This is what you do. You wait until well past nightfall, maybe midnight, maybe later. You climb up the steep path that leads to the old city, the path that runs beneath archways carved into ancient walls. There, the yellow light of the street lamps reflects off the granite palaces and convents built centuries ago. The only noise you hear is that of your heels reverberating on stone. You are alone up there, and you feel it: the beauty of the night, the weight of the past, love, solitude, longing—all the things poets write about. And then you walk back down, into the Plaza Mayor, where the tapas bars are closing and the teenagers are making out on the benches, and you are back in the lively heart of Cáceres, back in the Spain you know.
Toño Pérez pressed the walk upon me as if it were a final course to my meal, one more taste after the crisp disk of pig face and the tangy dollop of ice cream made with the region’s legendary Torta del Casar. By now I had become accustomed to his ebullience, a radiant enthusiasm belying the modest ambition you might expect from a chef cooking in the provincial town where he grew up. But this was different. He wanted me to understand something about him, about where he came from, and in so doing to understand something about the austere, earthbound place that is Extremadura.
Extrema: extreme; dura: hard. In truth, the region’s name (it depends on who you ask) is derived from either its position on the south side of the Duero River or its reconquista-era location at the edge of the kingdom of Castile. But it is my homemade, and quite literal, translation that I like best; few geographical names in Spain are as descriptive. Running west from Castilla-La Mancha toward the Portuguese border, the region is harsh and often barren, its sun-baked plains mostly given over to the herding of sheep and goats. It is the poorest area of the country and couldn’t be farther, metaphorically, from the Spain of so much recent celebration, the Spain where well-dressed locals press noisily against San Sebastián’s pintxo bars and models troll Barcelona’s Boqueria market with cellphones pressed to their ears. “Extremadura isn’t like the rest of Spain,” says Pérez. “Poverty brought hardships, but being poor kept us authentic.”
It has been this way for centuries. In the 1500s, Spain’s best conquistadors—those lesser nobles and ragged soldiers who would, in the name of God and country, gallantly despoil much of the Americas and call their depredations “discovery”—came from Extremadura, taking on the adventure of conquest mainly because there was nothing for them at home. So many conquistadors came from the single town of Trujillo, they say, that 20 American countries were born there. Francisco Pizarro was one of them; in search of opportunities in the New World, he left behind a miserable life as a swineherd and went on to conquer what is now Peru. He returned with treasures that would help transform his rustic outpost of a hometown into a Baroque jewel. Gold and silver plundered from the Incas helped underwrite the elegant palaces (one of them owned by Pizarro’s descendants) that line the city’s broad, magnificent Plaza Mayor; the altars of Trujillo’s churches still glitter as if new. Yet the Spaniards were never all that good at converting American treasure into durable wealth, and by the 18th century Trujillo had slipped back into decline. Today, just enough gentle neglect settles over the square to make the city’s fall from grace feel poignant.
Climbing the tiled staircase to Restaurante Pizarro is like stepping back into an earlier era of dining, complete with stiff-backed chairs at the tables and uninspired oil paintings on the walls. Manuela Carrasco, 76, and her sister Isabel, 75, inherited the restaurant from their parents (it was founded in 1919) and have worked there since they were teenagers, each doing what she loves best—Manuela in the kitchen, Isabel out front. On the day I visit, Isabel is recovering from knee surgery in her apartment downstairs, but Manuela is tottering around in sturdy shoes, taking care of her guests and overseeing the cooking. “We haven’t changed anything,” she says proudly, then catches herself. “There is that one potato dish Isabel makes. But otherwise, no, we don’t innovate at all.”
