Vegetables

Verduras

Appears in

Published 2007

About

Perhaps the one thing that impressed me most when I went back to live in Spain was the shopping; particularly shopping for fresh produce. In Australia we have supermarkets with a seemingly never-ending bounty of produce throughout the seasons. In Spain, one of the first things I noticed was the culture of procuring food, which has its roots in an era when Spain was an agrarian society and, as such, reflects the seasons.

Before industrialization, which happened very late in Spain compared with other European countries, many people lived in small towns and villages and worked for the landowning elite, often picking grapes or olives. Campesinos (peasants) would have their huerto or little garden in which they would grow many fruits and vegetables for their own kitchen. With such a direct link to food cultivation, the fresh food that arrived on the table was dictated by the seasons. For example, spring was the time for asparagus and autumn was the time for mushrooms. Some years were better than others. A handful of beans may have been flavoured with some cured pork and potatoes spiced up with a fresh herb sauce. The dishes were created from what was growing at the time and what was in the cupboard. Traditional vegetable dishes were cooked longer and the flavours allowed to intermingle ‘the way God intended them’.