YOU MIGHT still be vaguely under the impression that Ireland is, in some way, an agricultural country. But take a walk down the Ramblas in Barcelona and turn right into that garden of earthly delights known as the Boqueria, and you'll soon change your mind, writes FRANK MCNALLY
I enjoy Cork’s English Market as well as the next man. It has plenty of local colour and no shortage of fine food. It certainly puts Dublin, with its slightly prissy (and open at weekends only) Temple Bar food market, to shame.
But the Boqueria is something else altogether. Laid out in a square the size of two soccer pitches, it sets the standard for food markets everywhere. It is noisy, chaotic, and – apart from anything else – more entertaining than all the myriad human statues on the Ramblas combined.
More to the point, it is a monument to the incredible variety of food produced by a country that ranges from the green Celtic fringe of Galicia in the northwest, to the scorched earth of Andalusia in the south. If it’s edible, it’s in the Boqueria. And the adjective is stretched to its limits here.
At the market’s heart, in a large oval, are the fish shops: about 50 of them. Around these, like a miniature version of Barcelona itself, the other stalls are arranged in a grid system, with neighbourhoods specialising in meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, etc. But especially meat.
And perhaps the most interesting of the many meat shops are a sub-genre classified, in the English version of the market map, as selling “Liver [and] Inside parts”.
These are a vegetarian’s worst nightmare. You can buy a whole sheep’s head there, or a pig’s, if that’s what you need. But for more particular needs, brains are sold separately, as are tongues. There are hearts, livers, and stomachs too, of course. And there are strange red, brick-like things that turn out to be chunks of coagulated blood (excellent with fried onions, apparently).
This being Spain, there are also testicles. Bull’s testicles to be exact: pale pink, with dark red veins forming exotic patterns of a kind you might see be on the wallpaper of a two-star Paris hotel.
As criadillas, such delicacies are first skinned and then fried with vinegar, onions, bay-leaves and a pinch of thyme. But in search of the machismo believed to be conferred by the dish, apparently, some people eat them raw.
IN HIS BRILLIANT BBC series of the early 1990s, I remember (or I think I do) the Irish Hispanophile Ian Gibson relating just such a story about an army honcho from the Franco era who, at bullfights, liked to have the testicles of the first bull brought to him in his seat, where he would ostentatiously tuck in, as if to demonstrate the size of his own cojones.
Bull-fighting is not popular in Catalonia, as it happens. But as with every other kind of food, the Boqueria is not found wanting in the taurine testicle department.
It’s a measure of the market’s entertainment levels that the main thing we went there to see there we somehow missed. This was a stall specialising in Fruits del Bosc – Fruits of the Forest in Catalan – and called “Petras” after the owner: a burly, bearded man who, in pictures, looks like a bit of a fruit of the forest himself.
His main line of goods is mushrooms, the bewildering variety of which the shop was already famous. But Mr Petras has achieved increased notoriety in recent years thanks to a new line: edible insects. Ants, crickets, beetles, and scorpions are among his more popular snacks; and he offers a tasty range of worms too.
Upon learning which, from a guide-book, my children decided that this was the market’s must-see attraction. Unfortunately, as I say, we missed it; and in terms of grotesque spectacles, the kids had to settle for being photographed next to a seven-foot-long eel in one of the fish shops instead. So I never got to ask Mr Petras whether people really eat his bugs.
I suspect not, and that the canny mushroom magnate has just spotted an opening for something tourists will buy to bring home and say “look what we bought in Barcelona”.
If so, this is the Boqueria’s only sign of tourism-induced decadence, even though the venue is on every Barcelona’s visitor’s itinerary and there seem to be nearly as many people there to take pictures as to buy food. Like the frenetically busy staff in its bars and restaurants, however, the market somehow copes with the crowds. It’s still the Boqueria that overwhelms tourists, not vice versa.
PARADOXICALLY FOR a place where everything must be available fresh daily, the Boqueria’s greatness is probably down to its age. There have been food markets in and around the site for centuries, but even its present shape dates from 1840. Many of the stalls have been in the same families for generations, the territory staked out long ago and maintained jealously.
So much as it might be desirable, you couldn’t just create a Boqueria in Dublin, or anywhere else. Even if you could somehow borrow the market’s tradition, where you would find the range of food to fill it is another question.