The Hindu Business Line : Of rabbit meat and blood sausage!

Baeza (Spain), Nov. 14 It is a very special afternoon of innovative gourmet fare. The chefs and waiters are students of the La Laguna School of Catering and Tourism in the province of Baeza in Southern Spain. We are a group of 10 international journalists — three from India — invited by the International Olive Oil Council on table olives and olive oil promotion tour of Spain.

The entrees or appetisers are good enough to die for. What I can’t stop eating is a delicious creation of skinned slices of chilled orange fruit with tiny bits of fresh cod fish, covered with olive oil and garnished with spring onions. Fortunately, there is plenty to go around and one knows one is not depriving the others of this delicacy!

Next comes chicken with Palmanese cheese served with a special Mediterranean sauce made of dry apricots. The white wine accompanying the fare is sweet and mild.

As one is wondering how one will do justice to the several main courses that are bound to follow. Till now, we’ve not had a single meal that did not have at least half a dozen appetisers and five main courses, that is, not counting the dessert. Pepper stuffed with what appears to be spinach but ultimately turns out to be blood sausage (blood taken from the pit of the pig) appear on the table.

The young waiter who has been told that I don’t take pork, warns me not to try it. Yasmina, the Serbian psychologist, refuses to touch the stuffing, once she knows that it is pig’s blood. She is the wife of Misha, a correspondent of B 92, one of the larger Radio and TV stations of Serbia. Though she has a Muslim sounding name she is a Christian and though she enjoys ham, which one is told is the best one can find in Europe, she puts her foot down at blood sausage!

Sara, our tour guide — her real name is Enriqueta Avendano, but obviously she finds it simpler to use Sara for different tour groups — is full of tips about Spanish cuisine. All of a sudden cod fish has become very popular in Spanish cuisine. “A few years ago, nobody even looked at it, but suddenly I find it in at all kinds of restaurants,” she says.

We are in the Andalucian region which produces about 80 per cent of olive oil in Spain, which is the number one producer of olive oil in the world at 1.1 million tonnes. The region is steeped in history and there are all kinds of facts and popular lore about the various cultural influences here thanks to its occupation by Islamic and Christian regimes during various periods.

During a gourmet meal in Spain the talk turns to Paella, the popular Spanish dish made with the Bambo variety of rice grown in the Valencia region. Jill Rice, the American journalist, is a fund house of information on the Paella, which can be made with rabbit or different kinds of sea food. She explains how the pan should be filled with broth and the rice put into the boiling broth for just five or six minutes and allowed to be cooked without stirring “because if you stir, the crust will not be formed.”

Sara adds, “When we serve the Paella cooked with rabbit to the British people we never tell them that it is rabbit meat because then they start crying... you see many Brits have rabbits as their pets”.

The tourism industry in Spain is booming and one is told that Spain gets 40 million tourists a year. Its population is 45 million. After the Spaniards, the Brits are the second largest tourist group in Spain.

As though on cue, a dish called Fideua is served, it is made of noodles, shrimps and other seafood and Sara tells us that is as close to Paella that we’ve got in two days... with the noodles substituting the Bambo rice. Whether noodles or rice, it is indeed delicious and is quickly downed.

As the meal winds down to a leisurely end, Sara’s parting line targets the Italians, “Latin killed the ancient Romans, but when I was in school it nearly killed me... I had to learn Greek and Latin.”

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Of rabbit meat and blood sausage!