Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Art of Peeling Grapes In Barcelona

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BARCELONA–We meet Chef Papa Serra first thing in the morning outside the sprawling Boqueria Market, expecting a porcine Spaniard with a beard, exuding twinkling-eyed Bonhomie mixed with sage observations about life and food.

Instead, a trim twenty-eight-year-old New Zealander in a white chef’s coat shows up armed with a bottle of Cava and two wine glasses.

“I don’t look Spanish and I don’t sound Spanish, but I cook as if I was born running amongst the bulls,” assures Joel Serra Bevin. He is second generation Catalan, who, in addition to growing up in New Zealand, has spent time in Australia, London, and New York before relocating to Spain in 2010.

Joel today will guide us through not only the culinary delights of Barcelona’s most famous market, but also introduce us to the secrets of Spanish food, and then cook us an excellent lunch, helped immeasurably by yours truly, who turns out to be the unexpected  master of the art of peeling a grape.

The Boqueria Market is something to behold, the biggest and most popular of the twenty markets scattered throughout the city, first established, according to Joel, in the 1860s when Barcelona was still basically a Medieval town with a wall around it.

Unlike a lot of other markets, this one is permanent. These stalls beneath the market’s vast canopy just off La Rambla, the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare and a major tourist haunt, constitute the most valuable real estate in Barcelona. Owners pass their stalls from generation to generation. Merchants here are permanent fixtures. They even have their own Facebook pages.

You make your way through the labyrinthine aisles that snake through the market, past glassy-eyed monk fish that were swimming in the Mediterranean a couple of hours ago; armies of crabs and lobsters that are still moving; thick pallets of salted cod; gleaming glass bottles of saffron, the fifth most expensive product in the world (each strand must be dried separately); Ostrich eggs the size of Easter eggs; great legs of  Jamón Ibérico de Bellota, cured for a year and considered the finest ham in the world (it comes from black pigs who are fed bellota or acorns).

You begin to realize, aided by a helpful whisper from Joel, just how important food is to the Spanish.

The French and the Italians are much noisier about their love of food. The Spanish seem more content to stay home and eat rather than boast about it to the world. It may be blasphemy to say so, but you can get a better meal at much more reasonable prices in Barcelona these days, than you can in Paris.

Nothing is processed here. There is no such thing as industrial farming. Everyone still goes to the market daily. People are fresh-obsessed. They want to see the scales on the fish, the head of the chicken.

This almost fanatical care with and concern for food and its preparation is reflected in the city’s restaurants. Tapas, of course, is the preferred method of eating, small portions of a number of dishes that can include squid, monk fish, various meat dishes, and lots of succulent vegetables: eggplant, peppers, olives, tomatoes.

At the very popular La Paradeta, you choose the fresh fish you want, they cut off a hunk right there in front of you, cook it, and then serve it in a caferteria-style atmosphere that nonetheless has people lined up out the door waiting to get in–and this is in a country where the economy is in a shambles, and there is twenty-five per cent unemployment, the highest in the western world.

Nobody seems to be suffering too much over at Comerç24, considered for the moment the hottest restaurant in Barcelona. You can’t get into the place on a Friday or Saturday night. We have to be satisfied with lunch, but whatever time of day you eat there, the tapas is delicious, served on flat pieces of marble. By the time the bill arrives, concealed in a handsome wooden box, the place has certainly lived up to its reputation.

If you’re looking for history, and a stately, enduring sense of Barcelona’s past, you can find it at Quatre Gats–the Four Cats. It’s been around for more than a century and is famous enough that Woody Allen shot scenes for Vicky Cristina Barcelona here (his picture is on the wall).

This is also where the great Catalan artist, Pablo Picasso, hung out when he first came to Barcelona in the 1920s. In fact, the cafe sponsored his first art show. One can spend the morning at the Picasso museum, marveling at what Picasso achieved as a more traditional artist by the time he was fourteen, and then wander over to Quatre Gats for–what else–a tapas lunch.

But the good meals are not restricted to Barcelona’s famous restaurants. We wander around the corner from our apartment in the trendy el Born quarter and find a charming dinner at a corner bistro called La Catonada where the hostess stands on the street, persuading customers to enter, and where the owner, undaunted by the fact you speak little Spanish and he speaks little English, carries on a lively  conversation and then insists on having his photograph taken with you.

