Flowers, but where's the fish?

The waiter wandered over. 'Está bueno, is it good?'

It's fine, we assured him. A starter dish of brandada de bacalao, which Janine and I were sharing. Fortunately the brandada came packaged in two small parcels of filo pastry, easy to share without mess, nestling cosily on a bed of mushroom sauce. Boletus sauce actually, because this was a smart restaurant, and there were flower petals sprinkled over the top of the little parcels.

This is not our usual kind of food and I had no idea what a brandada was, but swift online research revealed that we were eating salt cod mashed with olive oil, garlic and probably a few other things. It's a favourite dish across the north of Spain and open to interpretation. We were celebrating the anniversary of our arrival on La Gomera as permanent residents, a huge event in our lives, so it seemed right to indulge in something special.

'I can hardly taste the fish, though,' Janine commented after the waiter had floated away.

'No, it's…. mild. Subtle.'

I dipped my fork into the mushroom sauce, just on its own. Mild. Subtle. I thought I could detect cinnamon, perhaps. Or was it cumin?

Subtlety in flavour is, of course, an indication of an expert chef who doesn't try to hammer your palate with taste explosions. Well, some of them do that. This one didn't.

After finishing my filo pastry parcel I wiped out the remaining sauce from the dish with a piece of bread roll, which had marginally more flavour than the mushroom sauce. Here was a demonstration, perhaps, that I can no longer consider myself young. It's said that as the years march on we tend to prefer stronger flavours.

Anyway, prising open a little packet of filo pastry had been fun, like opening a mystery present. For the main dish we ordered a dish of stuffed peppers - those tasty, tangy little red peppers called pimiento de piquillo, in this case filled with spinach and prawns and baked with a gratin of cheese. I was fairly sure this was going to be a commercial frozen product, because they always are. Which busy cook would want to waste time stuffing delicate little peppers when you can buy something perfectly serviceable from the local frozen food shop? But no, I was wrong, these peppers were clearly home-stuffed with home-made stuffing.

'Está bueno?' The waiter again, hovering.

'It's good,' I told him. 'But I can't taste the prawns.' Ah, no, the waiter explained, this was intentional. The chef puts the prawns, spinach and other ingredients into a bowl and mashes them together. He demonstrated a fierce pummelling with one fist mashing the other. 'The flavours mix together.'

Okay.

In our later assessment over coffee we decided that we were simple folk with a preference for simple foods. Our favourite supper at home is fried eggs on a plate of julienne potatoes, with plain, ordinary, unstuffed red peppers and lightly cooked peas. The go-to restaurant meal (apart from pizza) is a lovely white fish called cherne, grilled to perfection but fancied up with nothing more than the typical Canary dressing called mojo. With chips and a little salad.

Peasants.

But by this measure, so is one of the UK's most celebrated celebrity chefs, Rick Stein, who launched an extensive portfolio of successful restaurants and has starred in numerous cookery series in travelogue style on BBC television. We have some of his DVDs and I love watching him trying to be enthusiastic about an artistic arrangement of tiny morsels at the centre of an otherwise empty plate. He can't do it. But see him tackling a simple dish of plain, hearty food and you see a happy man.

-------------- NOTES --------------

The restaurant menu referred to the light and crispy brandada packet as a bric, spelt without a k but pronounced almost like the English word, an interesting example of language transfer designed to confuse the foreigner.

Cherne is a very popular fish in the Canaries but its English name, Atlantic wreckfish, doesn't add much to its appeal. It's chunky but with a mild flavour and very few bones when filleted, often none at all.

The mojo sauce served with cherne (and almost anything else, if you want) comes in two flavours, as I've mentioned in previous stories. Both are based on olive oil and garlic, along with coriander for the green one or red pepper and chilli for the spicier red. The green mojo verde is recommended for the fish and the red mojo picante for the accompanying chips or boiled potatoes, but really it's up to you.

Sea change in the village

Four of us squeeze into the taxi - two large ladies, one small and a guy with long legs. We're on our way to a party with free transport there and back. It's a couple of weeks before Christmas and a gloomy dusk has given way to invisible clouds spitting raindrops as though practising for something worse. This perhaps goes some way towards justifying tonight's cataclysmic break with tradition.

Every year the village association holds a Christmas cena-baile, dinner-dance, and every year since its inception this important event has taken place on the plaza, the village square. Naturally. We put out tables and chairs, decorate the plaza with bunting, and the village ladies cook vast tubs of watercress soup, chick pea stew, potatoes, meat and fish while their husbands look after the barbecue, beer and wine. We two foreigners contribute party nibbles on cocktail sticks, which are very popular because everybody needs a ready supply of toothpicks after eating the watercress soup, chick pea stew, potatoes, meat and fish.

