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The Book of Pintxos – inside story of Basque small plates

In a recent The Rest Is History, on the build-up to the Great War, podcast pals Tom and Dominic reached a quirky consensus on their dislike of Russian Salad… a view I share. You’ll have to listen to episode 3 to discover the context. Clue – a Serbian ultimatum that was hard to stomach,


This digression just happened to coincide with my perusal of The Book of Pintxos (Artisan, £30), Marti Buckley’s wonderful, San Sebastián-heavy follow-up to Basque Country, her indispensable guide to that great foodie region. I have to believe her when she writes: “Ensaladilla rusa is, after tortilla española, the most ubiquitous and popular pintxo in Spain.” For pintxo also read tapa, that small plate rival across the rest of the Iberian peninsula. Indeed it remains a restaurant mainstay in (its disputed birthplace) Russia and in old school diners across the globe.

Russian salad – a mutual bete noire

Marti, raised in Alabama, schooled in Louisiana, has spent well over a decade as the adopted daughter of Donastia (local name for San Sebastián). She’s the go-to gal to message the States that Italian and French are not innately superior cuisines to Spanish and her beloved Basque. But, as witness for the defence, Russian salad? Albeit, it HAS to be made with home-made mayo and hopefully the tuna might be canned ventresca in escabeche. Which still doesn’t in my eyes excuse a salad combining cooked potatoes, carrots and canned peas.
The author adapts her recipe from one of San Sebastián’s most acclaimed pintxos spots, the Bar Ezkurra, dating back to 1933 and physically little changed. It shifts, from its dark wooden counter, 175 pounds of rusa on busy days.

The joy of The Book of Pintxos is its depth of historical research, and pen pictures of the folk who keep the legacy alive, some by radically ‘elevating it’. A spin-off perhaps from a region boasting the highest per capita concentration of Michelin-star restaurants in the world. There’s a place for many approaches.
What unites many dishes is the toothpick. Pintxos was first promoted properly in North West England by Ramsbottom’s sadly missed Baratxuri, where at the end of a night full of bar snacks they tallied the bill according to the number of little sticks collected.
Before pintxos evolved to knife and fork this was the standard serving of simple snacks such as my old favourite to accompany a glass of tzakoli wine – Gilda. Arguably the original pintxo, this is just an anchovy fillet, pitted manzanilla olives and sharp pickled guindilla peppers threaded onto a toothpick. Hardly molecular gastronomy but at its core pintxos remain bar food.

The simple guilda
Burnt Basque cheesecake

Some of the 70 recipes are more complex as Marti traces the historical evolution, interviewing all the key players. Take Santi Rivera. In 1988 he took over the kitchen at his parent’s San Sebastián Old Town bar, La Viña, and perfected the one Donostian dish recognisable worldwide – Burnt Basque Cheesecake. Since then he has won a Pintxos Oscar’ in 1998 for his anchovy and cheese stuffed cone, but it is the cheesecake that shifts in vast numbers to this day – pan-burn crust on the outside transitioning into the creamiest of soft cheese custards, “the interior all jiggly and loose” in Marti’s words.
The author spreads her net beyond San Sebastián (or Donastia as the Basques call it) and covers my favourite places in Bilbao, a city I know better and have more affection for. One of my home page images was taken in Bilbao’s Plaza Nueva.

Certainly the Gure Toki’s truffled eggs and mi-cuit foie gras nougat are a step up from th humble guilda. Quality of ingredients has a role to play in the bar scene. La Vina Del Ensanche in Bilbao’s Old Town offers not just an encyclopaedic wine list but majors in the the world’s best jamon, Joselito Bellota.

