My Death Row Meal: Spanish Roast Lamb

I finally realised it the other night. I was wandering through the streets of Aguilas, a small, seaside town in southeast Spain, looking for a place to watch England get knocked out of the World Cup.

When I say was looking for the football, more than anything I was looking for something to eat. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was late at night. And opening times in Spain are always chaotic.

I walked back home and there she was. She was finally open. The old woman’s restaurant I’d heard so much about. The TV was on. Either she wasn’t showing the game, or it was half-time, but I was too hungry to care.

I looked at a rich-looking couple sitting outside, enjoying wine and a great spread of tapas. The hot evening air streaming down purple and the distant flicker of Venus brick-red.

Inside, the old woman was nagging at her husband to finish his cigarette and start on the washing up. He walked past me. World-weary, wine-shadowed eyes. He glanced at me with an expression that was hard to read, but seemed to say “don’t get married”. He scuttled off to the kitchen and I heard the clink of plates.

I looked at the tapas on the bar. 11.30 at night. Where else would you find food like that? I thought about Boris, the man who urged me to write a book about training to be a chef - a journey that failed miserably when I ran out of money and was forced to return to the 9 to 5 rather than the 9am to 5am.

He’d told me to buy an “old jalopy and scootle down to Spain and learn the knives”. “Spain,” I remember him saying breathlessly as he sank another oyster, “is the food capital of the world!” 

That was seven maybe eight years ago.

I ordered another beer and looked at the food again - meatballs in salsa, fried fish, hake roe, pimientos spread like oil paintings over clay. A similar hue to the sandstone cliffs that house the troglodyte caves where they once dried weed for baskets, and the hollows where the Romans fermented garum - a sort of Centurion’s Worcestershire sauce.

The old woman opened a huge metal oven, and the bar was filled with the smell of almond wood. She pulled out two huge steaks and headed to the rich couple’s table.

The game came on. No overpaid, half-time punditry from crisps-peddlers here, just adverts. Then I spotted it. The menu of the day. A huge roasting tray filled with potatoes the size of giants’ toes, and legs and shoulders of lamb - cooked not to pinkness, but to falling-away succulence.

She heaped a metal plate and put it in the wood oven to warm through, then asked whether I wanted salad to kick things off. She suggested pimientos.

A plate arrived with a basket of bread. Green and red streaks from Van Gogh’s palette, studded with black olives, and draped in garlic. Seconds later the peppers were snatched and the lamb arrived.

A whole front leg and parts of shoulder. Half a kilo of potatoes roasted not in the usual way, but more like fondant spuds - stewed in the lamb juices so the bottom was soft and the top wreathed in smoke and crisp from the fire.

It was incredible. I pulled off a huge strand of meat and munched. If I had one more meal - my Death Row Meal - this would be it. You'd hardly worry about the calories. The bone was thick, the meat was thick, the juice was thick, the fat was soon thick around my lips and hands.

The meat juices were seasoned with whole black peppercorns, sprigs of thyme and rosemary, the garlic papery and unpeeled. The taste was magical. Onions, a little white wine, but not much else. What else?

The lamb had been fattened on the nearby cliffs, munching samphire, wild rosemary and thyme. My word did this beast have flavour. I was half-way there, bursting. I picked up the leg bone like a troglodyte. Juice smeared, fat everywhere.

Uruguay scored again. “Goooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!” roared the Spanish commentator. His favourite part of the job. The stadium went wild. 

The dish deserved more applause. The woman asked me if I wanted postre. Just another cold beer. I washed my face, I washed my fingers, and then I told her what an excellent meal it was. She looked happy.

I sat outside, barely able to move. My stomach thrust towards Venus. The couple were now on gin and tonics and chocolate desserts. I looked at the sign. I hadn’t seen it earlier. There it was - asado cordero.

My bill came. Three beers, half a sheep and enough potatoes to sink a freighter for 16 euros. Where else in the world would you get a meal like that? Only in Spain. Only in Spain. Then the trap door fell open.

Experimentations With Spanish Food: Pollo Aguilas

For this to be a success, the chicken needs to be hacked into about 15 smallish pieces. So get your chopper out and plaster the walls or, better still, get the butcher to do it.

When I cooked this the other day in Aguilas, a lovely seaside town in southeast Spain, with thankfully not a Brit, German, or best of all, Russian in sight, the butcher attacked it straight away thinking I was making paella. But I can hardly blame him with my Spanish pronunciation and the custom in Aguilas of leaving the "s" off the end of words.

He soon made short work of it, using a half-moon hitlerite monstrosity that looked more like a halberd than something you´d get in a butcher´s shop, and it took to the bones like a sizzling poker through warm butter.

