On Food #2: Pan con Tomate.

Memory of a taste.

I first tasted the culinary genius that is pan con tomate when I arrived in Spain as an 11-year-old. Our neighbours in Barcelona did not skip a beat before inviting us over for incredible feasts. Antonia’s lunch and dinner table settings were exquisitely rammed with serving dishes and platters filled to the brim, all competing for attention sitting quietly and tightly, one right next to the other.

Plate after plate offered something to be tried and tasted for the first time — boquerones, escalivada, tortilla de patatas (unequivocally Antonia’s best), jamón Iberico, pan con tomate to name a few. To be sat at that dinner table was to have literally won the lottery. My six-year stay in Spain may as well have further fuelled my deep love for food, or at the very least started the fire.

Antonia and Antonio’s hospitality was partly the reason I have such good memories of my time in Barcelona, they hold a very dear place in my heart, much like that tortilla I was talking about earlier.

But circling back to the matter at hand, pan con tomate. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to comprehend how two very simple ingredients can make my heart sing, it’s as if I constantly forget how flavours work and I find myself starstruck. Allow me to paint you a quick picture, you take a bite of that perfectly crunchy and ever so slightly soft baguette bread slathered (and I mean slathered) with freshly squeezed tomato innards (always at room temp), covered in the smoothest layer of olive oil and a healthy sprinkle of sea salt (preferably Maldon). As you make your way through the chunk of bread the presence of garlic is undeniable, you think for a mere second you might regret it later (and you will) but there is no place in this world for pan con tomate without a thorough rub of a pungent garlic clove. Your lips, now covered in the gentlest whisper of olive oil, nature’s lipgloss.

Pan con tomate does not taste the same in the UK as it does in Spain, you should believe me because I’ve conducted many tests over the past 5 years. The tomatoes barely taste like tomatoes in England, and that’s as much as I’ll get into it right here. My logic? I’m not one to sacrifice the precious memory of pan con tomate to eat it in its mediocre form.

While this makes perfect sense in my mind, I find it’s not good for the soul. To deprive oneself of the foods that make our heart sing would eventually leave us unable to find the good that there is in a piece of bread slathered in tomato. How mundane, how wonderful.