Memories are made of this (1):

...Bread and Brenan in Andalucia

The bread baked daily in Pelayo, a pit-stop on the coastal road that links the prosperous city of Algeciras with Tarifa, my local market-town in the 1970’s, was, in the opinion of its regulars (including me), the best in all Spain. There was no need for a sign to draw casual travellers off the highway and into the the whitewashed blockhouse dwarfed by an enormous woodpile and a heap of moss-covered rubble that provided the baker with his secret ingredient, a pinch of lye in the dough.

On the far side of the road, where the valley dropped through wheatfields towards the sea, the Guardia Civil had provided the community with a single-room classroom - one-size fits all - where my children spent the first year of their Spanish schooling. The schoolroom was given leave of absence at harvest-time. The grain was threshed by donkey-power on a threshing-floor that doubled as the Guardia Civil’s car-park (information and denunciations welcome). The school curriculum included planting lettuces in the Guaria Civil’s vegetable patch and trapping, paunching and skinning rabbits attracted by the lettuces.

The bakery's wood-fired oven was in use every day except Sunday. The dough was prepared with wheat-flour and raised with leavening from the previous day. The crumb was cream-coloured and dense-tectured, and the crust was never less than a finger’s width deep.   Very little salt was added, but each batch included a spoonful of lime from the moss-covered heap in the yard. Whatever the dangers of this addition - no more than a few specks in each loaf - those who ate the bread of Pelayo from childhood were known for their strong bones and superior teeth.

Such bread, when stored in an unglazed earthenware under a wooden lid, never went moldy but dried out naturally for use in soaked-bread preparations such gazpacho, the traditional midday meal of the Andaluz fieldworker. In its original form, gazpacho is a simple bread-porridge flavoured with garlic and olive oil sharpened with vinegar eaten cold in summer and hot in winter. Possible embellishments are diced tomato and cucumber, chopped hard-boiled egg and a maybe a few scraps of serrano ham trimmed right down to the bone.

Gerald Brenan, writing in South from Granada, an account of his life as escapee from the Bloomsbury set in the Alpujarras in the 1930’s, had no doubt of the superiority of Spanish bread: “The loaf is very close textured but it has a taste and sweetness like no other bread in the world. This, I imagine, is because the grain is entirely ripe before being harvested.” Nor is the bread always eaten plain. “Besides loaves we had roscos, or rolls made in the form of rings, and tortas, which are flat cakes made with wheat flour, sugar and oil.  The poor, and sometimes the rich too, also ate maize bread, and in the mountain farms they ate black bread made of rye: for shepherds, it had the advantage of not going stale.”

Leftovers are treated with ingenuity: “Two dishes unknown to Western cooking are prepared with stale bread. The first of these is gachas, a porridge of wheat flour simmered in water which used to be known in England as hasty pudding.  In the villages it was taken with fried sardines, tomatoes and pimentos.  The second is migas, a sort of porridge but fried in olive oil, garlic and water, which could be made either of wheat or maizeflour, or breadcrumbs. The poor eat it with the invariable sardines, while the rich like to pour hot chocolate over it. My landlord took it with both hot chocolate and fish, stirred up well together.” Hunger, as they say in Andalucia, is the best sauce.

p.s. beloved paid-subscribers will shortly receive my favourite torta recipe and another for migas al monton.

p.p.s. More stories and recipes in Flavours of Andalusia (Grub Street).