Still, there is nothing like a home-cooked meal, even in Barcelona, and with some help from my wife Kathy and myself, Papa Serra, aka Joel, is preparing just such a repast. At noontime we have returned to the apartment Joel uses to entertain his guests.

The novice chef–me–is once again astonished at the preparation necessary for the creation of fine food. The making of the allioli, for example, is complicated and labor intensive enough to remind the novice chef that he will forever remain exactly that.

After a quick lesson from Joel, I am placed in charge of perhaps the most important part of the luncheon, the peeling of the grapes. We finally sit down to eat at two o’clock beginning with a tasty gazpacho that is refreshingly unlike the variations on V8 juice that Joel says constitutes most gazpachos–this is where my grape peeling has made all the difference.

The soup is followed by fresh sardines from the market that make you forget you were ever forced to eat a canned sardine. There is an exquisite lentil dish with a chorizo crust ensuring you will forever after love lentils; salted cod mounted on sheaves of endive lettuce, again, fresh from the market, and tasting like no cod you have ever had before. Even a  spiced chicken leg possesses an original, mouth-watering flavor thanks to the romesco, a Catalan sauce created with almonds, peppers, and roasted garlic.

At the end of a very satisfying morning with Joel, topped by a superb lunch, I believe everyone agreed that the meal would not have attained nearly the brilliance it did without the properly peeled grapes.

I smile and try to look humble, knowing I have attained culinary heights, and mastered the art of peeling grapes in Barcelona.

With Brooke Shields’ Mother, Dancing On A Stove In Spanish Harlem

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And then–I’m not quite sure how–Brooke Shields’ mother was in the kitchen of the restaurant in Spanish Harlem, dancing on the stove.

The music was playing loudly, the cooks and kitchen  help were staring in amazement, as was I. Brooke Shields looked grim. Teri Shields was having the time of her life.

I thought of that night when I learned that Teri Shields had died at the age of seventy-nine. I suppose I wasn’t surprised, either at the news of her death or by the reports that Brooke and her mother were barely speaking.

How I came to be in Spanish Harlem with Brooke Shields, who at the time was the most notorious twelve-year-old in America, and her wild and crazy mother, well, there’s a story.

Brooke had just starred in Pretty Baby, a movie directed by the French filmmaker Louis Malle about child prostitution in the Storybook section of New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century.

The film is all but forgotten now, but at the time it was hugely controversial, since it featured underage Brooke in the nude. For a time it was banned in Canada.

When I arrived in New York to interview her, Brooke Shields was the controversial flavor of the moment. She would inspire dozens of magazine covers and a whole Brooke look–Time magazine in its cover story about her called it “The 80s Look.” Everyone was clamoring to talk to her and Teri, a single mother who was acting as her daughter’s manager.

I met Teri on the set of the movie Brooke was currently shooting, King of the Gypsies,  a drama about  the secret world of the gypsies that had ambitions to become to gypsies what the Godfather was for gangsters. Brooke was co-starring with Susan Sarandon (who had also appeared in Pretty Baby) and Sterling Hayden, as well as another young newcomer, Eric Roberts (Julia’s older brother).

But all eyes were on Brooke.

Teri led me back to where Brooke was being made up. She was in full gypsy regalia. No doubt about it, she was a beautiful girl, and surprisingly self-possessed and well-spoken for someone so young and new to the game. She was quiet and serious and not particularly forthcoming, although when it comes to interviewing twelve-year-olds there is not, beyond a certain point, a whole lot to talk about.

Teri, however, was another matter entirely. She had once entertained ambitions to become an actress herself. Now that her daughter was famous, one got the impression that since she was only twelve and could not really enjoy celebrity herself, Teri would do it for her.

Brooke finished shooting for the day and Teri decided that we should all go out to dinner. Brooke wanted to go home. Teri wouldn’t listen. We would eat something in a favored restaurant nearby.

We took the elevator down. It came to a stop and a man  got on. Teri sashayed up to the startled new arrival. She batted her eyelashes at him and said, “How do you like me so far?”

Brooke rolled her eyes.

We walked along a Spanish Harlem street to the restaurant, Brooke complaining she wanted to go home. I felt like an interloper in this ongoing mother-daughter drama, but I dutifully went along anyway.

Teri blew into the restaurant, and more or less took over the place, ordering drinks–copious drinks, it turned out–and food. She talked to everyone, aglow with her daughter’s moment of celebrity. If anyone should have been famous, it was Teri Shields. Brooke slumped forlornly against the wall, hardly saying anything.

