PUMPKIN, QUINCE AND ONION REOGADO
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” an idea he comes up with while cooking tomatoes.
Such clear individual ideas on taste set him apart from Spanish cookery writers who had published books before him. In this pumpkin “reogado”, as he called it, 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. We forget how quinces used to grow in abundance, semi-wild, around the edges of villages and orchards, and how good they are to eat raw, like an apple, to keep in a clothes cupboard to perfume it, or to cook in a compote, or as quince paste or as little gleaming jellies to give as presents. The flavours work well alongside game, chicken, fish or a quinoa and rice risotto.
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Juan Altamiras’s original summer reogado of pumpkin was sauced by tomato and onion. Here autumnal quince replaces the tomato’s fruity acids and thyme backs up the parsley.”