The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  I put the first sack on the sack-barrow and rolled it across to the hopper. I flipped it over onto the edge and untied the string. I paused. There was an unmistakeable smell. I checked my boots for dog shit… Nothing there, oddly enough. I opened the sack… Inside was a putrid mass of evil-smelling brown sludge. That was where the smell of dog shit was coming from – the whole damn lot had gone mouldy.

  ‘Hombre!’ said the chief in my ear. ‘You don’t want to store olives in plastic sacks. That’s what happens; they go mouldy. I can’t pay you much for these.’

  ‘Pay me?! You mean, you’ll accept this muck to go in with the oil?’ I was incredulous, looking at the steaming brown slime in the sack and then at the chief.

  ‘I can give you a duro a kilo for that stuff,’ he said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. ‘Otherwise you might as well throw it out; nobody else is going to give you anything for it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, crestfallen – a duro was five pesetas, about 2p. ‘I guess that’s a bit better than nothing… What shall I do with it?’

  ‘Just tip it in the hopper,’ he said.

  ‘What! In there, with all the good stuff?’

  ‘Claro. Just tip it in.’

  Slowly, reluctantly, I took the sack by the bottom and rolled the disgusting contents into the hopper. I watched as it slithered slowly down to the bottom, and then went to get another sack. Sixty sacks there were – it took me half an hour to cart them across the yard, untie them and tip the muck into the hopper. A queue began to build behind me, half a dozen men with their hands in their overalls, idly scratching their crotches and looking with mild curiosity, but not much surprise, at the mephitic sludge I was pouring into their olive oil.

  ‘You don’t want to store olives in those feed sacks,’ said one. ‘They go rotten.’ This particular conversational form – the statement of the obvious – is one at which the Spaniard excels. ‘Yes, but he’s a foreigner,’ explained another. ‘He does not know the olive.’

  With each new sack I hoped there just might be a few nice, shiny, black olives, so I might salvage the tiniest bit of self-respect. But no: each sack seemed worse than the last. The men seemed more indifferent than hostile, or even critical, and when the horrible business was over I felt pretty bad about taking the paltry 10,000 pesetas (about £40).

  I returned home with my tail between my legs and the foul-smelling sacks in the trailer, to tell Ana of my foolishness. I suppose she should have known as well as me, but somehow the matter of sacking and storage of bulk products seems to be the man’s department. I slept badly that night, wracked with remorse. What made my transgression feel worse was that the oil you got from Muñoz’s mill was not your own oil. As with most of the bigger mills, all the oil goes together into the great storage tanks and, if you want oil rather than – or as well as – cash, you go to pick it up when it’s settled and bottled.

  Later in the spring, my shame had settled sufficiently for me to go and collect a few bottles of oil for the house. A little to my surprise, the oil seemed fine – nice and clear and a light gold in colour. I couldn’t imagine what they had done to achieve this, what filters and fierce refinements they had employed – but there it was, and it tasted alright. Not what I now know as a gourmet oil, but serviceable.

  The year after, we had another fair harvest, and this time we picked it fast, stored it carefully and got it to the mill as quickly as possible. There wasn’t too much of a queue, and I parked the car, anticipating with some pleasure the tipping of my sacks of clean, glistening olives into the hopper and watching them hop and hobble up the conveyor belt into the cleaner that would blow out the twigs and leaves.

  ‘Where might a man go who wanted to take a leak?’ I enquired.

  ‘Round the back there,’ indicated the harassed chief with a jerk of his thumb.

  I wandered round the back of the mill. There was a curious smell. I checked the sole of my boot once again, then pulled up short. Here was a mountain of olives forty-foot high. An evil-smelling steamy vapour was lazily rising from the pile, which was covered with a thick, oozing mat of pallid mould. The smell was the smell of my olives of the year before, only worse, and the olives in the pile, which had clearly been building up for weeks, had become an indescribable, mouldy mush.

  ‘Always happens when we get a backlog of olives,’ the chief reassured me, when I returned to the mill. ‘No importa – the refining cleans it all up.’

