The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [42]
The European distaste for burning-hot pepper is in perfect balance with nature because hot American peppers when grown in Europe give off little heat. The burning taste comes from a substance called capsaicin, whose burn increases when the pepper is grown in strong sunlight. Capsaicin is a failed chemical defense for plants. Most animals won’t eat plants that contain capsaicin, but many non-European humans are not deterred. The large red choricero, so called because it is used in chorizo sausage, has little heat when grown in Vizcaya on the wet fields near Guernica. When picked young and green, it is called a Guernica pepper. The same Guernica or choricero peppers, grown in the much sunnier Rioja, will begin to take on the sting of a chili. If Basqueland were sunnier, the Basques wouldn’t like their peppers. The great mid-twentieth-century Guipúzcoan chef and food writer José María Busca Isusi wrote of hot peppers, “This sting, if it is strong is bad, but when mild is very digestible and even aids digestion.”
In 1930 the Azcaray y Eguileor family published a book that promised to reveal the secrets of their Bilbao restaurant, El Amparo. It offered two suggestions for pimientos de Guernica, which have long been the popular ways of serving these peppers in Vizcaya.
PIMIENTOS DE GUERNICA
Rub the peppers with a cloth and fry them in sizzling oil, turning them so they cook on all sides.
or
Heat the peppers in an oven dish, peel them, and put them whole in a casserole with garlic and oil, simmer awhile, salt and serve them.
BEANS ARE ANOTHER American product easily understood by Europeans because of their resemblance to European species, such as the broad bean, grown in Navarra and Alava, and peas, which, until the sixteenth century, were only used as a dried bean. American beans were quickly transplanted to most of Europe. In Vizcayan Euskera beans are called indibabak, Indian beans. Every Basque region prides itself on its own beans: red, pinto, black, white, or the unripened, soft, greenish white beans that Basques call pochas. Because pochas are picked exactly at the moment they ripen from green to white, Tirso Rodrigañez, a Spanish government minister in the 1880s, called them “pubescent beans.” In Tudela, in southern Navarra, pochas are served with eel for holidays. In the Alava section of Rioja, they are cooked with lamb tail. But because the optimum time for picking pochas coincides with the fall game bird season, these beans are most commonly associated with quail. An article in a 1967 Basque food journal pointed out that pochas are so highly regarded that the dish is always called “pochas with quails” and never “quail with pochas.”
Before the Spanish Civil War, Nicolasa Pradera was the chef of a still celebrated restaurant, Casa Nicolasa, by the market in San Sebastián. This traditional recipe uses both beans and hot pepper.
POCHAS FOR QUAILS, GAME BIRDS, AND OTHER ROASTS
Put water in a stew pot with both lean and fat pork fatback or ham. [Cook the fatback or ham.] Let the water cool in the pan where the pork fat was cooked, and once cooled, add the pochas, chopped onions, raw peeled tomatoes, a hot pepper that is between red and green and is also peeled, a peeled, finely minced garlic clove, chopped parsley, a little white pepper, and a few drops of olive oil, and cook it slowly. Season with salt.
—Nicolasa Pradera, LA COCINA DE NICOLASA, 1933
The most celebrated Basque bean from America is the red bean of Tolosa, alubias de Tolosa. Borrowing even further from native American agriculture, the farmers in this mountainous part of Guipúzcoa plant beans in the shade between corn rows exactly as Central American farmers do. Busca Isusi wrote in 1972, “In the firmament of Guipúzcoan gastronomy there are many shining