Hours later, the meal finished, more wine was being poured. Brooke once again was demanding to go home. But now there was music and Teri was up and dancing around the restaurant.

Then she disappeared into kitchen. Brooke and I traded glances. I got up and went back to see what had happened to her mother. I stepped into the kitchen and there she was dancing on the stove.

I stood there, my jaw dropping, watching Teri sway to the music. Then Brooke appeared, saw what was happening, and ordered her mother off the stove. Teri looked wounded. What am I doing that’s so wrong? she seemed to be saying. I’m just having fun. What’s wrong with that?

It wasn’t hard to see that a weird transformation seemed to have occurred in the relationship between Brooke and her mother. The parent was the wild, immature child; the child had been forced into the role of the mature, responsible parent.

Brooke again ordered mother down from the stove. It was late, she said in a calm voice. She had to be at school the next morning. Teri finally acquiesced, and I helped her down to the floor. The air had gone out of the evening. The bill was paid, a cab was called, and we headed uptown away from Harlem.

They dropped me off at my hotel, and then Brooke and Teri went off into the night.

A few years later, Brooke was starring in a romantic tear-jerker titled Endless Love, the movie that was supposed to launch her adult film career. I happened to be in New York at the time, and ended up at the movie’s premiere party. There was a much taller Brooke, even more beautiful, but still quiet and removed from everything.

The friend who brought me to the party introduced us, and suggested we dance. To my amazement, Brooke agreed. On the dance floor I don’t remember us saying a single word to each other. If she recognized me, she gave no sign of it, and I decided not to say anything.

Later in the evening, I ended up standing beside Teri. She was much more subdued. I introduced myself and said we had met before, and had gone to dinner together in Spanish Harlem.

She looked at me blankly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

Endless Love failed at the box office and did not launch Brooke’s career as an adult movie star. But she has soldiered on in the business and managed to carve out a certain celebrity niche. Perhaps the best thing, she appears to have remained sane and grounded in the face of it all, much the same as she was the night the three of us went out together.

She has two children of her own now. There have been no reports of her dancing on stoves in Spanish Harlem.

When You Know Nothing, You Know Everything:Welcome To Barcelona

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BARCELONA—When you finally know nothing in this fabled Mediterranean seaport city of five million, that is when you know everything.

Welcome to Barcelona.

Our guide through the vagaries and paradoxes of the world’s smallest big city— and the biggest small city—is José A. Peral Mondaza, intellect, historian, linguist, and all-round charmer.

José, fortyish, handsome in a bookish and bespectacled early Peter O’Toole sort of way (the non-blond O’Toole), is married to a Montreal teacher and therefore has spent time in Canada. He steers us through the medieval streets of Barri Gòtic, the gentrified pleasures of el Born (the new old city, where we have rented an apartment), the wide boulevards of the Eixample, the quiet neighborhoods of Gràcia. At the same time, he also eloquently articulates how the tangle of history, politics, and religion still complicates life here.

The politics are present in the Catalan flags draped from seemingly every balcony. You soon learn that you are not in the Spain you imagined before arriving here, but in Catalonia, the semi-autonomous state within Spain that many Catalans believe is not nearly autonomous enough.

This is a region that very much wants to be on its own, that feels betrayed by history, by the dictator Franco (who banned the Catalan language, one of many oppressors who tried to do that), and by the current Castilian-dominated Spanish government, that, according to many here, continues to go out of its way to alienate Catalans.

The long-running ill-will is exacerbated by a Nov. 25 state election, which almost certainly will lead to an independence referendum, and an economic crisis roiling the country leaving twenty-five per cent of the work force unemployed—an astonishing sixty-five per cent of young people are said to be without work.

José isn’t sure how everyone keeps going. He is as amazed as anyone that even at this non-tourist time of the year, the restaurants and cafes continue to fill with patrons tasting delicious tapas, and the throngs at noontime crowding La Rambla, the historic pedestrian mall, are as thick as ever. He believes disaster is coming, but there is no sign of it in the windows of the smart shops on the Passeig de Gràcia, the wide thoroughfare that reminds you so much of Paris. You can barely squeeze into Apple’s vast store for the crowds anxious to check out the new iPad mini.