  I decided not to go back to that mill again, and cast about for somewhere to take our olives that was more in line with our hale and wholesome principles. I stumbled eventually upon what’s known as the ‘Muslim Mill’, a new outfit, rather nicely located in a dense olive grove to the west of the town. There’s a sizeable Muslim community in Órgiva, composed mostly of Spanish conversos and a miscellany of Sufis from all over the world. They have a rather enviable co-operative philosophy and, perhaps as a result of this, had pipped to the post all the other ecological and agricultural groups in setting up their own mill.

  Although a modest little place, the Muslim Mill is equipped with the latest in Italian oil-pressing technology. That makes its practices not quite as traditional as they might be, in that the oil is centrifuged rather than crushed out by the towers of capachos, and your hardliner would have it that this damages the oil’s finer properties. But to me it tastes pretty good, and the important thing is that you can be sure of getting your own oil from your own olives, so the skill you employ in harvesting and caring for your trees comes home to reward you. That’s become increasingly important to me as our farming has slid imperceptibly into gardening.

  As for the Muslim millers – well, they are far from cheap, and in all probability are on the make just like everybody else. However, Abd’l Khalil, the chief, is a first-generation miller (and a first-generation Muslim, come to that – he was once a José), so he has been spared the gene pool. And those draconian injunctions in the Q’uran against usury and suchlike give you a certain confidence – a hope that if you’re being ripped off, it’s done cleanly.

  SALAD DAYS

  GASTRONOMIC ACCOLADE was the header of Michael Jacobs’ email. Yes, in the past year, even El Valero has joined the digital age – at least, whenever the radio-telephone is in the mood. As the message appeared, I gathered that I had been invited to join El Dornillo, the gastronomic society of Valdepeñas de Jaén. This was a privilege indeed, for members are entitled to attend quarterly feasts created by Michael’s neighbour Juan Matias, one of the great chefs of Andalucía. I had been elected, the email noted, for my ‘efforts in promoting the food and wine of the Sierra Sur’. This was curious, for while I had certainly ingested and imbibed a fair bit of the food and wine of the Sierra Sur, I had no recall of having actually helped its dissemination. I suspected that Michael had rigged the election, though it may also have helped that as a schoolboy I played drums for Genesis, which, believe it or not, cuts a lot of ice in Valdepeñas de Jaén. There’s even a Bar Genesis, somewhere in town.

  My inauguration as a pinche de honor – an ‘honorary kitchen help’ – was to coincide with El Dornillo’s April feast, which is traditionally held in an arcadian valley setting, furnished with a clear stream, a copse of tall poplars and a great bowl of mountains, just to the north of Valdepeñas. I arrived, as requested, at midday, with the sun shining from a chilly but pellucid blue sky. The Sierra Sur is high, and spring comes a little later than it does in the Alpujarras, so the trees had as yet only the palest of green tinges, the colour of the new buds.

  A goat, or choto, was doing the honours for the society that day, the previous gathering having been graced by a couple of Iberian pigs. It made its appearance in two huge frying pans over a log fire. One contained the celebrated choto al ajillo, consisting of chopped goat with an armful of garlic, all boiled in oil. In the other was choto a la caldereta, similar to choto al ajillo but with the addition of red peppers and onions. Juan Matias, who seemed entirely at ease with cooking over an open fire for a hundre
d guests and more, explained to me the niceties of the different methods of preparation.

  The smell of the goat and its attendant garlic sizzling away over the blazing fire was driving the company to distraction. The sun shone and the throng eddied and flowed around tables charged with wines from nearby Alcalá la Real and tapas of embutidos – small sausages and suchlike left over from the pig feast. And then the president called us all to attention for the inauguration of new members. A handful of us stepped forward to be presented with an assembly of gifts: a straw hat to keep off the bright April sunshine, an apron that signified our status as pinches, and a pergamino – a most official-looking parchment in a frame with a little wooden dornillo (mixing bowl) affixed to the top left hand corner. The inscription on my parchment referred to me as Don Christopher Stewart, which had a nice ring to it. Michael, however, told me that his own, which he keeps mounted on the wall above his chimney breast, was even more impressive, inscribed as it is to a Don Michael Jackson.

