The Best of Spain - A Cookbook [antikvár]

' 1 I : i :, : , • r ¦ . .• • ! , 111. , • . I . .1, •. lU íáJ.í ; 'Ii,''! ip't-ii). C.'M '•'íilí'í^l li, I Introduction The cooking of Spain may well be the least known and most misunderstood of the world's great cuisines. All too often, Spanish cooking is equated with Mexican cooking, which is quite erroneous because it is not at all hot and spicy. In fact, it is a cuisine unto itself, which relies on the robust Mediterranean flavors of garlic, olive oil, peppers, and tomatoes, and blends them with the more unusual tastes contributed by the Moors, who ruled Spain for nearly eight hundred years. The Spanish way of preparing foods is really much closer in style to French and Italian than to anything from the New World. Of course, Europe has Spain to thank for introducing native American foods -peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and chocolate - to the Old World, and one wonders how European cooking existed for so long without them. Spanish cuisine was shaped both by Spain's remarkable history and by its unusual geography and climate that compress the variety of a whole continent into one relatively small country. Moorish rule imparted Eastern accents to Spanish food, still evident today in the use of saffron, cumin, coriander, almonds, and rice. Geographically, an extensive coastline makes seafood an important feature of the Spanish A goatherd in the town of Mérida, Extremadura