A quick scan of Pizarro’s menu offers a summary tour of Extremadura’s culinary landscape. “There’s a lot of meat,” says Manuela, with characteristic understatement. Lamb, goat, and pork figure prominently—each roasted with thyme or fried with its liver and slowly braised for frite. The few vegetables listed tend toward the thorny and rugged—wild asparagus, baby cardoons. A tomato soup grabs my attention. Instead of a common gazpacho, this soup is hot, made with nothing more than tomatoes, oil, and bread. It’s served with a bowl of grapes, which the waiter sets down with instructions “to float them like croutons.” It strikes me that in its simplicity—its pure tomato-ness, with hints of smoked paprika and cumin—this soup is as much a paean to history as the statue of Pizarro outside. Gold and silver, after all, weren’t the only treasures the conquistadors brought from the New World; they also carried back potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes.
Manuela calls their kind of cooking “folk” food, but she also reminds me of another element in the region’s culinary history: the monastery. Extremadura’s conquistadors didn’t travel alone; with them went monks, who saw in the Americas a new world of souls to convert. They returned bearing edible marvels, but with an advantage: Monks knew how to cook. It was through their networks that those potatoes and peppers and tomatoes spread throughout Spain and then to the rest of Europe.
The monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, in fact, was once the El Bulli of its day, a place where the latest trends in global gas tronomy were developed and disseminated. Today, it is a jumble of dramatic towers and ornate sanctuaries that jut imposingly over the town’s whitewashed houses and green hills. Franciscans—some in rough brown habits, others in jeans—have replaced the original Hieronymites, but the monastery remains a favored pilgrimage site for the faithful, who come to pray before the statue of a dark Virgin.
And to eat. Four centuries after its glory days, the monastery retains a reputation for good cooking, thanks largely to the efforts of a 77-year-old monk named Juan Barrera. Although he has now retired, Fray Juan ran the hospedería— the public inn and restaurant that the friars operate off the side of the main cloister—for more than 40 years. When he was a young man, his order sent him to a hotel in Seville to learn the business, and when he came back, he set about turning Guadalupe’s hospedería into one of the region’s great treasures. “The first time I made stuffed partridge, it was 1966, and I prepared it for Juan Carlos—he was still prince,” Fray Juan recalls. “The king and queen, ministers, presidents—I cooked for them all.”
What he cooked drew heavily from Extremadura’s peasant repertoire but with the trace of cross-cultural exchange that is the hallmark of monastery cuisine. You can taste it in the nutmeg Fray Juan uses to season his meatballs and in the wines—not just Sherry but Cognac, too—that go into the cream sauce for his baked hake. Even his migas, the most humble of Extremaduran dishes (bread crumbs slowly sautéed with olive, garlic, and bits of chorizo), come dressed up with chunks of pork rib. He has passed these subtleties on to Fray Javier and the other monks who continue his work at the inn, though they now serve meals in a shiny dining room designed by Rafael Moneo, the architect responsible for the Prado’s new wing.
“Religion and cooking go together,” Fray Juan says of his twin vocations. “They both provide sustenance.” The formula certainly worked for Charles V. In 1556, dejected, gouty, and having just abdicated the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles retreated to the Hieronymite monastery at Yuste, in northern Extremadura. There, in a bucolic tuck in the Vera Valley, the sedan chair used to carry the emperor over the mountains is still on display. Charles went to Yuste to die in ascetic spirituality, but his was hardly an abstemious end. Records show he required daily slices of the region’s excellent ham and enjoyed numerous rounds of the amber-colored beer the monks once produced. He would have been there in time to delight in the friars’ greatest invention: pimentón, the brick-red paprika that gives so much of Spanish cooking its flavor.
“Columbus brought back the first peppers and gave them to the monks, so we have them to thank,” says Ramón Mirón, whose family has been making pimentón for nearly 100 years. At the Santo Domingo mill, in Aldeanueva del Camino, he shows me the peppers that have arrived, already dried and smoked over wood fires by the farmers who grow them in the Vera Valley, just over the mountains, to be ground into three kinds of powder—sweet, bittersweet, and hot. It’s a dirty job. When Mirón introduces me to Alonso Varela, his head miller, I take in only the crinkly eyes and orange jumpsuit. But as I go to shake his hand, I notice that his flesh and hair are the same color as his outfit. It’s like coming face to face with an Oompa Loompa.
