This is the first meal I've ever documented this way. First reason, obviously, it's El Bulli man. Second reason, it's my birthday weekend extravaganza in Barcelona with Glyn and he's given me a pretty sweet little camera. A couple are blurry, dark, or too close because I was fooling around with all the exciting, new buttons. Oh, but they're not all bad...
Imagine it in Spanish: it's evening in Roses, and the French (because everyone here is French) are walking their tiny, well groomed dogs and plying their whingy kids with ice-cream cones. Outside the decent, but rather shabby Hotel Marina, is a taxi stand:
"Good evening! We're going to El Bulli, do you know where that is?" I ask.
"El Bulli? Ah, well, it's my first day actually..." The driver makes a quick and lispy phone call during which he is obviously being given directions. "Oh-ho! You meant El Boo-yee" He says, folding up his phone. And we begin the ten minute drive up that winding, narrow road along the ocean. It's beautiful here, but more importantly, you don't pronounce those l's in El Bulli--two l's make a y. Because it's Spanish, after all. And despite the French occupation of Roses, this is Spain. And not just Spain, but Catalunya, the graffittied ruins that whizz past remind me, and the revolution is coming.
This certainly isn't a newsflash, but all Mexican food is not created equal. I mean, of course the Chevy's I've occasionally resorted it is an inevitable disappointment, but even what passes for reasonably respectable Mexican food in a lot of places can be pretty horrific. Boston, in my experience, has terrible Mexican food. I spent four years there essentially twitching in desperation for something resembling a decent taco. In our freshman year, Stephen and I went to a restaurant that came very highly recommended. They actually managed to make a quesadilla nearly inedible. We went back one other time, hoping we'd just been on a bad day, but the food did not improve.
The problem, of course, is that cities without many visible Mexican people rarely have excellent Mexican food. Forty years after the race riots in Roxbury, Boston is still a surprisingly white city. In addition to the problematic social and cultural implications, this means the odds of getting decent guacamole are pretty slim.
The Nashville of my earliest years was a similar city. Back in the years before salsa was the best-selling condiment in America, my understanding of Mexican cuisine went no farther than Chi-Chi's, and it went there infrequently. When my mother was pregnant with me, a friend of hers was the manager of a Chi-Chi's, and he treated her to an all-she-could-eat pseudo-Mexican feast. The hours she later spent throwing up put her off the idea for some time.
Over time, that aspect of Nashville's culinary landscape broadened. Slowly at first, immigrants arrived, and the food in the Music City changed for the better. I know a lot of people there who have some militantly angry feelings about immigration in general. Many of them are the same people who have forgotten a time when they didn't even know what cilantro was, let alone whether or not they thought it tasted like soap. I, for one, am nothing but enthusiastic about this recent cultural shift.
The lid slide off the small cooler as Stephen hoisted it into the overhead compartment. He'd had to lower the locking handle to fit the cooler in, so a gentle bump was all it took for the lid to fall and bonk the gentleman in the aisle seat. Stephen apologized numerously and with genuine repentance, but the man was not placated. Later, as Stephen passed by on his way to the bathroom, the man elbowed him in the hip.
This is proof of a few things: one, that Stephen really loves me. Two, that I really, really love barbecue. We'd taken turns toting the cooler containing just under three pounds of pulled pork and six small, styrofoam tubs of sauce through the airport. He doesn't love barbecue the way I do; his mouth doesn't water when he thinks of tender shreds that mingle porky unctuousness with a perfume of smoke. Still, he took his turns carrying the cooler, even letting me slip the lid aside to catch a smoky whiff. Useful, that boy.
I realize I should go back a bit, begin at the beginning. Barbecue, a word so loaded with history and etymology, regionalism and secrecy, it both demands explanation and defies it. Lovers tend toward an intolerable snottiness when they explain it to the uninitiated, so I'll do my best to be brief. Barbecue, as a verb, means to cook a piece of meat oh so very slowly over an indirect fire, to braise it in smoke, until incomparable tenderness is achieved. Questions of seasonings, dry rubs and sauces, have evaded more serious barbecue scholars than myself, so I'll stick to technique. Hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, portobello mushrooms, chicken in sticky sauce, any of that cooked on a grate over coals was grilled, not barbecued.
Barbecue, as a noun, can refer to any cut of any animal cooked in such a way, but typically the word is shorthand for something specific, depending on where you're from. In Texas it means brisket; it's ribs in Kansas City. Where I have family in North-western Kentucky, they tend toward mutton. I'm from Nashville, and in Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Alabama, if you say barbecue with no modifiers, you probably mean smoked, shredded pork shoulder. We eat those other things too, I've seen everything from whole pigs to elk legs thrown in a smoker, but the barbecue closest to our hearts is pulled pork.
Hey, kids, I've been back for a week now and all is well. I've got a couple of posts stored up, but we left our camera in Nashville, and I sort of wanted to wait to post when I got it back and could include pictures. But now I'm tired of waiting, so that's that; I'll go ahead and start getting them up.