My task was to recreate my Madrid tapas experience using only this book, ingredients I could find in New York, and my apartment’s comically small kitchen. I invited four guests—ambitious, perhaps—and on the night before the party began the daunting task of choosing which dishes to prepare. At four hundred and thirty pages, “The Book of Tapas” is nothing short of encyclopedic: common Spanish ingredients are listed in a section at the front, and the recipes that follow seem to combine and re-combine these ingredients in every possible permutation. (The book is divided into no-nonsense categories: vegetables cold, vegetables hot, egg and cheese cold, egg and cheese hot, etc.) As a start, I eliminated anything that required a deep-fryer (so long, croquettes) and recipes calling for hard-to-find sea creatures (baby eel, octopus). My guest list included one vegetarian, so I needed a mixture of vegetable and meat dishes. And because I did not want to spend the whole party in the kitchen on a hot summer night, I decided to choose several tapas that could be prepared ahead of time and served chilled.
I settled on olive caviar, mushroom and olive salad, baked cheese sticks, and melon balls with ham, all of which I would make before the party. After the guests arrived, I would duck into the kitchen to whip up patatas bravas and fried green asparagus with garlic, vinegar, and paprika. All but one of the ingredients were easily found and purchased Whole Foods. For my beloved serrano ham, I was happy to trek to Despaña, a Spanish food boutique in Soho. While I waited for the ham to be sliced, I tasted dozens of cheeses set out on sampling tables throughout the store.
Back at home, I got to work on the cold dishes. For the olive caviar, one blends anchovies, olives, capers, and olive oil in a food processor until a paste is formed. Mine never reached the creamy consistency of the spread in the photograph, partly because I quit when my tiny blender (the late-night infomercial variety) began to smoke. For the mushroom and olive salad, I sautéed a chopped red bell pepper and whole mushrooms before adding tomato sauce, olives, and garlic. The recipe said to simmer the mixture for ten minutes, but the end result looked more like a sauce to put on something else than a salad to eat alone. As I put it into the refrigerator to cool, I worried that I should have cooked the mixture longer to let the liquid reduce. Fortunately, the baked cheese sticks were fun to make: melt butter in a pan, combine with flour, bread crumbs, and parmesan, fashion into logs with your hands, and then bake at 400 degrees. Mine came out looking more like slugs than like neat, square, sticks, but I was pleased to find that they didn’t crumble when they came out of the oven.
The ham-wrapped melon balls were just as simple as they sound. After scooping out the insides of a ripe cantaloupe, I wrapped each ball with a thin strip of ham and then inserted a toothpick. As I worked, stealing tastes of ham, it occurred to me that “The Book of Tapas” relies more on the quality of the ingredients than on the skill of the chef. Many of the dishes, I realized, could be prepared with minimal effort and then served as appetizers that would make any dinner party seem more sophisticated.
I made many more than the twenty-four ham-wrapped melon balls that the recipe called for, and ate at least ten as I worked, juice running down my chin. Because the recipes were so easy, I finished with plenty of time to clean up before the party. I’d asked my guests to bring wine, but at the last minute, again thinking of Spain, I panicked and dashed out to buy two bottles of Rioja. Tapas are bar-food, after all, and I find that people are more receptive to my culinary experiments when they’ve had enough to drink.
As soon my guests walked through the door, I filled their glasses and set them to work on the food. As predicted, the ham with melon was a big hit; even the vegetarian seemed intrigued. And, though I’d worried about the consistency of the olive and mushroom salad, the ingredients had blended well, the olive and garlic giving the tomato a rich, complex taste. The baked cheese sticks were also popular; everyone agreed that when combining butter, flour, and cheese, there is very little that can go wrong. Most of us loved the tangy flavor of the parmesan, although one naysayer insisted that the cheese taste should have been even stronger. Of all of the dishes, only the olive caviar was left uneaten. For the vegetarian’s benefit, I’d announced that the spread contained anchovies, which made everyone squeamish. Worse, the anchovies, capers, and olives—each salty on their own—had combined to make something that tasted too much like the sea.
Everyone was in a good mood when I headed back to the kitchen to cook the patatas bravas: small potatoes (I’d bought fingerlings) boiled, then peeled and topped with a sauce of olive oil, white wine vinegar, paprika, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce. I enlisted the vegetarian, a self-proclaimed potato-boiling expert, to help me decide when the potatoes were ready, and they came out perfectly tender. But what made the dish great was the vinegary sauce, which was unanimously voted as one of the best tastes of the evening.
The final dish was the asparagus. Of all of the recipes, this one seemed the most unusual: bread is fried in a pan with oil, then dumped into a mortar and pestle and pounded with garlic to make a topping for the sautéed asparagus. After frying the bread, I chose an accomplice to operate the mortar and pestle (yes, I have one!) while I worked on the asparagus. At the very end, after the bread mixture and the asparagus were combined, I sprinkled white wine vinegar on top.
Again, the vinegar was the star of the show, combining with the garlicky fried bread in a way that made even those not usually fond of asparagus happy to eat their vegetables. As I looked around at all the empty plates and glasses, I realized that my tapas experiment—thanks to the Ortegas’ excellent book—had been a success. Along with the ample supply of wine, the six small dishes had made for a festive and satisfying meal with plenty of room for laughter and conversation.
We ended the night by eagerly sopping up the last of the vinegar sauces with bread.
Photos from “The Book of Tapas” courtesy of Phaidon Press www.phaidon.com.
