The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (37 page)

There was something surreal about the scene, and it wasn’t just that Baelo was ancient and yet so well preserved. (Americans are always gawking at such sights in disbelief, while Europeans seem to view them with cool nonchalance. True to form, we were the only ones actually looking around, while a group of bronzed sunbathers lined the beach nearby.) The surreal setting had to do with the striking prominence of the tuna-preserving factory, a prominence that Lisa pointed out as we approached. The entire town seemed to have been built around it, suggesting that the Roman Empire needed the
almadraba
tuna to feed its growing population. It was clear how abundant bluefin must have been. Was I looking at a Roman ruin, or the future of a ruined Barbate?

Past the line of sunbathers, past the approaching tide and the indigo water of the Strait of Gibraltar, I could see the vast silhouette of Africa, right there just a few miles from where we were standing. It was a vision, arresting in its simplicity, of a very connected world. The rushing waters of the strait are, of course, a major artery connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, which eventually feeds into still more oceans: Pacific, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. You get the picture. It’s one ocean.

At the foot of the strait—bluefin undoubtedly just below, jetting off to
spawn, and the migrating birds from Veta la Palma just above—it seemed impossible to separate anything in nature, just as Rudolf Steiner had warned against doing. The bluefin below and the birds above were living metaphors for the ecological network Miguel believes in so strongly. And suddenly, though not by accident, I saw the network as larger—not just ecological, but cultural as well. It was everywhere around me, memorialized in the fading marble of Baelo, the menu of El Campero, and the Phoenician coin Ángel carried around in his pocket. Just as Lisa described, tuna are inseparable from these people and this place.

Look no further than the depleted
almadraba
fleets. These are the last vestiges of cultures that evolved in accordance with nature, of diets that listen to the seasons and the ecology and as a result are rewarded with the best possible flavor. Their demise, like our abuse of soil, is evidence of decisions made in the service of immediate goals (cheaper, more abundant food) rather than the future. It’s Eduardo’s “insult to history” all over again—an insult to culture itself.

By the time we left Baelo, I had changed my mind about the Barbate museum. If the
almadraba
is, as Miguel claimed, “a living lobotomy of the ocean,” the museum was a peek inside the operating room. The passions of the people practicing a dying art were all along the walls—in writings, three-thousand-year-old etchings, and black-and-white photographs from the turn of the last century. The museum won’t save bluefin from extinction, but for the children of Barbate yet to be born, it will help them know the culture from which they came.

A
S
WE
walked through the door to Aponiente, Ángel grasped my head in both hands. “Dan!” he said, shaking his head and apologizing for the missed
almadraba
. “Fucking wind!”

The dining room had been renovated since my last visit. Ángel said he had hopes of finally achieving a Michelin star, insinuating that he had been overlooked because of the restaurant’s design, not the food. But once again we were the only diners.

Ángel sat down across from me. Slouching forward to light a cigarette, he brought his face under the light. He looked exhausted. His small, deep-set eyes were ringed with black.

“It’s been so crazy,” he said. I looked around the empty dining room and wondered what he was referring to. “I get these feelings. Thoughts in my head that I can’t get rid of. I know something is going to happen, some idea is going to be born. It’s going to come out of me. I say to myself,
You must relax.
But who can relax when you’re about to give birth?”

I asked if he was getting enough sleep. “Sleep? Yeah, sure. Three and a half hours. This is optimal. I believe I’m getting that much. Anything less is no good.” He extinguished his cigarette. “But anything more and I get very fucking crazy.”

Lisa asked how he had become involved with Veta la Palma. It was, after all, the reason we’d come. He shrugged his shoulders and said they had simply approached him. It was “organic,” he said. I reminded him of his
rejection of fish farms at the lunch with Carl. (“Never, never, never.”) How had he gone from refusing to even meet with Veta la Palma to becoming a champion of their fish?

“Actually, I signed on as a partner now,” he told us, without a hint of embarrassment.

A small plate of
almadraba
tuna skin with tomato marmalade appeared. “If you can’t get to the
almadraba
, I’m going to bring it to you,” Ángel said. He had scraped the skin of its fat and impurities, boiled it, and then braised it. It was soft and gelatinous. Ángel told us that ancient Romans would dry the skin and use it for shields.

The tomato marmalade was very dark and intense. “Tuna blood,” Ángel said after I took a few bites. “I added it to the tomatoes while they reduced. My parents are hematologists, what can I say?” He continued, impressed by his own train of thought. “Chefs know death. We know dead products. But in order to understand death, the chef also has to know the life.” Ángel paused as I finished the marmalade. “So we’re forensic scientists.”

We are also naturalists. Not to get too high-handed about it, but chefs can do a pretty good job of translating the natural world. A delicious carrot communicates the soil it was grown in, a grass-fed lamb the kind of grasses it was pastured on, and so forth. The experience of a well-prepared meal can make these connections clear in powerful ways.

