Spain and Portugal: Buy the Book?

Twenty years ago in Southern California, “Spanish” restaurants were usually Mexican, serving not cocido madrileno , merluza con salsa verde and pinchitos morunos , but tacos, enchiladas and tamales. (It was as if you’d gone into a restaurant advertising “English food” and been offered Boston baked beans, shrimp Creole and New York cheesecake.)

Now that anything remotely “Mediterranean” is considered automatically g.c. (gastronomically correct), Spanish means Spanish--at least more or less. Oh, there’s still some confusion about Spanish food around here--if anybody in California makes a genuine Valencian-style paella, for example, I have yet to encounter it; and, for the last time, tapas does not mean “little bites” and is not a generic word for multicultural hors d’oeuvres. At the same time, Spanish flavors and even Spanish products are showing up more and more in our restaurants, and sometimes it’s possible to even find dishes that are genuinely Spanish.

Portuguese food is another story. To the best of my knowledge there is no real Portuguese restaurant in the L.A. area. Most of us, for that matter, probably couldn’t name a single Portuguese dish if we had to--or explain the salient differences between Portuguese and Spanish cooking. (One is that the Portuguese, reflecting their centuries of trade with Asia, tend to use more spices; another is that many Spanish dishes are based on a sofrito of long-cooked onions, tomatoes and peppers--a device used sparingly in Portugal.)

Knowing Portuguese food not at all, and only just learning about Spanish food, the serious food lovers among us could probably use a comprehensive entry-level reference book on both Spanish and Portuguese cuisines. That’s exactly what we have in “The Gastronomy of Spain and Portugal” by Maite Manjon (Prentice Hall: $35).

Manjon, who has written a number of other books on Spanish and Portuguese food (and is married to British author Jan Read, who probably knows as much about the wines of Spain as any person on the planet) obviously knows her subject unusually well. The bulk of the book is an “Illustrated Dictionary of Spanish and Portuguese Gastronomy” with more than 1,000 entries, listing not just dishes and raw materials but also cities, regions and major wines. Handsomely produced, fully cross-referenced between Spanish and Portuguese, liberally scattered with clearly written recipes and full of amusing and sometimes illuminating anecdotes and asides, this is a reference book you can read as well as just look things up in.

That said, I must offer the merest of quibbles: Rubert (or Rupert, or Robert) de Nola’s seminal Catalan-language cookbook “Libre del Coch” (not Llibre de Coch , as Manjon renders it) wasn’t “first printed in Barcelona in 1477”; internal evidence suggests that it may have been written that early, but it was published for the first time in 1520. The Canary Island staple gofio is not, as Manjon describes it, a kind of bread; the term refers to a kind of toasted flour (usually of wheat or corn), prepared in a number of ways--as a primitive sort of bread, yes, but also as a kind of gruel, as dumplings and as a breakfast drink stirred into hot milk.

Further, the Valencian dish of rice cooked in fish stock, with the fish itself served separately, is called arroz a banda (rice on the side), not arroz abanda (which means nothing in either Castilian or the Valencian dialect of Catalan). And the Portuguese word for sauce, which Manjon renders repeatedly as molho , should be spelled with a circumflex accent: molho.

One thing I can’t quibble about, though: In her entry on tapas , Manjon doesn’t say, “ Tapas means ‘little bites.’ ” She defines it (of course) correctly, saying, “In its original sense the word tapa means a ‘cover’ or ‘lid,’ ” and adds that the term was originally applied to these little appetizers because they were served on small plates set on top of glasses of Sherry or wine.

Another new book with an Iberian flavor, though strictly Spanish and strictly a cookbook, is “Recipes From a Spanish Village” by Pepita Aris (Simon & Schuster: $24.95). My first question, and it may well be yours too, was: Which Spanish village?

No particular one, as it turns out. This volume is the third in a series that began with “Recipes From a French Herb Garden” by Geraldene Holt and “Recipes From an Italian Farmhouse” by Valentina Harris. The village, like the herb garden and the farmhouse, is generic rather than specific.

Aris (who isn’t Spanish, despite her first name, though she has lived in Spain) has tested recipes for and/or written a number of previous cookbooks, and is a co-founder of and columnist for the British food and wine magazine Taste. Both her introductions and the recipes here are crisply written and easy to follow.

Virtually every part of Spain is represented and a great many classic Spanish dishes are included, among them cocido madrileno , merluza con salsa verde and pinchitos morunos , as it happens--as well as some that were new to me (e.g., tomatoes stuffed with spinach, orange juice, almonds and ham, from Alicante; or spicy octopus salad from Santiago). The photographs, drawn from a variety of stock sources with additional special photography by Linda Burgess, are first-rate and beautifully reproduced. Though rather thin, the book has an attractive, weighty feel to it, as if tightly packed with merchandise.

The only problem with it, in fact, is that it seems to lack a viewpoint, a personality, a defining principle. If Aris has a take on Spanish cooking, or likes some things about it (some regions, some ingredients, etc.) better than others, she doesn’t reveal this to the reader. It could almost have been called “Recipes From Any Old Spanish Village,” I thought.

Oh, and again I have quibbles: For instance, I’m not sure what to make of Aris’ statement, “The introduction of pasta to Spain has given rise to what appears to be a new paella seafood dish, the fideua . . . “--since there are Spanish pasta recipes dating from at least the 13th Century and fideua has been made for at least 100 years. I find it highly doubtful that “bacalao increases in weight by half when soaked, but this is lost again in discarded bones and skin”--and I find it doubtful on both ends. (Perhaps Aris is thinking of whole carcasses of dried, unsalted cod, known as pejepalo .)

Sometimes Aris gives confusing versions of dish names, mixing Catalan and Castilian. For instance, she mentions rovellons al ajillo ; rovellons is Catalan for a certain mushroom, al ajillo is Castilian for “with chopped garlic.” In another case, she combines escalivada (Catalan for “roasted vegetables”) with con anchoas (Castilian for “with anchovies”). In common with a good many other writers on Mediterranean cuisines, she seems to think that lima beans and favas are more or less the same thing--stating, in a recipe for the Andalusian dish habas rondenas (Ronda-style favas), that “Tender frozen baby lima beans . . . are an excellent substitute”--when the two vegetables have nothing but color and shape in common, tasting (and cooking) completely differently.

What bothers me most of all, though, is that in her recipe for truchas con salsa romesco (mountain trout with piquant almond sauce), Aris--who lists a surprisingly extensive bibliography for a work of this sort--notes that the author of another book “suggests substituting 1/2 canned jalapeno pepper” for part of the dried chilies actually called for in the recipe. I am that author, and I did no such thing. I can’t help wondering how many of her other sources she misread (or rewrote) as well.