If you must – Ensaladilla rusa recipe from The Book of Pintxos

Ingredients
Salt
3 large Yukon Gold potatoes peeled
1 medium peeled carrot, ends trimmed
7 large eggs
3 cups mayonnaise, preferably homemade*, divided
¼ cup drained canned green peas
¼ cup drained canned tuna ventresca in escabeche, or any good-quality oil-packed tuna, flaked
1 baguette, sliced on the bias into 15 pieces

Method
Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the potatoes and carrot and cook for eight minutes, then add the eggs and boil for 12 minutes more. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the eggs to an ice bath. Pierce one of the potatoes with a fork; if it slides in easily, drain along with the carrot and transfer to a cutting board. (Alternatively, continue boiling until the potatoes are fork-tender.) 
Peel the eggs and finely chop five of them (set aside the remaining two whole eggs). Cut the potatoes into ½-inch pieces and the carrot into ¼-inch pieces; transfer the chopped eggs, potatoes, and carrots to a large bowl. Add 1½ cups of the mayonnaise, the peas, tuna, and ½ teaspoon of salt and use a silicone spatula to gently combine. Fold in more mayonnaise (up to ½ cup) until the mixture is creamy and soft. Season to taste with more salt if needed. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. 
To serve, scoop generous portions of the salad atop the baguette slices, using a butter knife to form little mountains. Remove the yolks from the remaining two eggs (reserve them for another use), then use the small holes of a box grater to grate the whites over the pintxos. Using a pastry bag fitted with a decorative tip or a zip-top bag with a corner snipped off, squeeze a generous teaspoon of mayonnaise onto each pintxo.  

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Dockworkers’ tipple Rum & Black the new rock and roll?

The Bloody Foreland, Donegal, autumn, some time in the Seventies. It’s raining as we get off a bus that’s going no further. Over the breakwater the waves are pounding but such is the sea fret you can barely see them. You can, though, feel the spray and by the time we stagger into the bar where we plan to stay – Murphy’s, Halloran’s, O’Dowd’s? – we are soaked to the callow bone. Cue a welcome that brings two young travellers round. “You’ll be having a warm double toddy won’t yous?”  Indeed a second rum and blackcurrant swiftly follows the first before our restorative drisheen-heavy fry-up appears.

I’d hardly given that evening a thought in half a century until a bottle of Salford Rum Company Rum and Black arrived in the post on a Yorkshire summer day that couldn’t have been more different than that Irish drencher. The R&B belongs deep in the memory bank like the Guinness and Black we also supped as students. They felt quite rock and roll. Lager and lime we shunned.

Mojitos weren’t a thing back then but, courtesy of Salford Rum’s head bartender Hendo,

 the cocktail recommendation that accompanies our review bottle is a ‘Black Spiced’ take on the summery classic. In the absence of Licor 43 from my shelves I substitute Kamm & Co with its heady flavours of ginseng and grapefruit. Hardly like for like, but it does the job alongside mint sprigs, cinnamon syrup, lemon juice, a handful of fresh blackcurrants. soda and, of course, the Rum and Black. All that vitamin C coursing through us!

Historically the drink is known as ‘the drink of the dockworkers’, a working men’s club staple back in the 1800s and early 1900s utilising the exotic spices and rums filtering in via the Ship Canal. I expect the stevedores of old Salford Docks, when it was the UK’s third argest port, laced their grog with blackcurrant cordial. Updating it, the distilling team “fuse smooth rum with locally sourced blackcurrants from The Promise Co, a family-rum urban homestead in Worsley.” A gorgeous, collectable bottle, designed by ‘Dave Draws’  takes the tipple even further upmarket. Worth the retail price of £42 a 75cl bottle? At a 28% ABV  it is quite delicate compared, say with a créme de cassis, but proof that it slips down well – we drained the bottle, even running out of soda, as the sun sank in the west, releasing the inner docker in ourselves.

• My own Ribes nigrum (blackcurrant) update. 1kg of freshly picked berries from my own urban homestead have been steeped in vodka for the past three months with sugar syrup to be added in time Christmas to complete my own créme de cassis, to let the festive Kir Royales roll.

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