It really wasn’t until my experience eating at Ángel’s restaurant that I started to see just how powerful. Cooking with tuna skin and blood is daring, provocative, and in the vein of what’s popular right now. If Ángel’s food were defined only by this kind of nose-to-tail cooking of the sea, it would be just that—daring and provocative, and in vogue. But the totality of a meal in Ángel’s hands transcends the individual plates of food, and even the craft of cooking. The meal becomes, like
jamón
, more than the sum of its parts. And you emerge from it with a sense of awareness you didn’t have when you sat down—about fish, absolutely, but also about the fragile state of the oceans and our responsibility to keep them healthy.

In that sense, meals in the hands of chefs like Ángel are not only works of art; they can also be vehicles for igniting change in our food system. I know that’s an unlikely idea—to sit in a restaurant halfway around the world (a seafood restaurant, no less) and come to the realization that a meal has the power to change the American food system. And yet that’s exactly what happened.

Ángel, like Eduardo, is offering an alternative by way of consciousness. It’s often said of restaurants that they are places of escape. Through Ángel I came to view them as places of connection, too. You eat, say, an unknown fish and want more of it. Wanting more of it invariably means becoming interested in how to ensure it survives. Knowing how a species survives requires an understanding of marine biology (like phytoplankton) and the politics around fisheries (like bycatch). Pretty soon you’re interested in the cultural significance of preserving other species (bluefin tuna). Consciousness breeds what Aldo Leopold called a land ethic (and Safina later called a sea ethic), and he called it an ethic because he understood that ethics can inform and direct action.

Which isn’t to say that the Third Plate, as I have come to envision it, exists solely within the world of haute cuisine. But it is to say that chefs like Ángel have an opportunity—and perhaps the responsibility—to use their cooking to shape culture, to manifest what’s possible, and, in doing so, to inspire a new ethic of eating.

Across the small dining room, a waiter wheeled a cart. Ángel sprinted out of his seat and took control. Smiling broadly, he lowered his head to just above the cart, his eyes squinted eagerly, and drove over to our table.

The cart held three cutting boards, each with a different cured fish sausage. There was a
butifarra
(traditionally made with Catalan pork), a
classically inspired chorizo, and a riff on a
caña de lomo
(cured pork loin). In each case, Ángel had substituted fish.

“
Jamón ibérico
of the sea,” Ángel said, slicing a piece of each and handing me a plate of glistening meat. It was nearly impossible to distinguish them from their pork archetypes. Pimentón, the distinctive dried red pepper that’s a classic seasoning for Spanish chorizo, perfumed the meat.

Here I have to credit Ángel with something I neglected to acknowledge at the table. No one in the history of cooking, as far as I know, had ever thought to fashion fish into charcuterie. There is of course cured fish, and there are fish “sausages”—fish mousse mixed with heavy cream and egg whites, stuffed into a casing, and poached (an invention of the nouvelle cuisine chefs in the early 1970s). But no chef had replaced cream or pork fat with fish fat and then actually hung it to cure. This alone was a pretty revolutionary idea. (Lisa saw it differently: “The Spanish mentality is to make everything resemble pork, since pork is the paragon of food. So in that sense, I don’t know, Ángel actually did something rather predictable.”)

Then Ángel said something truly revolutionary. “Dan!” he said, looking like a small child behind his sausage cart. “It’s mullet!” Ángel explained that he chose mullet for the flavor, and the fat. “In fact, I no longer cook with the bass,” he said. “It doesn’t compare. The mullet is the most misunderstood fish in the history of fish.”

To put this declaration in perspective, imagine a Texas rancher declaring his preference for boneless, skinless chicken breast over sirloin. This would be very much like choosing mullet over bass and boasting about it to another chef.

I first learned of mullet (this is grey mullet, not red mullet, the delicate and revered—and unrelated—fish of the Mediterranean) when I worked in Paris, where I saw their narrow, silvery blue bodies packed tightly together in fish stalls and markets. Alan Davidson, in his ocean guide and cookbook
North Atlantic Seafood
, writes that the mullet “swims along the bottom, head down, now and then taking in a mouthful of mud, which is partially culled
over in the mouth, the microscopic particles of animal or vegetable matter retained, and the refuse expelled. When one fish finds a spot rich in the desired food, its companions immediately flock around in a manner
reminding one of barn-yard fowls feeding from a dish.”

The unflattering description is justified. The mullet’s herbivorous diet translates into a flavor that’s notoriously oily and off-tasting, often like the muddy water they inhabit. For bottom-feeders, that’s to be expected. You are what you eat. Which is why, as Ángel explained, the mullet from Veta la Palma are so demonstrably superior to other mullet. Their habitat is clean, and full of the kind of varied diet that mullet—or any other fish, for that matter—rarely find.

“I could never get a cured sausage to work,” Ángel said. “It’s a delicate process, and it absolutely depends on the fat. The mullet have the right kind of fat.”

