Everything but the Squeal

This is another book about eating in Spain, this time specifically Galicia in the northwest, and only pig: as the name implies, all of it.

Unfortunately, its author, John Barlow, is no Paul Richardson, whose book on eating anything and everything Spanish, all over Spain — A Late Dinner — I reviewed on this site, and loved.

The problem with Mr Barlow is that, although, like Richardson, he is in a relationship with a Spanish native (Barlow is married to Susana, a Galician woman, while Richardson is partnered with Nacho, a man from Madrid), he just doesn’t ‘get’ Spain. He speaks Castilian and even understands a little Galician (like Catalan, a very different language), but he looks on as a bemused and often — or so it seems to me — slightly superior outsider.

Yes, he is informative about Galicia (the remaining Spanish province for me to explore) and the pork-eating habits of Galicians. The problem is one of tone.

I persevered with this book because of my love of Spain and my desire for knowledge about Galicia. You, on the other hand, may love it, especially if you love jokey, blokey, racy English tabloid writing.

I guess the other slightly irritating thing about the book for me is that, in spite of his fanatical dedication to eating every bit of the pig (from sludgy boiled head to slimy boiled tail), he seems to have a general ignorance about food.

Tasting a pork and mushroom sandwich near Ourense, he says of the bread used: “It seems unlikely that bread could in itself excite strong culinary passions.” WTF? Am I being racist in declaring that a very Pommy point of view?

And, while we’re on page 218, his observations of the Spanish habit of dining late and sleeping little, he calls a “seemingly incomprehensible quirk of Spanish life”. And he  lives there.

It just so happened that I was reading this book at the same time another Pom, Jamie Oliver — who gets food bigtime —  was on television with his wonderful pork show. Jamie managed to excite our desire for eating pork while at the same time exposing us to the generally criminal mistreatment of pigs. Nowhere in this book does  Barlow ask about or write about pig farming practices in Galicia.

Read it if you want to know the many ways in which the Galician people cook and eat pork, many of them pretty damn boring if you ask me (although the ham sounds sensational). But it was not, for this reader, an endearing book.