittedly splendid cheeses today are recent inventions, and without the great pioneer Veronica Steele - has anyone ever given her an honorary degree? - who knows what our cheese industry would be like? Similarly, we have no regional sausages or pies. God help us, even the English can manage Melton Mowbray pork pies and Cumberland pies and Cornish pasties, just as they can manage Stilton and many other local varieties of cheese.
Nor do we have any equivalent to the endlessly inventive cultures of the tapas or pincho, which are tiny dishes to accompany drink, often served on a skewer, and coming in a vast range of flavours and components. Actually, that's not true. We do. They're called Tayto cheese 'n' onion crisps.
Why is this? Why does no-one eat eel in Ireland, through our rivers teem with it? Is there a single Irish dish based on trout roe, as the Spanish txepetxa is? Is there an Irish dish which can compare with the Spanish cocido stew, which exists in various regional forms throughout Spain, and which consists of different types of meat and sausage, according to the area? Yes, yes yes, I know I've written a Diary about this before. No matter. So long as the Spanish embassy continues to taunt me with Gourmetours, I have to have these occasional little rants. Otherwise, I'd go mad. MAD, DO YOU HEAR ME? MAD!