This is how things should be. However, last year the Christmas dinner-dance eventually happened near the end of March, postponed successively by inclement weather, illness and competing events. This proved to be a catalyst for change. Tonight, the village dinner-dance is being held in a restaurant.

Sensible, pragmatic, but perhaps a little sad. The comilona - feast, blowout - on the village square has always been so authentically villagey, all of us beavering away to prepare a communal self-indulgence, celebrating who we are and where we are. Tonight we've succumbed to the modern disease of outsourcing.

Pilar and Bernarda are noisily excited in the taxi, Bernarda because she always gets excited by the prospect of fun, having been widowed very many years ago, and Pilar because she has only recently begun to rejoin the world of laughter. Widows generally still wear black, but these days it's acceptable for the solid black to transform gradually through more cheerful patterns to, eventually, a return to colour. Pilar is still in transition, Bernarda long ago burst into bloom again.

In the restaurant our tables have been set in two rows on a covered terrace, which is an excellent start because we're outdoors in the pleasant evening air but sheltered from mean attempts to rain us out. Bottles of wine, water and Fanta are plonked on the tables as soon as we're settled. Conversation begins to hum. Carmela, sitting opposite, comments how nice this is, one big family brought together for the evening. She's speaking philosophically but in fact she's not far from the literal truth, almost everyone is related to almost everyone else in some way.

Half an hour later her husband Eusebio is complaining of hunger. There is still nothing to eat on the table and the mood is beginning to slide towards rebellion. Bernarda hails a passing waitress: 'Can't we have some food?'

This releases an ominous rumble of agreement from around the table: food, we need food! 'When we organise our own dinner,' Bernarda scolds the waitress, 'we put snacks on the table as soon as people arrive! Cheese, bread, mojo, almogrote...'

The waitress hurries off for a consultation with the boss and returns with trays full of cheese, bread, mojo and almogrote. The boss bravely comes over to explain that we'd all arrived half an hour early, and anyway the agreed start time of half-past eight really meant half-past eight for nine. This gets him nowhere and he sensibly retires to oversee preparations for the rest of the meal.

'Is the food good here?' Pilar asks us doubtfully, knowing we've been before. Very good, we assure her, fingers crossed. It is, it's very good, but the known unknown is how our neighbours will react to it. This is one of the more adventurous restaurants in town, capable of serving weird combinations of ingredients in wine bottles cut in half lengthways.

However, a clever restaurateur knows his clients. When the food arrives it's reassuringly recognisable as a village comilona - chick pea stew and watercress soup followed by meat, meat and meat. J spots some cherry tomatoes decorating a plate of ham and rapidly snatches them to safety. Nobody else wants tomatoes. There are also mountainous heaps of papas arrugadas (wrinkled potatoes) and fish and local goat cheese so we're fine.

'I don't think much of this potaje de berros' says Eusebio, across the table. General agreement, it lacks the obligatory corn cob. 'And the garbanzos need more bacon,' contributes Santiago. Of course they do, stewed chick peas are no good without plenty of bacon. Home cooking is always best. And grumbling is fun.

Eventually we get to the postre stage, pudding, and soon afterwards from the terrace door to the restaurant comes some experimental tapping of microphones, a few drumbeats, the twang of guitars, then the salsa band launches the evening's dancing. Tables are cleared, stray cutlery and fallen tomatoes removed from the dance floor and the party begins.

Paco, our diminutive Down's syndrome neighbour, grabs a passing waitress to dance with him. She's Cuban and always happy to wiggle. Pilar and Bernarda dance with each other then with practically every unwary male in the room, including me. By midnight most of the staff are dancing too, cooks, waiters, waitresses and the lady with the mop. It's all wonderfully - what's the word - yes, villagey! And the rain outside can bother nobody. I suspect we are witnessing yet another sea change in the local way of life.


Notes for the serious student
Papas arrugadas are small potatoes boiled in their skins with lots of salt, important enough to justify a whole blog post to themselves (Wrinkled potatoes, 25 May 2017).
Mojo is a sauce based on oil and garlic, without which the papas arrugadas are just wrinkled potatoes.
Almogrote is a spread made with smoked goat cheese, chilli pepper, oil and garlic. It can be mildly or very hot and everyone who makes it claims theirs is the best on the island.
Potaje de berros is watercress soup, a local speciality.
Garbanzos, chick peas, are nearly always served as a stew with meat stock and are the nearest anyone gets to eating vegetables at this kind of comilona. (Where do all the carrots go? 10 February 2016).