  The newly inducted kitchen helps stumbled through speeches of acceptance and thanks, as the collective appetites approached critical mass. But at last the business was complete, and with sighs of ravenous delight the company fell upon the perfectly cooked goat. More wine flowed, and as we had our fill of choto, fruits and pastries did the rounds. It was a glorious occasion in itself, but it was amenizado – which I used to think meant ‘menaced’, but in fact means ‘enlivened’ – by the band of the Valdepeñas Old Folks’ Home. These characters made the Buena Vista Social Club look like striplings, with a combined age for the eight of them approaching seven hundred years (I sometimes wonder about the usefulness of ‘combined ages’ as a statistic). They gave it all they’d got and, as the afternoon turned to evening, and the company moved from wine to Cuba Libres, the music took on a life of its own. There were four guitars, two bandurrias (lutes), a saxophone and an accordion, and they were cracking for all they were worth through the dance numbers.

  I found myself musing over how many guitarists you’d find for your band in your average British old folks’ home; the Spanish seem to have it over us in this department. There was singing too, with songsheets, a number or two from each nearby village, including one that contained the memorable refrain:

  Si tu me quieres

  Meteré un pepino en tu buzón which, roughly translated, means, ‘If you love me, I’ll slip a cucumber in your letterbox.’

  The Spanish are fond of a salacious conceit.

  For days afterwards I was fired up with enthusiasm for the simple country feast, the déjeuner sur l’herbe perfumed with the scent of roasting meat. I felt sure that I could emulate the Dornillo’s cooking in our own valley: not with goat (for I ‘do not know the goat’, as the locals would have it) but with a couple of lambs as the main attraction. An occasion soon presented itself. It was shortly to be my fifty-first birthday – three seventeens for those with a fondness for prime numbers – and I felt that this was a pretty significant age to celebrate, the all-important half-century having slipped by with barely a cake and a candle.

  I put the word about that I would be throwing a feast down in the valley by the confluence of the rivers. According to the local feng shui experts (who are legion in the Alpujarras), this would be a most auspicious place to have a bash – or anything else, for that matter – on account of the meeting of waters. Thus encouraged, I invited pretty much everyone I knew and, when a good number intimated that they might come, I chose and dispatched two lambs and hung them, in accordance with local wisdom, from an orange tree so that they should absorb the humours of the night air and the azahar, the sweet scent of the tree.

  Having farmed sheep for the last thirty years of my life, I’ve become quite adept at cooking them. There are any number of things you can do with a lamb, but if the meat’s good – and, though I say it myself, our lamb is tasty – then the simplest recipe is best. I just rub the whole thing over with olive oil and salt, then lay it on a spit over the hot embers. For the glaze, I make up a mix, warmed in a pan, of marmalade, honey, orange juice, soy sauce, garlic, cayenne pepper and whisky. I make lots of it and slap it on constantly right through the cooking process. If all goes well, when the cooking is done, I serve up a lamb like a big toffee apple, the skin looking like one of those bashed-flat ducks you see hanging in the Chinese eateries in Soho, while inside the crisp sweet glaze the meat is deliciously tender and succulent.

  There was a minor problem, however, in that a good many of our friends do not eat meat. All of the local Spaniards do, but the expat community of Órgiva is engulfed in a raft of alternative diets, from straightforward vegetarianism through to vegan, ovo-lacto-vegan, macrobiotic and ayurvedic. There is also a small but significant minority of crudo-vegans, who eat only raw food – a fad which seems to be sweeping the alternative Alpujarras. It’s a tough regime to keep up in the winter, they tell me, and not really a ball of fun in the summer, either; but apparently it makes you feel a whole lot better than you did in the dark old days when you fired your food, and there is ample evidence, for those who can see, that mankind was never intended to cook his food.