In fact, while on the subject of bones, it's important to buy a decent chicken that's led some sort of life foraging for acorns and things. Sturdier bones and muscles offer far more flavour, rather than the brittle-boned, bacon-across-its back daisies you often get in the UK.

But it´s easy to be a food snob here in Aguilas, with lovely, corn-fed chickens at two euros a kilo, which means they wouldn´t dream of importing (literally) couped-up Frankenhens from Thailand.
 

POLLO AGUILAS
(Serves 3-4)

1 chicken (about 1.3kg)
1 large Spanish onion
3 garlic cloves
1 carrot, diced
3 celery sticks, diced
20 green beans, in inch-wide pieces
150g decent chorizo sausage, diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tsp of salt
1 tablespoon harissa paste
8 green olives
500g jar cooked white beans
100ml Spanish brandy (Terry Centenario is ideal)

Heat the olive oil, then put the chicken pieces in skin-side down. Turn when golden brown. Fry for 15 minutes until browned all over.

Add the salt and chorizo and cook for a few minutes, turning all the time. Add the onions, carrot, celery and garlic and cook for 20 minutes or so stirring regularly.

You´ll find the vegetables and chicken produce enough liquid to make a thick liquor to stop any burning. Then add the brandy, harissa paste and green beans. Cook for another five minutes.

Add the beans (including the jelly from the jar) and cook for a couple more minutes. Then leave a lid on and let it rest for at least 30 minutes while you polish off the rest of the brandy and shout at the Spanish family arguing in the street.

Finish the meal off with white bread and manchego cheese, or similar ewe-milk cheese.

The Old Man And The Cheese

Pic: Patricia Varela/Flickr

The door squeaked behind him, as it did every evening when the old man walked in. He turned and smiled at Mr Dutt, who was teaching his granddaughter how to add using two ivory dice.

The little girl was counting each dot and Mr Dutt was trying to get her to remember that two and six are always eight, and five and four are nine - whichever way round they are. She preferred her way. It was more fun counting each dot, and she could spend more time with her grandfather.

The old man shuffled down the aisle, between the tins and racks of dusty birthday cards to the fridge at the back of the shop. He stopped for a moment at the cat food. Jessie still had half a tin. It was enough for tonight.

He opened the fridge door, pulling harder than he needed to, and felt the temperature of the cider tins. Mr Dutt was still doing five for four. Nine percent. Almost as strong as wine, but without the flavour. Just the distant notes of sour apples and cheap alcohol. It was enough for tonight.

He pulled ten cans from the back of the fridge and balanced them under his left arm in the crevices of his raincoat. It had been worn once by a country gent and spent its first year folded in the boot of his vintage car, before eventually finding its way to a charity shop where the old man had bought it three years ago, when his luck had changed.

The smell of five-star petrol had long been replaced with cider fumes and ripe cheese. The old man adjusted the cans and then stopped at the milk section as he did every night. He coughed frantically, hacking away at his lungs, and then stumbled towards the milk, and with his free hand grabbed a block of cheese and put it in his pocket. It had the curved shape of Edam.

He turned again unsteadily, regaining his balance, and shuffled towards the counter. Mr Dutt rolled his eyes and then the dice again. One and one. The little girl put a finger on each dot.

“One. Two!” she said.

“Snake eyes,” said the old man.

The little girl looked up at him and then giggled.

“Snake eye,” she said.

The old man pulled a handful of coins from his pocket, and waited for any change. The girl picked up the cans with both hands and slid them into a plastic bag.

“Put another one or the bag will split,” Mr Dutt said gently.

The old man opened the garage door and Jesse ran to greet him, rubbing her tail against his leg and mewing for her tin. He spooned out the pink sludge and collapsed on a grimy mattress on the concrete floor. It was the only thing he had left from the fire.

He pulled the cheese from his pocket, broke the wrapper with his two good teeth and then bit off a chunk, dissolving the cloying fat with a mouthful of cider. Then he bit off more, turning his mouth slowly, and grimacing at the pain in his back.

The old man woke with a half-empty can in his hand. The rest were crushed next to his mattress. Jesse was purring next to him. Winter was setting in. The embers from the tin can he warmed his hands on were long cold.

He gathered his coat around him and shut his eyes, hoping to sleep through the hangover. Not that he really had hangovers any more. He slept because it meant less time worrying about food and drink. I’d sleep all the time if I could, he thought. But who would look after Jesse? Besides, he didn’t have the strength.

