Summer in the city. You lie around in your underwear, eyes glazed, watching TV adverts for canned iced tea, air conditioners, mosquito machines and indefinably pornographic ice creams.  It’s time to head for the hills for the Catalan Picnic Experience, an elaborate ritual that bears no resemblance to the consumption, in the car in a layby in the pouring rain, of the soggy affairs we used to call British Rail sandwiches.

The Catalan Picnic takes place in a special, immaculately kept area in a clearing on a pine-clad mountainside or by a river. Tables and benches hewn out of logs are well spaced out under the trees, and at a safe distance from each table, in the open, is a special individual square stone hearth with a barbecue.

When we had a house in the Solsonès, when the kids were small, we used to go to a wonderful place called Creu del Codó near Coll de Jou (at 1460 metres one of the toughest mountain passes in Europe where we once had the excitement of watching the Tour de Catalunya flash past).

I had it down to a fine fast art: oil and vinegar in plastic bottles, sugar and salt,  plastic cups and plates, checklist on the fridge door: matches, kitchen roll, tin of olives, insect repellent, Swiss Army Knife, plastic bags, fruit. In the village on the way we would buy a massive pa de pagés (farmhouse loaf), una sindria (a watermelon), costelles de xai (lamb cutlets) and botifarres (sausages).

Never ever has food tasted so good, in the pine forests, surrounded by clouds of wasps, with stones in our paper cups to stop them blowing away.

The hillside is dotted with ice boxes in bright neon colours and old ladies squeezed into folding chairs, fanning themselves. From their cars parked outside the area, the large families heave baskets, iceboxes, radios, folding chairs, washing-up gear, footballs, toys,  pots and pans, plates and cutlery, cruets, bottles of wine and beer, Coca Cola and lemonade, coffee pots and bottles of brandy, gigantic two-kilo loaves,  and claim their tables. The women lug the enormous melons and watermelons and bottles of Coke and lemonade to cool down in the font, the spring that pours out of a little pipe in the hillside and in and out of a series of troughs. The men and children traipse off into the forest with baskets and boxes to collect kindling and pine cones. The women cover the knotted wood table with a red and white checked tablecloth. They then proceed to hack doorsteps off the loaf, rub them with tomato and dribble them with olive oil.

The air becomes fragrant with woodsmoke as the men get the fires going. They all have hairy paunches hanging over baggy bermudas, and they stand around in groups shouting and waving kitchen tongs and long forks. The paella (l’arrós) is a particularly complex form of the Picnic Experience: the women start early in the morning at home, preparing the squid and prawns, scraping and steaming open the mussels and clams, making the fish stock from the prawn heads and then getting it all into plastic containers and not forgetting onions, garlic, parsley, tomato, saffron, the rice itself of course and the big flat paella pan and…

“They’ve got everything but the kitchen sink,” gasps our friend just up from Bcn.

And after the coffee and brandy, when all over the hillside men snore on tartan rugs in the shade, children play and women chatter and wash dishes in the font, the couple just across from us oblige. The woman sets up a camp bed in the shade of an umbrella pine, and the man clambers onto it, flakes out and falls fast asleep.

Tags: Catalan food, Catalonia

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2010 at 1:52 am and is filed under Catalunya, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.