The Hieronymites also had a monastery in Murcia, and that Mediterranean region continues to make its own version of pimentón. “But in Murcia, they dry the peppers in the sun instead of over a fire,” says Mirón. “Their pimentón might be a prettier color, but it doesn’t have the smoky flavor that ours does.” Or the prestige: Pimentón from the Vera Valley is widely considered the country’s best.
That’s the irony of Extremadura, a region that has so few resources and yet produces some of the most delicious, most emblematic foods of Spain. In the area around Jerte, the great mystery is the microclimate, miraculously perfect for growing cherries. Planted in neat terraces carved into the sloping mountainside, the trees are so gorgeous, and their fruit so delectable, that nearly all local commerce revolves around them, and jams and liqueurs made from the fruit are on sale even in the valley’s hardware stores. Cabezuela’s main tourist attraction is a cherry museum, which lays out, in rather painstaking detail, the harvesting process. In the town of Jerte itself, the cozy hotel Tunel del Hada offers “cherry therapy” at its spa, with cherry skins and stones ground up and added to everything from bath salts to massage oils.
It’s almost animistic, the power the extremeños invest in their native products. Another example: the raw sheep’s-milk cheese called Torta del Casar, possibly the most coveted (and expensive) food in all of Spain. It’s a sexy cheese, intensely aromatic and so creamy that eating it requires cutting a circle through the top rind and scooping out the liquid inside with a spoon. More than anything, though, Torta’s mystique is derived in part from its origins. Since the dried flowers of a local thistle, not rennet, are used as a coagulant, rumor had it that the recipe was first devised by medieval Jews seeking a way to make kosher cheese, or perhaps by exceptionally resourceful shepherds. For centuries, Torta was made only in the spring months, when it was too damp for regular cheese to harden properly. Although production has been mostly industrialized around Casar de Cáceres, the small town just north of Cáceres itself, mechanization can’t wholly erase the element of chance that goes into the crafting of something so temperamental. Ricardo Regalado heads the board that awards certification to Tortas del Casar, and he’s worked as a cheesemaker since the 1970s. But walking past his sheep farm’s birthing stable, he still shrugs at the magic of it: “A Torta is a living thing,” he says, as if that somehow explains something.
Toño Pérez and I are seated on the plush sofa in his restaurant’s lounge, surrounded by polished silver vases and thick art books and potted azaleas that stand out against the blood-red walls. With his partner, José Polo, Pérez opened Atrio in 1986. Although neither had any experience at the time, their restaurant is now ranked among Spain’s best. Yet for all the acclaim, Pérez defines his ambitions in distinctly local terms. “So many of our clients are people from Cáceres. We’re creating this gastronomic project together with them, teaching them to eat, educating them about food.”
Although his decidedly modern cooking employs techniques (potato foam accompanying the octopus) and ingredients (crayfish with the pigs’ feet) from the rest of Spain, he sees his food as intimately tied to the region where he grew up. “Torta del Casar is like taking a bite of the fields,” he says. “It defines Extremadura.” A few minutes later, talking about pimentón, he says the same thing, then repeats it about wild mushrooms and game. Everything edible defines Extremadura. Listening to his words, I finally get it: Here, local products don’t simply engender pride. They evoke identity. What you grow and make—succulent cherries, smoky spices, complex cheeses—is who you are.
Nowhere is this alchemy of identification more potent than in jamón ibérico. Ham made from acorn-fed pigs is worshipped throughout Spain, but in Extremadura it is something else, something in the blood. Tell the waiter at Cáceres’s convivial Mesón San Juan that you find the jamón delicious and he will interrupt his flirting to lean in close and gravely whisper the name of the town it comes from. Walk into any overlit, napkin-strewn bar in the region and ask about slicing ham, and the bartender will inevitably tell you that it’s an art, that the cut affects the taste, that there are professional carvers who make a lot of money touring the country—a lot of money. Everyone seems to have memorized the same statistic: Seventy percent of the ibérico produced in Spain comes from Extremadura. Certainly no one here questions it.
