A friend of my wife is staying with us and yesterday volunteered to make a cocido montañes, typical Spanish food from Cantabria (she is from Santander), that is eaten at this time of year. I don’t have the recipe, but it was a 24-hour job, starting with soaking the beans overnight and buying huge quantities of meat from the local butcher, mainly pork, beef, morcilla (the black sausage – with rice, not onion; there are two types and the morcilla de burgos is always with rice and my preferred version), and chorizo. Unlike the bean dishes from Asturias, eg the classical fabada, this cocido also included green vegetables, in this case green cabbage, which I must say makes a pleasant change – as you get the fleeting impression that you are eating Spanish food that is halfway healthy instead of just wall-to-wall protein consisting largely of fat.
The ten of us who sat down to lunch could not however do justice to the 8-litre casserole that stood on the table (I am exaggerating – a little), possibly owing to the fact that traditionally – and this has no rhyme or reason and applies to any bean-based dish – the dessert always has to be arroz con leche. This is loosely translated as rice pudding and with the same ingredients, but served cold, so clearly some room had to be left for this, as indeed it did also for the chupitos of orujo and the bottle of 40-year old brandy that the hostess-for-the-day produced from her late husband’s cellar.
The wines?
As it happens this lady’s husband passed away fairly recently and had spent his entire life collecting not just Spanish wine but wines from around the world. However, due to the vagaries of life’s lottery, he developed a liver condition that was not wine-friendly and for the last ten years of his life was abstemious. His wife accompanied him, so there were all these fantastic wines just going to waste in his cellar – with no-one to drink them. She is now trying to catch up!
Spanish wine does not travellers well once bottled, and even the French stuff got so old, in this case, it became undrinkable. We opened a bottle of Chateau Pinchon Longueville 1972 that was just hanging on in there, but some of the riojas, including a Marques de Riscal 1975, had long previously given up the ghost. Shame really, as these riojas could have been drunk while they were at their peak, but regrettably there was no-one around to do the honours.
After the lunch, which went on a bit, we did some experimenting by putting some fresh young rioja into the carafe of the Riscal and it did improve it quite a bit.
If you don’t know this trick, it usually works. A wine that is over the top need not be thrown away or put on the cooking wine shelf. Refresh it by adding a wine from the same region and preferably made from the same grape, and it miraculously becomes drinkable again – as did our rioja…
