By August, cooking in Catalonia can feel like a punishment for having bought food.
The kitchen is already warm before anyone touches the hob. Opening the oven would be an act of aggression. Even the idea of boiling a pan of water seems unnecessarily ambitious.
This is when dinner stops being a cooked meal and becomes a collection of things placed on the table.
Bread. Tomatoes. Olives. Cheese. Anchovies for anyone who wants them. A packet of crisps usually appears too, although nobody admits to putting it there.
It is one of the easiest Catalan meals to make and somehow it still takes us ages to eat.
Start with the bread and tomatoes
Pa amb tomàquet does most of the work. The bread can be toasted if the toaster does not feel like too much heat, though fresh crusty bread is fine. Cut a ripe tomato across the middle and rub the cut side straight onto the bread until the flesh has disappeared into it. Add olive oil and salt.
That is all.
It still feels slightly odd to me that the tomato skin is left in my hand afterwards, empty and rather sad. I used to think I was doing it wrong. Apparently that is simply what a properly used tomato looks like.
The tomato matters more than people let on. A hard supermarket tomato will skid across the bread and leave little more than a damp pink mark. You need one that is properly ripe, the sort that would struggle to survive the journey home at the bottom of a shopping bag.
Then empty the fridge
Once the bread is done, the rest is less a recipe than an inspection of what we already have.
Olives go into a bowl. Manchego sometimes appears, although a Catalan cheese is better if there is one in the fridge. Fuet can be sliced thinly enough to make it look as if someone has made an effort. Anchovies stay in their tin because transferring them to a plate creates washing up for no good reason.
If there are roasted peppers or aubergines left from earlier in the week, they become escalivada. It is served at room temperature with olive oil and a little salt. It also makes the meal look far more organised than it really is.
Tomato salad works too. Thick slices, olive oil and salt, with onion if everyone is willing to live with the consequences.
Nothing needs to arrive at the same time. That may be the best part. Someone remembers the cheese halfway through. Another person finds a jar of pickled onions just as the bread is running out. The table changes while we eat.
A meal without a timetable
Hot weather changes the shape of the evening here. Dinner moves later because eating while the sun is still attacking the windows seems ridiculous. Nobody wants a large plate of anything. We sit longer and eat in small instalments.
This works particularly well for Albert. A table full of separate foods is easier than a dish where everything has been mixed together and cannot be identified. He can see the bread, the tomatoes and the cheese. He knows what each thing is before it reaches his plate.
There is no grand attempt to persuade him to try the anchovies. I have learned enough about family meals to know when a battle is both unnecessary and likely to ruin my own dinner.
He can assemble his own bread and decide how much tomato it needs. Sometimes that means barely any. Sometimes it means rubbing with such determination that the bread begins to collapse. Both count.
What to put on the table
For four people, this is usually plenty:
- One large loaf of crusty bread
- Four or five very ripe tomatoes
- Good olive oil and salt
- A bowl of olives
- Fuet, ham or another cured meat
- Cheese
- Anchovies or tinned tuna
- Roasted peppers or aubergines, if you have them
There are no useful quantities for most of this. Put out what people will eat and return anything untouched to the fridge. The bread is the only thing we consistently underestimate.
Cold melon is good afterwards. So is ice cream. Sometimes the fruit is forgotten because everyone has filled up on bread and somebody has opened another bag of crisps.
The kitchen remains almost clean. There is a knife, a chopping board and a suspicious amount of tomato pulp around the bread basket, but no stack of pans waiting beside the sink.
By then the worst of the heat has usually passed. The windows can be opened and dinner can stay on the table until somebody finally decides the cheese has been outside long enough.