Veterinarian José Luis Cortés takes me out to the dehesa—the savanna-like landscape of grassy hills and oaks that serves as free-range feeding ground for pigs during the cold season known as the montanera. He is there to make sure everything goes according to protocol—that the pigs are putting on gobs of weight, that no farmers are sneaking feed in with the acorns and grass. As we approach, a clutch of napping sows roust themselves and snuffle off to a nearby pond. “Acorns have a lot of fat, and they give the ham its sweet flavor,” Cortés explains. “But the pigs also need exercise to work the fat into their muscles.” If he sees a conflict between being a vet and preparing animals to become food, it doesn’t trouble him. “This is our tradition,” he says.
There’s tradition as well in Montánchez, where another of those mysterious Extremaduran microclimates creates ideal conditions for curing. The town’s narrow, looping streets are filled with curing houses, most of them family-run, and to step inside one is to enter a world of sacred rituals. At Casa Bautista, I watch a family—parents, children, grandparents—spend their Sunday morning buying a jamón ibérico. They bring to the task all the intensity an American would put to the purchase of a new car. There are educated questions, multiple sniffs of the plastic pipette the shopkeeper inserts into each leg, heated consultations between husband and wife.
The connection between land, animal, food, and culture culminates in jamón. Traveling through Extremadura, I detect the contours of this nexus everywhere—in the sight of townspeople gathered around the carcass of a just-slaughtered pig; in the approving nod I get every time I order ibérico. But once again it takes my philosopher-chef to bring me to the heart of it. “Tell me about the ham,” I say, and the light grows brighter in Toño Pérez’s eyes. He has just finished lunch service, and although at five in the afternoon the last customers are still trickling out, he has exchanged his whites for a sweater and jeans. By now, I understand the deep resonance a single product has for the identity of a people and their connection to the land. And so, when Toño’s answer comes, I understand that we are talking about more than just cured meat; we are talking about Extremadura itself. “Ah, jamón,” he exhales. “Jamón is God speaking.”
Details
Toño Pérez and José Polo recently started converting two historic buildings in the old city into a boutique hotel (and the new location for Atrio). Until it is finished, by summer of 2010, the Parador de Cáceres (011-34-927-21-17-59; parador.es), a 14th-century palace with a lovely sienna-colored patio, is the city’s most charming place to stay. A few yards up the hill from Trujillo’s Plaza Mayor, the NH Palacio de Santa Marta (011-34-927-659-190; nh-hoteles.es) has tastefully revamped another historic building and added modern amenities. Rooms at the Hospedería del Real Monasterio de Santa María de Guadalupe (011-34-927-367-000; monasterioguadalupe.com) can be, appropriately, somewhat spartan but are nevertheless attractive and offer an unsurpassed chance to stay at an active monastery. In Jerte, the Hotel-Spa Tunel del Hada (011-34-927-470-000; tuneldelhada.com) is a cozy country inn with upscale touches and gorgeous views of the valley filled with cherry trees.
Eating there
With two Michelin stars, Atrio (Avenida de España 22; 927- 242- 928), in Cáceres, is a delight, from the lush, formal décor to the deeply flavored dishes coming out of the kitchen. The wine list might be the best in Spain. For a more casual option in Cáceres, Mesón San Juan (Plaza de San Juan 3; 927- 626- 648) serves straightforward tapas, such as perfectly sautéed porcini with garlic, in a lively tavern atmosphere. In Trujillo, both Restaurante Pizarro (Plaza Mayor 13; 927- 320- 255) and Mesón la Troya (Plaza Mayor 10; 927- 321- 364) are good places to try traditional Extremaduran recipes like migas and the comforting stew known as caldereta. For slightly more sophisticated cuisine, the Hospedería del Real Monasterio (see above), in Guadalupe, is best. Restaurante Nardi (Braulio Navas 19; 927- 481- 323), in Hervás, is an appealing place to try lighter, updated takes on such regional classics as zorongollo (a marinated salad of roasted red peppers) and crisp-skinned suckling pig.