Authors: Craig Boreth

The Hemingway Cookbook (18 page)

BOOK: The Hemingway Cookbook

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Sensing that a larger war was imminent, Hemingway did not wait 10 years to write his novel of this war, as he had with
A Farewell to Arms
. He began
For Whom the Bell Tolls
in March 1939, six months before Germany invaded Poland. It was published in October 1940 and was a huge success, becoming the biggest best-seller since
Gone with the Wind
.

The novel takes place northwest of Madrid, high in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, late in May 1937. Robert Jordan, a young Spanish professor from Montana, has joined a band of Loyalist guerrillas well behind the fascist lines. Through telling the story of Jordan’s mission—the destruction of a steel bridge coordinated with a surprise Loyalist attack—Hemingway expressed his distaste for both sides and the deep sorrow he felt at seeing his beloved Spain torn apart. He showed us the nightmares of the characters’ present lives and shared their fond
daydreams of a past that grew more and more distant each day of the war.

With the guerrillas in the mountains, we dine on rabbit stew and coarse red wine. Robert Jordan sits with the band of
guerrilleros
for their first meal, drinking wine and eating together. He meets Maria, a beautiful young girl who suffered terribly at the hands of the fascists. She brings the rabbit stew, prepared by Pilar, the woman of Pablo, described as “Something barbarous … Something very barbarous. If you think Pablo is ugly you should see his woman. But brave. A hundred times braver than Pablo. But something barbarous.”
¹¹

Pilar’s Rabbit Stew

They were all eating out of the platter, not speaking, as is the Spanish custom. It was rabbit cooked with onions and green peppers and there were chick peas in the red wine sauce. It was well cooked, the rabbit meat flaked off the bones, and the sauce was delicious. Robert Jordan drank another cup of wine while he ate. The girl watched him all through the meal.
¹²

4
SERVINGS

1 3- to 4-pound rabbit

2 cups red wine

4 onions, coarsely chopped

4 green bell peppers, coarsely chopped

1 cup chickpeas

1 bay leaf

2 tablespoons paprika

2 teaspoons salt

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Cut the rabbit into pieces. Place in a stew kettle with the wine, onions, peppers, chickpeas, bay leaf, paprika, and salt. Add enough cold water to cover and cook covered over low heat for 2 hours. Combine the flour with 4 tablespoons cold water and mix until smooth. Add to the stew and stir until slightly thickened. Serve with plenty of crusty bread.

A Valencia Escape

For now, newly arrived in the hills and hungry, Robert Jordan savors the simple stew. When the war turns bad in the north, and the food remains the same meal after meal, Jordan, too, may lift his spirits with Pilar’s reminiscence of high-spirited Valencia, and the food and drink that only memory and tragedy can hold so well.

We ate in pavilions on the sand. Pastries made of cooked and shredded fish and red and green peppers and small nuts like grains of rice. Pastries delicate and flaky and the fish of a richness that was incredible. Prawns fresh from the sea sprinkled with lime juice. They were pink and sweet and there were four bites to a prawn. Of those we ate many. Then we ate
paella
with fresh sea food, clams in their shells, mussels, crayfish, and small eels.

Then we ate even smaller eels alone cooked in oil and as tiny as bean sprouts and curled in all directions and so tender they disappeared in the mouth without chewing. All the time drinking a white wine, cold, light and good at thirty centimos the bottle.
¹³

For the paella, we will defer to the forthcoming section on
The Dangerous Summer (page
104
),
in which Hemingway enjoys
Paella de Langosta
at La Pepica on the Levante Beach in Valencia. For now, though, there remains the delicious
Empanadilla de Pescado
and the baby eels cooked in oil and garlic
.

Hemingway at La Pepica, Valencia, Spain, 1959. On the far right is Juanita Balleguer.

Pastry of Fish, Peppers, and Pine Nuts
(Empanadilla de Pescado)

6
SERVINGS

For the Dough

1 cup water

¼ teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2½ cups all-purpose, unbleached flour

1 large egg

For the Filling

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, chopped

1 green bell pepper, chopped

1 pound fillet of haddock, cod, or sole, cut into thin strips

1 tomato, peeled and chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

½ teaspoon paprika

1 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup chopped olives

1 hard-boiled egg, chopped

¼ cup pine nuts

Oil for frying

To make the dough, in a medium saucepan, heat the water, salt, butter, and oil over medium heat until butter is melted. Remove from heat. Add the flour to the saucepan and stir, incorporating flour completely. Add the egg and beat with a wooden spoon until the dough is smooth. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead lightly. Add more flour, if necessary, and continue kneading until the dough is no longer sticky. Form dough into a ball, cover with a towel, and let stand for 30 minutes. Roll out dough until very thin and cut out 3- to 4-inch circles.

