Priorat: Part 1 (fish soup and black-footed pigs)

I arrived in Barcelona yesterday!  With some trepidation, I had blindly signed up with a group called Catacurian that advertises on the internet as a culinary tour of the Priorat, one of Spain's most interesting wine regions.  The hook that caught me was the promise of a week's worth of lessons in traditional Catalonian cuisine, which I had so thoroughly enjoyed on my visit to Barcelona last summer.  My nervousness was put to rest the moment I stepped foot in the house in the small town of El Masroig (mahs-roach), a 2-hour drive south of Barcelona, inland from Tarragona.  The owner of the renovated 100-year old house and cook extraordinaire is Alicia Juanpere.

Alicia's grandfather owned the stone house, called Can Miquelet del Mano, and she and her partner Jonathan Perret bought the house in 2002 and completely renovated it to transorm it into a charming 3-room hotel and cooking school.  The rooms are exquisitely decorated, comfortable and more luxurious than I had anticipated. The focal point of the house is appropriately the kitchen, which juxtaposes the most modern appliances with locally made terra cotta cazuelas and ceramic mortars and pestles.  There is a small herb garden off the kitchen shaded by a mulberry and an almond tree.  And, of course, downstairs is a winelover's dream cellar, stocked with all the finest wines of the local Priorat and Montsant wine regions. With room for a maximum of 6 guests at a time (just 5 this week), I feel like I am visiting a friend's house rather than taking a tour.  Alicia and her assistant Noelle, a former cook at San Francisco's Firefly who now lives in Barcelona, are generous with their hospitality.

Yes, yes. That's fine and nice, you say, but how is the food and the wine?  In a word, breathtaking.  Alicia spares no expense to procure the finest local products and wines.  For lunch on our first day we enjoyed a spread of artisanal charcuterie and cheeses.  Of course, there was the famous jamon de bellota from the black-footed Iberico pigs fed on a diet of acorns, which is still not allowed to be imported into the United States. Made from the same pigs, there was also paprika-cured loin (lomo), a pork terrine with spinach, pine nuts and raisins and the best spicy chorizo I have ever tasted.  This was all served, naturally, with the local specialty of pa amb tomaquet, bread rubbed with tomato and drizzled with olive oil, and a glasses of the local sparkler, Cava, and a quaffable red from the Montsant.

For dinner and our first cooking class, Alicia made (with our assistance) one of the dishes I most enjoyed on my last trip, a fish stew called suquet. Alicia's version, filled with lluç (hake), rap (monkfish), fresh local red shrimp, potatoes and saffron, was even better than the version I had at the beachside restaurant Can Majò in Barcelona. The key to this, as in many Catalonian dishes, is the picada, in Alicia's version a mixture of finely ground almonds, hazelnuts and pine nuts added towards the end of cooking to thicken and flavor the dish.

If possible, the suquet was upstaged by a simple and unusual appetizer of wild Mediterranean mussels cooked with nothing but whole cloves of garlic, sprigs of rosemary and lots of local olive oil.  The flavors and aromas exploded in my mouth, and I may have let slip a gasp, or at least a groan of pleasure, with my first bite. We washed all this down with a white garnacha (grenache), followed by a blend of red garnacha, cariñena (carignane), and cabernet sauvignon, both labeled Odysseus, made by the 28-year-old female winemaker of Viñedos de Ithaca in the Priorat. Dessert was a simple plate of mel i mato, a fresh ricotta-like farmer's cheese drizzled with local rosemary honey and crushed toasted hazelnuts, accompanied by a sweet dessert wine.