He informed me (as Lisa and I had guessed by now) that he was collaborating with Veta la Palma on the project. Apparently convinced of the genius of the idea, the owners of Veta la Palma had committed to building a three-thousand-square-foot curing room and supplying the mullet for the operation. Ángel was donating the intellectual capital. He predicted that within a year they would be producing four thousand kilos (8,800 pounds) per week.

The next course was a fillet of roasted mullet with a puree of sea lettuce and phytoplankton. The dish was an ode to the mullet’s diet. The garnishes were meant to instruct and amuse, and they were very tasty. But the mullet itself, the first fillet I’d tasted, was stunning.

I had reason to feel conflicted, having frequently declared Veta la Palma’s sea bass to be the best piece of fish I had ever eaten, a fish that could change the world. I’d recently learned from Miguel that, as an herbivorous fish, the mullet is infinitely more sustainable to raise than bass, and now, thanks to Ángel, it appeared to be better-tasting, too—sweeter, richer, and flavorful in ways you don’t associate with fish, especially not mullet.

Ángel took two large gulps of beer. “Mullet is not like other new fish.
You know how it is: you get all excited working with them for the first time, it feels so right, and then after a little while it gets stale and you start thinking about other fish. Every time that starts to happen with mullet, that’s when they surprise me. They do something crazy. And I fall in love all over again.

“This reminds me of someone you should meet,” he said. “His name is Santiago. He showed up at my door one day with shrimp from the Bay of Cádiz. He looked like he slept on the beach, he smelled a little, so I took pity. I bought the shrimp. And that night, just out of curiosity, I cooked them. These weren’t just any shrimp. They were the most unbelievably sweet shrimp you’ve ever tasted. I served them that night. Customers thought we fried them in sugar batter. A few days later, he came again, with more of the shrimp—he knew I’d want to buy more. So I bought them all and I said, ‘These aren’t from the bay, are they?’ My whole life I’ve gotten shrimp from every corner of the bay. I was sure these were not bay shrimp. He tells me that they are definitely from the bay. I said, ‘No, they are not.’ He said, ‘Yes, they are.’ I cooked up the new batch, and they were better even than the first. Unreal shrimp. Anyway, this goes on for a long time, until about a year ago, right after I started working with Veta la Palma. Then I got an idea.” Ángel tapped his forehead.

“One day, Santiago drops off the shrimp and I say to him, really casual, I say, ‘Hey, Santiago, let me buy you a drink.’ And we go for a drink. Then I buy him another. Then another. Then, right in the middle of talking, I interrupt him: ‘The shrimp are not from the bay, are they?’ The poor guy starts stuttering. I have a hunch, so I just say it: ‘You’re stealing shrimp from Veta la Palma.’ Without even pausing, Santiago says, ‘I’ve been doing it for twenty years.’”

Armed with nothing but a small rowboat, some fishing gear, and a bottle of wine, Santiago works his way through Veta la Palma’s canals, siphoning enough fish to make a small living. His deep familiarity with the terrain comes from years spent as a rice laborer in the surrounding fields. Apparently unable to make enough money to support his family, he ventured into illegal catches—something he had already indulged in from time to time on
special occasions. He sells only to chefs, the most discerning ones in the area, but until Ángel no one had ever challenged him about his source.

“He goes to different ponds in Veta la Palma at different times of the year. Always at the full moon,” Ángel said.

Thinking of Steiner and his lunar planting schedule, I guessed, “Because the fish have better flavor when the moon is full.”

“No,” he said, looking puzzled. “So he can see what he’s catching. But he knows exactly when and where to get the fish at the height of flavor. Really, at the pinnacle—every time he brings me something, it’s just a little bit better than anything Veta la Palma has ever sent me themselves.”

“How has he not been caught?” Lisa asked.

“Caught? Caught how? It’s thousands of hectares. Where are they going to look? Anyway, even if Veta la Palma were a swimming pool, they wouldn’t be able to catch this guy. Miguel and the others, they know about him, they know this bandit exists, but they haven’t even tried to stop him. Part of that is respect. They owe him, actually. That ice water method to kill the fish—the one that Miguel always talks about? ‘Calms the fish, slows down the metabolism, and the quality is so much better.’ That’s not Veta la Palma’s humane invention, or something they borrowed from the Japanese. That’s because of what Santiago did! One night, I think it was ten years ago, Santiago caught some bass and left it for them in an ice bucket, to show these guys the right way to do it.”

“It’s right out of the picaresque,” Lisa said to me later, explaining that “there’s a tradition in Spanish literature of rascally characters—they do things like steal, cheat, and drink, but as long as they’re smart, they’re respected and given space to operate.”

“I have never met anyone like him,” Ángel continued. “He knows more about Veta la Palma than Miguel. One hour with Santiago and one bottle of wine is worth three months with Miguel.” He smiled and shook his head. “Santiago doesn’t know anything about biology, he knows nothing about ecology, nothing about Veta la Palma the company, nothing of what they’ve done. To him it’s canals and ponds with lots of fish. Ángel lit yet another
cigarette and seemed lost in thought for a moment. He recovered with a slap to the table.