At seven thirty, just before Cal Pep throws open its doors, the line of hopeful diners snakes across the square waiting to get into this popular tapas restaurant. Inside, a long counter seats twenty patrons at a time. The rest of us line up behind them against the wall, waiting for the next available stool. After an hour, we finally are ushered to a small table in a rear room. The tapas is great but not beyond anything available elsewhere in Barcelona without the wait.

To be sure, the situation is slightly less dire here where the Catalans have a reputation for industriousness—the rest of the country views them as the Germans of Spain. Catalonia’s outsider status is such that it is considered too far south to be north, too far north to be south. The locals grumble that the region annually sends sixteen billion Euros to the government in Madrid but doesn’t get nearly as much back.

Religion is everywhere, reminding the visitor of the grip God used to have on this country. It is most obviously represented here by the Sagrada Família, Holy Family, the magnificent cathedral that is to Barcelona what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

Even if you have seen photographs, nothing prepares for you for the electric jolt provided by the first sight of Sagrada Família’s incredible edifice. It is not only Barcelona’s but possibly the world’s, most dramatic and original testament to God, created by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, who devoted forty-three years to the cathedral (even now, it is not finished).

A deeply conservative and religious Catholic (he attended mass every day), Gaudi’s God was always present between the lines of his whimsical creations that appear to have tumbled out of a slightly cockeyed fairy tale—dreams in stone, the art critic Robert Hughes once called them.

Thus, with the aid of the insightful José, it is possible to get a deeper, more spiritual view of Gaudi’s Casa Batlló, the block of apartments dominating a corner of the Passeig de Gràcia.  The bone-like columns supporting the lower stories are Gaudi’s assertion that life is fragile and comes to an end. All that keeps us going is the pleasure represented by the balconies in the shape of carnival masks.

But pleasure, Gaudi’s façade tells us, is not enough. (“Man is free to do evil,” he once said. “But he pays the price of his sins”). Pleasure leaves you finally alone as represented by a single upper window, and haunted by monsters—the scaled, undulating roof in the shape of a dragon. Finally, there is only God who can redeem the lost, lonely soul, therefore the cross rising triumphantly from the rooftop.

The architect’s employers, unable to see the God in Gaudi, were furious when they saw what his genius had wrought—begging the question of what they were doing while construction was underway. Up the street a few blocks, Senora Milà was equally unhappy when she saw what Gaudi had produced after he was hired to design an apartment complex. It was supposed to be called Casa Milà. Instead, the locals derisively nick-named it La Pedrera, the stone quarry. “I ordered a palace,” groaned Senora Milà. “Instead, I got a prison.”

Even in these extravagant times, modern architecture seldom allows for Gaudi’s delightful excesses. Standing on the sidewalk before Casa Batlló, it is difficult to imagine how such a deeply conservative man could ever have created these fantastical works of unbridled imagination—works, incidentally, that remain fascinating but unsettling (even Gaudi’s architecture school teachers were uncertain whether they had graduated a genius  or a madman).

So the crowds gather daily to gawk and to wonder. Meanwhile, not far to the north, amid the descending evening calm of the Gràcia quarter, José finishes his day with us, worrying that the Madrid government might one day act as intelligently where Catalonia is concerned as the government in Canada has acted with Quebec. “If that ever happened, the separatist movement here would fall apart,” he says. His wife, he says, used to be a Quebec sovereignist; no more. However, she is very much in favor of Catalan independence.

But then such are the contractions rampant in this fascinating old city. I realize after a few days here that while I understand nothing, I still don’t know much of anything, which means that although I can be a happy visitor here, I can never be a Catalan.

Welcome to Barcelona.

Ron Base’s new novel, Another Sanibel Sunset Detective, is now available. Check it out HERE.

That Afternoon With Henry Fonda

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In a fit of nostalgia yesterday I pulled John Ford’s 1946 western, My Darling Clementine, off my DVD shelf and watched it on our new fifty-five-inch Sony television screen. Magical: it brings old movies to life again with a sharpness and clarity that is breath-taking.

Seeing a young Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in a performance so fluid and natural that you forget this is a movie–at times you feel as if you are inhabiting a man’s life–brought memories flooding back. It would be unfair to say Henry Fonda has been forgotten in the years since his death in 1982, but as is the case with so many iconic stars from that era, he has certainly faded.

Not for me, though.

I was writing about television for The Windsor Star and Fonda was across the river in Detroit appearing at the Fisher Theater in a long-forgotten play titled The Trial of A. Lincoln. Fonda, who had previously played the role onscreen for John Ford, was playing Lincoln.

