Month: May 2021

My first step in diving into a new cuisine is to track down a couple of well-reviewed cookbooks and read them cover-to-cover, making two lists: specific recipes I want to try and ingredients that I want to have on hand, either because they’re pervasive across the cuisine or because they’re specialized, iconic, and not really substitutable. The Denver Metro area has a pretty good ethnic food scene and most things I find I can source or substitute fairly easily, but there’s always one thing. For Basque cuisine, it’s becoming clear to me that that thing is going to be cheese.

There just aren’t that many Basque cookbooks out there, and even fewer that go beyond the narrow and specific category of pinxtos/tapas. I got the two shown above from the library and bought José Pizarro’s new release (still on its way). I got so much out of Pizarro’s Seasonal Spanish Food when I was working my way through Asturia and Galicia last winter, and I’m thrilled that he has a new book out just in time to be relevant to what I’m doing here. I got through these the other night and I’ve started sourcing what I’ve put on my list.

Alexandra Raij takes no shortcuts and pulls no punches. Basque cooking, she reiterates, is all about the ingredients, and there are some things that just can’t be substituted. Jamón and bacalao. Those little pippara peppers, and choriceros. Idiazabal and Roncal and Ossau-Iraty cheese and bleus – Bleu des Basques and Cabrales – and about a million little hyperlocal varieties that are all just called ardi gasna (sheep’s-milk cheese). Seafood, and lots of it, fresh and quality, in great variety.

Marti Buckley’s Basque Country is just as much all about the balance of seasonal fresh foods and iconic preserved foods, but it’s a little more accessible. I can get all the seafood I need at the Korean supermart in Aurora; we’re coming into the right season for most the fresh veg I’ll need on a regular basis (which is why I chose spring/summer for this project in the first place) and I found a reliable, if slightly spendy, source for frozen artichokes.

When I started on the north coast tour last winter, my big investment was making twenty pounds of air-cured chorizo; but I hesitated at the price of real Spanish jamón, muddling through with a mixture of American ham, prosciutto and salted pork belly (many of the recipes called for jamón or pork belly). But with Basque recipes it’s just unavoidable. So I’ve got a half-pound kit of sliced Fermin serrano on the way. The remaining ingredient that’s really giving me fits is Idiazabal. It’s easy to find but runs $40+ per pound online, so I’m just going to have to make the rounds of the specialty stores in town. Dangerous… what else will I not be able to resist coming home with?

When people are involved in their work, they experience, and produce as experience, a dissolution of the reified object, and for that matter, the reified subject. Involvement in the world is a negation process, a dissolving. There is no such “thing” as the environment, since, being involved in it already, we are not separate from it. – Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature

Perhaps I shouldn’t have picked up on a whim, on the strength of an appealing cover, what turned out to be a very mediocre hiking memoir by a very average dude directly on the heels of a meaty and nuanced aesthetics work on the problems in environmental writing. But I did, and I got some unexpected things out of it, more from my own reactions than from the book itself.

I am reminded, first of all, that so many of the brightest lights in ecological, nature, and place-based American literature – and especially of the American West – came to writing from work that involved slow and careful observation of the natural world. Dude describes exploring Capitol Reef with a copy of Ed Abbey in his pack, without seeming to take any significance from the fact that at the time Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, he was a working park ranger. Abbey was a fire lookout too. So were Norman Maclean, Doug Peacock, Philip Connors. Aldo Leopold was a forester of course, and it’s less known that John Muir was a geologist, and the line between art and science blurs in the work of the many, many naturalists and ecologists who are better known as writers.

That kind of observation, that kind of immersion, takes time. And when my life shifted away from that immersion, feared becoming the kind of dilettante nature writer and artist I hate, dipping in and out of places, skimming beauty and poignancy off the surface without the give-and-take of deeper relationships.

I’ve been living with my heart somewhere else. In the past, with John, with my small children, with a the aspirations of a younger and more naïve version of myself. In the future, with my books and art in a home of my own making, with friends in and out and good food and wine and music and meaningful work. One a beach or mountainside, a hiking trail or riffling river or the built-up layers of history along street in a city where the language is not my own, anywhere but here, in the textureless grey mundanity of a square-box apartment too far from anything that I feel drawn or attached to. Marking time, treading water, waiting. Just waiting.

Recently I’ve become afraid that I’m so out of practice at being in the world that I don’t even know how anymore. And so I started practicing, and what I found intriguing was that sensation of lostness itself – the experience in my body of living through a liminal time and space, the ebb and flow of my mood and energy, what I resist and what I desire, what sustains and what dismays me.