Strangely - there is no book tie in with this series - so if you were inspired by what you saw then you'll have to look elsewhere and some of these books might work for you.From Amazon - The Spanish cookbook that has has the best reviews is 1080 Recipes
It's recipes are modern and are simple. The Moro Cookbook
also has great reviews. It's recipes are not exclusively Spanish - it includes North African dishes - but I guess that is one of the points of Spanish cooking. The Real Taste of Spain: Recipes Inspired by the Markets of Spain
does not have any Amazon reviews - but it is more in the spirit of the TV show.If you were taken by the idea of the quite posh presenter who does not mind getting a bit grubby then she has published these two books. Cook: Smart, Seasonal Recipes for Hungry People
, which has good reviews and The Wild Gourmets: Adventures in Food and Freedom
which one reviewer really hated, mainly because he felt that it was little more than a urban middle class fantasy about rural life. Surely that's the point - I really doubt that the good people of Hampsted and Highgate really want to be peasants and foragers.Much of this show was set in Spain but it also had Tommi Miers making Spanish dishes in her kitchen in the UK and as she was frying her onions and crushing her garlic, in the background, we could see her washing machine. I liked that. I can't remember many cookery shows that show the other things we use the kitchen for. Maybe next week we will get to see her pedal bin. Hope so.
Away from Tommi's kitchen the show's attention was self consciously visceral. We saw dogs killing rabbits, pigs having their throats cut, old Spanish women squeezing the faeces from the dead pigs intestines and sausage meat kneeded by the grubby hands of elderly Spanish peasants (though I don't think the show called them that - it was just went out of its way to make it clear that that's what they were). They even had old blokes and goats.
I guess it's starting to sound like I'm sneering at the show - but I'm not really. (The Guardian does though). I thought that, like all good cookery shows it has a spine of eccentricity running through it, a posh girl getting grubby in the muddy and bloody world of Spanish peasants is as a good a premise for a TV show as any.And some of the food looked great.
My favourite Spanish restaurant is in North London where I used to live. It is
El Molino - a Tapas bar on the Holloway Road. It was popular with a lot of North London's Spanish community and I would happily recommend it.
So I have.
Finally - the part of the programme that got me most excited were the bits about the ham and I found this company which sells Spanish hams. Though in warning, a whole leg of Jamon de Recebo was very very expensive, though the mejillones and the chorizos were slightly more reasonable.