Somehow I managed to convince my editors that I should talk to Fonda about television (he had done a couple of short-lived TV series). But I had no more interest in his television views than I had in flying to the moon. What I wanted to discuss with Henry Fonda was his movies–from The Grapes of Wrath to 12 Angry Men to Once Upon A Time in the West. He had arrived in Hollywood, a young man from Nebraska, and had been appearing in films for nearly forty years.

I encountered him in the lobby of the small hotel where he was staying. “You’re early,” he snapped as we shook hands.

“Well, come on up,” he said, softening. “But you’ll have to wait until I’ve read my sports scores.”

I remember trailing him across the lobby, focused for some bizarre reason on the back of his neck, thinking, irrationally, This is the back of Henry Fonda’s neck. What can I say? I was young and highly impressionable.

Upstairs in his small apartment, he leaned on the kitchenette counter intently reading the sports section. Then he settled into a sitting room sofa and began to talk in the laconic, mid-western drawl that was so distinctive on the screen. He was dressed in a denim shirt and a pair of jeans, still whip thin at sixty-five and looking younger than his years (although at the time, barely in my twenties, I thought sixty-five ancient; it has become much younger over the years).

I had expected to talk to him for an hour or so surrounded by publicity people. Instead, it was just the two of us, and as the afternoon wore on the one hour became two and then three. The phone never rang. Shadows lengthened and evening fell, and I believe the only thing that stopped Henry Fonda talking through the night was the fact that he had to go to the theatre for an eight o’clock performance.

He talked frankly about why he had become an actor: “I don’t like myself, so I like becoming someone else.” He spoke, sadly, about his relationship with the great John Ford (they’d had a falling out shooting Mr. Roberts; Ford had actually struck Fonda), and said the director was ill and would never make another movie (which turned out to be the case). He talked about how director King Vidor was losing it while making War and Peace, and that had a lot to do with why the movie turned out to be so disappointing.

He was disgusted at some of the movies he had allowed himself to make for money, particularly The Battle of the Bulge. “They had me winning the whole goddamned war single-handedly,” he said angrily.

He told a great story about how he agreed for the first time in his career to play a bad guy in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. He showed up in Rome having carefully cultivated a beard and mustache for the part. Leone was appalled. “He made me shave immediately,” Fonda recalled. “‘I want Henry Fonda,’ he said. ‘You must look like Henry Fonda.'”

The fact that he had been married so many times, amazed and embarrassed him: “I can’t believe I ended up being married five times!”

After we finally parted company, I spent a lot of time wondering why Fonda spent so much time and was so painfully open with a young reporter who was a complete stranger.

I had the idea that he saw himself as something of an old shaman, sitting around the camp fire, passing down tales of an ancient Hollywood to the next generation–and I believe there was some truth to that. An entire era of movie-making was fast disappearing even back then, and I think he wanted to make certain some record of it was left behind.

In her autobiography his daughter, Jane Fonda, writes about the distance he kept from his family and how she seldom talked to him, and yet he would speak to strangers on a plane for hours. That would certainly help explain why he spent so much time with me.

But I think there was something else.

Several years later, now a feature writer in Toronto, I flew to Chicago to interview Fonda again. This time he was appearing in a much-more acclaimed one-man show playing Clarence Darrow.

We met at the Ambassador East Hotel where he was staying with his wife, Shirlee. He had aged considerably since our last encounter–which, incidentally, he only vaguely remembered (a valuable lesson in celebrity interviewing; you remember everything, they remember nothing).

Despite the fact he had been ordered to conserve his voice for the stage, we once again talked through the afternoon. Finally, Shirlee poked her head in the door and said in a warning voice, “Fonda, that’s enough.” He shrugged, and we stood to say good-bye.

As I waited down the hall for the elevator, I could hear the Fondas, their voices raised in anger. Shirlee Fonda was not happy that her husband had spent so much time with a reporter. “Shirlee,” Fonda replied sharply. “It’s my job.“

At the end of My Darling Clementine, Henry Fonda as Earp says good-bye to the lovely Clem and then rides off down a long and winding road. I found myself suddenly choked with emotion, not only at the simple beauty of John Ford’s neglected masterpiece, but also by the memory of that long-ago afternoon in Detroit with a legendary movie star doing his job–and doing it so very well.