To make the filling, heat the olive oil in a skillet. Add the chopped onion and green pepper and sauté until soft, about 10 minutes. Add the fish, tomato, garlic, parsley, paprika, salt, and pepper to taste. Reduce heat and cook, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat, allow to cool, and mix in the olives, chopped egg, and pine nuts.

To assemble the
empanadillas
, place a heaping tablespoon of the fish mixture in the center of each round of dough. Bring up the sides of the sides of the dough and pinch closed around the semicircle. Lay the
empanadilla
flat and press the seam with the tines of a fork to seal. Pour oil into a skillet to a depth of at least 1 inch, or into a deep fryer. Heat the oil until hot. Fry the
empanadillas
, turning once, until golden brown on both sides. Drain on brown paper or paper towels.

Sharing a table in Pamplona, Spain, 1926. (Left to right) Gerald and Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest and Hadley Hemingway.

Fried Baby Eels

4
SERVINGS

3 cups (about ¾ pound) baby eels

½cup olive oil

3 cloves garlic, sliced

Salt

Rinse the eels and pat dry on paper towels. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. Add the garlic, fry until lightly browned, and remove. Add the eels and toss gently until golden. Drain the eels on paper towels or brown paper, dust with salt to taste, and serve.

The Dangerous Summer

Twenty years later, Hemingway wrote the final chapter of his Spanish adventures, covering one of the greatest bullfighting duels in the country’s history.
Mano a manos
are unusual.
Mano a manos
between two of Spain’s greatest matadors are rare indeed. Seldom is there one truly great matador in Spain, let alone two fighting at the same time. In the summer of 1959, there were Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordoñez, both great matadors, both friends of Ernest Hemingway, and brothers-in-law besides. When they fought together, the only two men on each afternoon’s card, fighting three bulls each instead of the usual two, it was a summer of great rivalry and danger. When one man did something in the ring that was truly brave and artistic and without fear, the other must match it if he was to win the competition. It was a supreme display of Spanish pride, and death was never closer at hand.

Hemingway turned 60 that summer. He went back to Spain to cover the
mano a manos
for
Life
magazine and to update
Death in the Afternoon. Life
, which had found great success serializing
The Old Man and the Sea
in 1952, commissioned Hemingway to write a 10,000-word article. The first draft ran 120,000 words and eventually became
The Dangerous Summer
, a complete chronicle of the rivalry between the two matadors. Of equal importance is its value as a window into the life and mind of the aging master. In Pamplona, the fiesta is in some ways changed, in others exactly the same:

In Pamplona we had our old secret places like Marceliano’s where we went in the morning to eat and drink and sing after the encierro; Marceliano’s where the wood of the tables and the stairs is as clean and scrubbed as the teak decks of a yacht except that the tables are honorably wine-spilled. The wine was as good as when you were twenty-one, and the food as marvelous as always. There were the same songs and good new ones that cracked and suddenly pounded onto the drums and the pipes. The faces that were young once were as old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. . . . Nobody was defeated.
¹⁴

Matador’s Feast

There was great food during that summer, including picnics back at the Irati River above Pamplona, lunches of cold, smoked trout, egg-plant, pimientos, and Navarra black grapes before returning to Pamplona for the afternoon bullfights. But the meal that takes center stage during this epic drama is dinner at Pepica’s, on the beach in Valencia:

Dinner at Pepica’s was wonderful. It was a big, clean, open-air place and everything was cooked in plain sight. You could pick out what you wanted to have grilled or broiled and the seafood and the Valencian rice dishes were the best on the beach. Everyone felt good after the fight and we were all hungry…

We drank sangria, red wine with fresh orange and lemon juice in it, served in big pitchers and ate local sausages to start with, fresh tuna, fresh prawns, and crisp fried octopus tentacles that tasted like lobster.… It was a very moderate meal by Valencian standards and the woman who owned the place was worried that we would go away hungry.
¹⁵

Sangría

Most sangría recipes you encounter these days have brandy, Cointreau, or other liquor. This classic, simple recipe is just wine, citrus, and sparkling water
.

2
TO
4
SERVINGS