Spinach in Raisin Oil with Pine Kernels

Spinach, one of the many food plants brought to Europe by Arab kitchen-gardeners, is a thirsty vegetable and its deliciousness at table relies as much on growers’ skills as cooks’ techniques.

Thanks precisely to such friary farm-to-fork growing and cookery, Altamiras could leave behind earlier Catalan and Castilian recipes, mainly for boiled spinach dressed with goat’s milk or almond milk, cheese, vinegar, spices and broth to balance possible pungency. Instead he wilted tender, young washed spinach in olive oil with no cooking water. Senorial cooks contributing to the 14th-century Sent Sovi had used this technique, but Altamiras may have known it from local wheat and barley gruels, gachas, into which young cabbage, leeks, watercress and spinach were often thrown to wilt.

In the second stage of his recipe, Altamiras made it his own, tossing cooked, chopped spinach in warm, garlicky oil slowly aromatised by raisins. Only the gentle, golden olive oil from Empeltre olives, a variety which still grows in the Valdejalón today, and soft raisins sun-dried from the Franciscans’ home-grown table grapes, allowed him to do this. The aromatising technique was new to Spanish cookbooks and later writers did not pick up on it: perhaps Altamiras learned it from the Morisco villages where the friars worked, or perhaps from Franciscan medicinal oils. Whatever his source, the idea was perfect for flavouring Lenten dishes in which no meat fat was allowed.

His pine kernels, probably the only bought ingredient in the recipe – they appear in many friary’ account-books – were added raw, hence pure white, following the tastes of the times, but you may prefer to toast them. As Barbara Ketchum Wheaton says of her recreated recipes in Savouring the Past. The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, sometimes there’s a choice to be made “between one’s curiosity about the past or one’s desire for delicious food.”

But it is just a detail: in every other respect the recipe seems entirely contemporary.

Vicky Hayward

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❖ Spinach in Raisin Oil with Pine Kernels

Aromatised olive oil boosts the flavors and textures of steam-wilted green leaves, in this case spinach tossed after cooking in olive oil (evoo) aromatised with garlic and raisins.

Flavors // spinach (or chard), raisins, your very best olive oil

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