My first day of classes at the Universidad de Oviedo
finished, I walked into my host grandparents’ apartment to the most incredible
smell. It was somewhere between onions being sautéed for pasta sauce, and
baking tater tots. I drifted into the kitchen, inhaling deeply with every step.
“What on earth are you making, Eloina? It smells fantastic!” I said to my host
grandmother.
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| Tortilla española at Eloina and Lucio's. |
She
grinned and pointed at a bowl of beaten eggs next to the frying pan. “I’m
making tortilla española,” she said.
Fifteen minutes later, I discovered that this translates to “a slice of heaven
on a plate.” Tortilla española is
basically a large, unfolded omelette, filled with onions and potatoes cooked in
olive oil and salt. After one bite, I declared that I’d found my favorite
Spanish food.
Four
weeks later, I took my final exams and returned to Eloina and Lucio’s for a
celebratory tortilla lunch. Eloina,
as promised, waited for me to come home from school before she started making
it. When I got in the kitchen, she put me to work washing and chopping potatoes
while she prepared the eggs. I had never seen cooking like this before. A
circle made by her thumb and index finger was my size guideline for the potato
chunks, and by some nearly psychic power, she shook no more salt into the pan
than necessary.
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| Making my first tortilla back home. |
“See,
once you do it enough, you don’t need to measure things,” she told me as she
poured the eggs back into the pan. “Food is best when you follow your
instincts.” After devouring our creation, Eloina helped me write down a loosely
organized recipe for tortilla, with
such directions as, “Not too much salt” and “Put a bit of olive oil in the
pan.”
A
year on from that warm afternoon in Oviedo, I’m still making tortilla española.
Spain
and its fantastic foods had a lot of lessons to teach me. This one, though, was
the most important of all. A poster of Guernica
and an Asturian flag can represent wonderful memories. But objects can’t
compare to those memories, or to the stories (and recipes) you bring home. My
summer in Spain showed me, more than any other journey I’ve taken, that the
best mementos never come in boxes.