PUMPKIN, QUINCE AND ONION REHOGADO
A detailed read of Altamiras’s recipes reveals a pattern of flavours around which you can improvise to come up with original combinations, providing you stick to his guiding idea that “everything calls for a little tasty sauce, but not a jumble of flavours”. Such clear individual ideas on taste set him apart from Spanish cookery writers who had published books before him. In this pumpkin rehogado I have kept the original “skilletful of fried onion”, but swopped his fruity tomato for autumnal quince, and his kitchen-garden mint and parsley for thyme I found on a walk in Madrid’s sierras. The flavours work well alongside game, chicken, fish or a quinoa and rice risotto.
