Red Flags and Floyd

Our love of Spain can be traced back to various influences early in our relationship but probably the most significant was the 1992 food programme, Floyd on Spain, in which the late Keith Floyd, the legendary chef, toured the country, sampling the local food, doing a bit of cooking and of course drinking a vast quantity of the local wine.  We emulated a few of his recipes at the time, some of which have remained in our repertoire ever since and we were inspired to make our first visit to Spain later that year to Barcelona where we ate in the restaurant Los Caracoles (“the snails”) that was featured in his programme. 

Floyd on Spain is repeated regularly on the various specialist TV food channels and we have a recording of the one where he visits the Valencia region, learns how to cook paella and visits a strange village restaurant run by communists.  Nearly twenty years on, and after a little research, we found a restaurant that we thought might be the one and set off inland into the spectacular mountain scenery that we know well through our various trips with the Costa Blanca Mountain Walkers.  An hour or so inland lies the village of Tarbena where, a year after the forced deportation of the Moors that ultimately ruined the economy of this region, the village was repopulated in 1610 with seventeen families from Mallorca.  They brought with them the tradition of making sobresada sausage (still made in Tarbena four hundred years later), beginning the culinary tradition which brought Floyd here.

Sure enough we found the restaurant, Casa Pinet, almost unchanged from 1992.  The woman who prepared fideua (paella made with noodles) with Floyd all those years ago was on hand to show us a photo of him on the wall among pictures of famous left-wingers such as Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Hugo Chavez.  I avoided the temptation to try to explain in Spanish that our flat in London is near where Karl Marx is buried – I tried that speech in the cemetery in Buenos Aires where Eva Peron is buried and while I think I got the Spanish mostly right, Suzanne thought the curator of the cemetery who I was talking to was bored out of his mind.

The people at Casa Pinet are more than ever convinced of their political leanings in the current economic circumstances.  Posters exert you to support political prisoners in Cuba, give to food parcels for Gaza and contribute to the struggle to free Western Sahara.  We had a quick drink and left them to contemplate their sausages, the class struggle and the decline of international capitalism.