  Not surprisingly the issue of what to serve a crudo-vegan guest is a vexed one. I settled on tabouleh, which, although it involves some serious graft at the chopping board, tends to be acceptable to everyone, and is a terrific accompaniment to the meat. I make mine, if anyone’s interested, with an armful of mint, another of parsley, a bucket of tomatoes (ripe to the verge of putrefaction), a chopped head of garlic, a couple of jugs of lemon juice and a great heap of nutty bulghur wheat. To this vegan largesse I added a bowl of salsa, hot enough to lift the top of your head, along with some crisps to dunk into it, and some buckets of baba ghanoush, humus and other dainties. I was rather proud of the spread I had created until Ana pointed out that the crudo-vegans would have nothing to do with the bulghur wheat (which was boiled), or the crisps (fried), aubergines (baked) or chickpeas (boiled to a pulp). I rather defensively suggested that even crudo-ovo-lacto-vegans might feel an atavistic pleasure in sitting close to the smoke and imbibing the smell of roasting meat; it’s something that goes deep in all of us.

  The old folks’ band of Valdepeñas lived too far away to invite, and I imagine their touring days are over, but a couple of friends had agreed to play guitar and flute and we engaged the services of a dazzling puppeteer, whose performance could keep the adults, as well as children, spellbound.

  The morning of the festivities arrived bright and clear and I lit a great fire of olive and driftwood from the river, and kept it fed to produce a smouldering heap of charcoal. At the last minute, however, as the guests started to arrive, I realised that I had no spit to mount the lambs on, or at least the one that I had would hold the lamb over the fire but was useless for rotating it. What I needed was a couple of crosspieces welded onto the steel pole to fix the meat while I turned and basted it.

  I had never done any welding before but I had always liked the look of it. Someone had left an electric welder on the farm after a building job and I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to handle, so I started the generator, cut the crosspieces to length and set to the welding. Very swiftly I realised that there was a lot more to the job than meets the eye. First of all there is no way you can see what you’re doing; the glass in a welder’s mask is completely black, as well it should be, so you cannot see at all until you get the blinding spark of light when electrode connects with metal. Then, when you can see, you are invariably in the wrong place: you try and move the rod but it sticks to the metal and defies all your efforts at wiggling it about to free it. But that’s only the very basics. The hard part comes when you do succeed in getting a proper spark in the right place, and the two pieces of metal actually stick together – whereupon you’re supposed, for some unfathomable reason, to bash it with a hammer.

  I smacked the spit rods hard with the hammer, as I had seen welders do, and with a clank the joined pieces fell apart. I cursed and rearranged them. I could hear the first m
erry-makers hooting and braying in the valley below; they would have to wait, I hadn’t even started cooking the lamb yet; it would serve them right for arriving early. I peered into the blackness of the mask again. FFZZSAPP went the electrode and a great clod of molten metal formed nicely between the two poles. Rather pleased with myself, I put the mask aside, took up the hammer and gave it a gentle tap. With a tinkle the rods parted yet again.

  An early guest suddenly appeared. ‘Hallo there, Chris. What are you doing?’ he enquired in a friendly sort of a way.

  ‘What the hell do you think I’m doing?’ I growled.

  ‘My, you’re in a party mood,’ he said, and ambled off.

  My incompetence with the welder was getting to me. Once more I rearranged the rods, slipped a new electrode into the holder. This time it worked. I blobbed more and more molten metal around the join and finally whopped it with the hammer. Joy of joys, it stayed together. I leaned the finished spit against the wall and set about arranging the second one.

  Just then Ana came into view at the side of my mask. ‘What on earth are you up to?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Everyone’s here and you haven’t even started cooking the lambs.’

  ‘Stay cool,’ I admonished. ‘It’ll be alright. I’ll just weld this spit up and then I’ll be ready to start the cooking.’

  ‘Shall I take this one down to the fire?’ She reached for the completed spit.

  ‘No! Don’t touch that, it’s hot…!’

  But too late: Ana had picked it up, yelped and dropped it. As it hit the ground it returned with a clatter to its earlier state as two separate pieces of iron.

  ‘Jeezus-Christ!! Now look what you’ve done,’ I shouted.