A last meal should be about friends, frivolity and copious alcohol. So I think I’d head to Bal in Catalonia, at the beginning of the year, for the calçotada.
This is a festival of calcots, or spring onions – around now, in late January or early February – that lasts from morning until night. They set up barbecues on the cobbled streets, and grill the onions over charcoal for you to dip into romesco sauce, made with peppers, almonds and hazelnuts. There’s a lovely optimism in celebration of the year’s first crop.
It would be a day of eating onions and drinking vermouth – a Riojan or Catalonian red variety on the rocks: medium sweet, slightly herbacious, and not very heavy. We’d then move on to Gran Recosind, another delicious traditional Catalonian red.
In between platefuls of onions, we’d have a wonderful bit of grilled meat – sausages, lamb chops, or steak – and more red wine.
We’d have fresh oranges – at their best at this time of year – to cut through all the richness; and a glass of sweet cava: a nice way to finish.
There’d be people everywhere dressed in medieval costume, men walking around on stilts … A mixture of family, colleagues and foodie friends would join me. The kids could run around together and all the adults would be slightly legless and trying not to fall into the barbecues!
This bonkers, magical atmosphere would be one big affirmation of life. Sitting around the table is wonderful, but you could argue that it’s a bit confined. It’s nice to be outside, smelling everything, hearing the noise of the crowds, the sizzling meat. It’s a package of joy and greed and wine and friends and sharing. So if this was my last meal, it would make me very, very happy.
Romesco
100g whole blanched almonds
50g shelled hazelnuts
4 dried noras peppers
½ dried guindilla pepper or 1 small dried red chilli, crumbled
3 garlic cloves, peeled – one crushed, the other two whole
6 tbsp olive oil
50g stale white bread, cut into 1.5cm cubes
150g piquillo peppers or 2 medium red bell peppers, roasted, peeled and seeded
1-1 ½ tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp tomato puree
40 strands saffron, infused in 8 tbsp boiling water
½ tsp sweet smoked Spanish paprika
Sea salt and black pepper
1 Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Put the almonds and hazelnuts on a baking tray and dry-roast them in the top of the oven for about 20 minutes or until light golden-brown. Remove and cool.
2 Meanwhile, break open the dried peppers and discard their seeds. Crumble the peppers a little further in a small bowl and cover with boiling water.
3 Fry two of the garlic cloves whole in the olive oil until light brown. Remove the garlic with a slotted spoon and reserve. Now fry the cubes of bread in the same oil until they are also light brown. Keep the oil aside.
4 Traditionally this sauce is made by pounding the bread, nuts, garlic and peppers (soaked in piquillo, keeping the pepper water aside) together in a mortar and pestle. If you do not have one, use a food processor.
5 Once you have a coarse paste, transfer it to a mixing bowl and stir in the olive oil, half the pepper water, the vinegar, the remaining crushed garlic clove, the tomato puree, saffron, paprika, and the salt and pepper. Taste for seasoning. If the sauce is very thick, add a little water and or more olive oil.
