Throughout the year we write about gastronomy from the perspective of pleasure and entertainment, from the conflicts, collisions, dilemmas and tricky issues with which it takes root. Sometimes we do it from “how is life”, other times from “one day is one day”. We talk about the concrete and tangible, chemistry, diet, habits, nutrition, norms, and the symbolic, the party, the celebration, the outrage, the taboo and the ritual. Mounted on the A pendulum that swings, swinging, from tradition to modernity, from creativity to custom, from personal to collective, from private to public, we fill pages and pages of ink about something as trivial, everyday and mundane as food, something that passes through the bodies and lives of each and every human being who has populated, populates and will populate the world, to end up confirming, again and again, the polyhedral quality of everything related to eating, from large schools of red tuna to bread crumbs. The same polyhedral quality that any other object of desire has, any other topic of conversation. Regardless of the prism face one chooses to contemplate, whatever side one prefers of the object of one’s own writing, if one scratches a little, if one dares to go a little beyond the surface, at the bottom one always finds life. Whole, all of it, and without palliatives.
Beyond the concrete perceptions on the palate, sweet are hugs and victories. Bitter, defeats and betrayals. Acid, the best jokes and the most brilliant songs by King Crimson. Spicy can be what comes after dinner, more than what could be on the plate, and salty, the friend you haven’t seen for a while and who is here, back in the village, ready to spend a summer that seems historic. Talking about summer gastronomy is not talking about food, it is talking about joy.
Ice creams flourish in July and August for the same reason that mushrooms do in autumn: because the conditions they need to thrive are in place, namely, the lifting of restrictions. Only in summer are children allowed to go down to the ice cream parlour every afternoon for a chocolate or synthetic raspberry cone. Milk, the base of ice cream, is the juice that binds sauces, nourishes babies and restores spirits the rest of the year. It is the embodiment of the Parsiphalian myth, the force of innocence, the quintessence of what we would today call functional foods and, therefore, filed away in the health folder rather than in the pleasure folder. It can only be consumed in summer after having renounced its vocation to nourish and having embraced that of joy: in the form of a creamy, multicoloured, solid and melting emulsion, carrier of sweet pleasure, mother of all stains and drips, superfluous frippery, costume jewellery, because, otherwise, it would be a sin.
The watermelon season is summer, not because neither the weather, nor the cycle of its seeds nor the wheel of crops dictates it. It is because the flavor of the watermelon improves substantially when it is consumed in bites, in sandals and a tank top, leaving the eating subject sticky from the navel to the forehead. The watermelon is a being that lives in strict symbiosis with old, faded t-shirts. Watermelons wouldn’t be so delicious if you had to worry about staining the sleeves of your shirt or the turtleneck of your wool sweater.
Summer is the time to devour fried fish not because chopitos, dogfish, whitebait or anchovies shine especially at this time, but because summer is that time of exceptionality in which, if you are between five and five hundred years old, you suspend the obligation to carry socks, using cutlery, eating at a decent time and saving some hunger for the vegetables for dinner.
Oilcloths, curtains, sun loungers, coolers, flip flops, visors, plates, glasses, cutlery… Summer is the queen of plastic season. Regardless of what guides, reports, rankings, illustrious personalities or highly respected winemakers may have stated, I am unable to evoke any memory of drinking champagne in a plastic glass that is not at a party and is not memorable. Just as during the rest of the year wine compartmentalizes, separates and distinguishes, summer wine, the popular one, the one that comes without a label and is served in two-piece removable glasses, unites.
Plastic in summer destroys the myth around which imitation was invented, that of aspiring to recreate or emulate the most luxurious substances at lower costs. There are the remains of the printed image of Lightning McQueen, worn by the scouring pad and the dishwasher, to attest that this red plate of rigid plastic never wanted to look like the ceramic or glass one. It was born special and made its difference a source of pride. The plastic plate that accompanies you during the half hour you spend standing in the heat, waiting for the rice of the popular paella among the crowd, has never felt any inferiority complex in front of its ceramic or glass colleagues. It was born to support and assist the common, not the exclusive. Its purpose is to facilitate the passage from hand to hand and the transit from the basket to the trunk, from the trunk to the tablecloth on the floor, from the tablecloth on the floor to the lap, and from there, already dirty, satiated and happy to have fulfilled its purpose, to the case that will keep it, after having passed through the sink, until the next bacchanal.
The highest and most refined summer gastronomic experience is joy. Let’s consume it without any type of moderation.
You can follow EL PAÍS Gastro in instagram and X.
