The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [132]
Unformed cheese, sheep’s milk curdled with rennet, an enzyme found in the stomach of an unweaned lamb, and served as a kind of yogurt with mountain honey, used to be a meager staple of the rural poor. Known as mamia or, in Spanish, cuajada, it is now the fashionable dessert in fine restaurants in all seven provinces.
Poster from the 1930s by Jean Paul Tillac. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)
The Asador Horma-Honda in the village of Bernagoitia, not far from Bilbao, serves modern rural food. Its recipe for cuajada, which follows, is a contemporary dessert made with industrially bottled rennet and unusual because it is made with sugar and cinnamon, instead of being served tart and sweetened by adding honey.
CUAJADA
Boil a liter of sheep’s milk with a stick of cinnamon. Let it cool a little, mix in sugar according to taste, and divide it into six cups. Add to each one a spoonful of rennet. Let completely cool and refrigerate.
During cheese-making season, pigs graze on the slopes with the sheep so that Basques can feed them the whey, the nutritious liquid leftover. There was a uniquely Basque breed of pig in Labourd and Basse Navarre that grazed with the long-legged, hound-eared, white Basque sheep. In the early 1980s, Basques realized that the Basque breed of pig had died out. In the Aldudes Valley, which gets steeper and steeper until farmers along the French-Spanish border are looking into a deep green gorge, it was decided to bring back the Basque pig.
The race was rebred from the few pigs remaining throughout the western Pyrenees who still had the characteristics. What is characteristic of a Basque pig? Appropriately, the most telling feature is extremely large ears, so large in fact that they fall over the pig’s face, nearly blinding the animal, resulting in a not typically Basque passive nature.
THERE IS A movement in French Basqueland clearly influenced by events in Spanish Basqueland, and its activists like to call themselves abertzale, choosing a word Sabino Arana invented to mean “Basque nationalist,” or literally, “patriot.” As in Spain, French abertzale emerged in the 1930s, reemerged in the 1960s—a shoot from the Guernica oak was planted by the cherry orchards of Itxassou—and became stronger than ever in the 1980s and 1990s.
A variety of nationalist parties, usually left-wing, began running candidates for local election. Herri Batasuna organized in the French provinces under the name Euskal Batasuna. Abertzale parties have struggled to get more than 10 percent of the vote in the larger towns but have made a significant showing in some rural villages, which is remarkable because a substantial part of the economy of French Basque villages, as much as two-thirds, comes from pensions, farm subsidies, and other social expenditures by the French state.
Some French Basques worry that the abertzale movement will lead to a French ETA. ETA, they remember, started out as a nationalist movement promoting culture and ended up shooting Basque politicians and extorting money from Basque businessmen. For a brief moment, such a group did appear in France. Or did it?
On December 11, 1973, the office of a medical school in a Basse Navarre village was raided, officials were roughed up, and documents were stolen by a group calling itself Iparretarrak, ETArists of the north. In their communique, published ten months later, they wrote: “Our country is in the process of dying, and it will die in a few years, our land will be the paradise of retirees, invalids, and foreigners . . . If we want our rights, if we want our freedom, we have only one route: fight.” Their principal activity was vandalizing the property of the tourism trade, especially in the summer when Parisians flood the coastal region and French campers and hikers take to the mountains. They used slogans such as “Our country is not for sale” and “Euskadi will never be a Riviera.” One arrest was made in 1977, but the suspect seemed