The old man was praying in the railway arch, with a cardboard sign at his feet, as he did most days. The rain was pelting hard. The shoppers had their heads down. It was a bad day for begging. It had been a bad week for begging.

He was bent forward on his knees, his hands clasped in prayer as he’d seen the beggars do near Charles Bridge when he had money. Some of them could keep it up for hours. Cardboard the only cushioning for gravel-dented knees.

Some sat inside the cathedral and held their hands over candles. That’s too hard, he thought, even in this cold. It’s not the pain, it’s the blisters. Too long and they come out like yellow gobstoppers.

A woman looked down at him, and then looked away quickly. He could feel her pace quicken. An hour or so later, perhaps two, there was another drop. It sounded heavy - perhaps a nugget. Too light for a two-pound coin, and not a 50p - they give a different tinkle; something to do with the edges.

If he was right, and it was a pound, he had enough for four ciders and two tins of pink sludge. Or three cans and one decent tin of cat food with delicious jelly and juicy bits and gravy like the advert said.

Jesse was going off the pink sludge. She’d seen the advert as well. She stared at the telly and drooled. The woman snipped the pouch and had a whiff of the lamb casserole and poured it into a bowl, the jelly glistening away, and none of it had been lost on Jesse.

She’d seen that cat tucking in with its fat little cheeks and Equity card. There was more to the world than pink sludge. Her eyes had been opened. The Bishop was right. There was too much pester power in the world, and it wasn’t just what kids wanted for Christmas. Cats were in on it too.

Two cans of the strong stuff and a pouch of coq au vin with baby shallots, he thought. Then there was a double drop. A pair of 20s probably. They had the tinkle of 50s, but not the thump.

Then another drop. A heavier clatter this time. You often found that with begging, the old man thought. When you get a good drop another one follows. Someone sees someone give and it catches on. People are like sheep, he thought, especially in London.

No room to move, just follow the ones ahead. Works the other way too, mind. If people are in the mood for walking, looking you hard in the eye and shaking their heads, it catches on too. The herd has decided - it’s not a day for milking.

That’s why he liked to beg with his face to the floor. He didn’t get the hard looks, or the pity either. But there were always more hard looks than pity.

His stomach was rumbling. I bet Jesse’s is as well, he thought. Bad day for begging. People give more when it’s sunny. Hasn’t stopped raining for weeks. That’s what happens when the world gets warmer. The ache in his back was getting worse. He didn’t dare look in the bowl. Not yet.

Perhaps it was more than he thought. He remembered the time he’d spent an afternoon with his face to the floor without a single drop, and then got up to find a crisp £20 note in the bowl.

There wasn’t one this time, but there were a couple of nuggets. He counted the coins as best he could - £5.47. Not the worst day he’d had. But there were far better ways to make a living.

Two cans and a pouch of braised monkfish in gravy stock, or perhaps chicken in cheese with chives. His stomach gurgled again at the thought of the cat food. The only thing he’d eaten all day was half a sandwich he’d found in a bin and a few scraps from a box of fried chicken. Amazing how many people leave the skin.

He put the coins in his raincoat and held on to the wall as he clambered to his feet. His legs were numb, he couldn’t feel his boots. He held on to the wall until his head stopped spinning. The sickness was coming back, but he’d have to eat something first.

He hobbled down the street, his neck hunched against the rain, and his collar pulled tight. He heard the cheery jingle in his pocket.

The old man pulled open the door harder than he needed to. Mr Dutt was teaching his granddaughter to read. She looked up from her book and smiled.

“Snake eye,” she said.

The old man grinned and wandered off to the fridge. He picked out four cans of cider and then looked at the gourmet pouches. They were more than he thought. More than the advert said. He put back two cans. Ocean delicacies with whole shrimp, or duck and turkey?

He walked towards the counter, and staggered slightly at the milk section. But this time he couldn’t do it, however much he coughed. It wasn’t the new cameras. He’d stolen cheese a dozen times since then. It was something else.

He stood there staring at the milk. He couldn’t look at the cheeses. But he knew they were there. Wedges of Edam and amber blocks of Red Leicester, glistening under the lights, clammy moisture beneath.

He staggered again and did his trick, but his hand was still empty. The little girl walked past him, book in hand, and disappeared through the beaded curtain where her mother was cooking.

The old man put the cans and gourmet pouch on the counter. He reached into his pocket and began counting out the coins, staring at the green display. He hobbled to the door, his stomach gurning at the smells from the kitchen. The sickness was setting in. He looked at the rain thundering on the pavement.

He pulled his collar tight, and felt a tug on his trouser leg. He looked round. The little girl was looking up at him.

“You’ve forgotten something,” she said and handed him a block of cheese.