Cooking Lesson 1: Calamari a la Calamari

Every Monday, when Gloria comes up to our apartment for her English class, I’m in the kitchen cooking dinner. Ever the showman, she usually manages to keep herself focused on the class for about 45 minutes before she begins talking more and more loudly. I try not to respond, not wanting Leah’s class to degenerate any further into chaos – Gloria’s kids often come to class with her, and no matter how far and wide Leah searches for a bland topic of conversation, there’s something to bicker about. If there’s nothing worth fighting over in the topic itself, they fight over whose grammar is better.

But if she’s alone, she can’t resist eventually poking her head into the kitchen to comment on whatever is being cooked. I’ve never seen anything I would call approval register when she looks at a roasting chicken or pot of spaghetti sauce, although once she was intrigued by lasagna. Here, that’s foreign food. Finally, one Monday when she could endure no more of what I called cooking, she snapped: I was enrolled in cooking classes.

Free of charge (it would be easier for us to steal her money than pay her), and focused on Catalan delights, the classes would be held each Saturday afternoon. We would split the cost of the ingredients, which only she would be allowed to purchase. I would follow her instructions precisely and she would stand off to the side, coaching. We settled on fried calamari as the first dish and made a plan for to meet at two on the following weekend.

Leah and I arrived in her apartment to find the following: three barking dogs, an enormous bag of spinach, two heads of lettuce, some mushrooms, four apples, and a sink full of whole squid. Gloria apologized for not having enough time to make us a salad, some spinach, and baked apples. We had, it was becoming obvious, been snookered: this was not a cooking class, but a lunch date.

She threw two white aprons our way and then shoved us out of the way to begin cleaning the squid. “You can clean them,” she said. “If you want.” We decided to step in, since we were supposed to be learning. I picked up a squid, whose smell still lingers on my hands as I write this, many handwashes later, and began to follow her lead. You clean squid like so:

1. Rip head from body.
2. Find plastic-y bone, remove.
3. Look for parts that are more gross than rubbery, remove.
4. Cut head in half with enormous scissors, shove eyes into trash.
5. Explode squid eyeball all over your apron, feel pang of embarrassment.
6. Shove plastic-y squid nose (beak?) out of head. Receive short lecture about how the nose is delicious.
7. Peel skin from flesh. Become frustrated. Keep picking at skin, which is maybe 1/3 of a millimeter thick. Find it impossible to remove from your fingers.
8. Notice that Gloria has already cleaned six squid while you were doing this.
9. Let Leah try; resolve to ask the fish guy to clean your squid for you if you try this at home.

Next, she gave us some enormous scissors to hack the squid into little rings. After heating some oil in a cazuela, which is a big clay dish that can go on the stove or in the oven, we threw in the squid. While it fried, Gloria said, “Now, grate an onion.” Then, she peeled an onion and quickly grated it into a sort of onion paste, which she added to the frying squid. After letting it cook for about fifteen minutes, she added some tomato sauce.

Now the squid was red, and it was clear that we would not be getting nice crunchy rings of fried calamari. It was looking more like squid stew. She grabbed some parsley that had been sitting on the counter and chopped it up. It too went in to the cazuela, without the hassle of being washed. All I could think of was the factoid in Fast Food Nation about here there is more e.coli in sinks on and on counters than in toilets. “American sinks,” I repeated over and over in my head. “American counters.” I did not make eye contact with Leah.

Next, we offered to set the table. Of course, since we had offered to do a task, Gloria said, “No, absolutely not.” She crushed up some garlic in a mortar and pestle and threw that in the cazuela. Next, she beat an egg in the mortar with the remaining scraps of garlic, poured in an unknown quantity of olive oil, and handed the thing to Leah: “Stir.” Leah stirred. This would be an allioli, a very Catalan sauce that goes on all sorts of things. Would be, that is, if Leah stirred properly. She wasn’t stirring properly. Gloria took the mortar and stirred, then poured the whole mess in with the still-frying squid. She stirred the whole mess to keep the egg from cooking like it did this summer when Leah and I tried to make French Vanilla ice cream and wound up with Shirred Egg Ripple.

Gloria decided that the calamari was done and transferred most of it to another, smaller cazuela. She threw some spinach out of the way and set it on the counter. We now had about ¾ of the squid, leaving the remaining ¼ for her and her daughter for what is, traditionally, the biggest meal of the day. Her eye caught on another pan, one that had been sitting out of the way on the far end of the counter. She opened it to find garbanzos, spinach, and boiled eggs, sautéed with garlic. “And this,” she said, scraping as much as would fit in with the squid. She was rambling about how sorry she was that there was no dessert, but that a bunch of Finns had arrived early. Finns everywhere. So many Finns. “Ok,” she said. “Go.”

Go?

“Yes, you go. I am very sorry, but there is no time to have lunch together. We will have lunch together…April 20. It is my Saint’s day.” Everyone in Spain celebrates something like the equivalent of two birthdays: one when you were born, and one on the day that honors the saint with whom you share your name. April 20 is the Domingo de Gloria, the Ascension. That might be Easter, which would be fitting, since you remember what happened on Christmas.

The recipe over, we were shepherded onto the elevator with our calamari and beans. The next day, we got a glimpse of what had happened to the rest of the groceries. I was coming back from running – it was Sunday morning – when I ran into Gloria walking down our street. “Come,” she said. “I have something for you.” I hoped it was water, since it was about 80 degrees here on Sunday.

It was, in fact, a flan-like pudding, roasted artichokes, baked apples, spinach quiche, and stuffed mushrooms. All of these foods are good; none are quite what you’re looking for when you finish running on a hot day. I tried to resist, but it was useless. Gloria made up three plates and handed them to me, shuttled me back to the elevator, hit the button for the 6th floor, and closed the doors. Never mind that, laden with all the dishes, I would be unable to re-open the doors when I arrived there. After standing at our floor for a few minutes, I managed to set one dish on the floor and turn the handle that opens the elevator door.

Leah was, needless to say, surprised to see that I had returned from my run with Sunday lunch. “She shouldn’t be giving us all this food,” she said. “I want to pay for it.” Not likely to work. There is a theory here that many of the Catalan people are actually descended from Jews who changed religion because of all that “inquisitiveness.” We have heard – and we have no idea whether this information is reliable or not – that anyone whose last name is something like a place name or a common verb is from a family that grabbed the name out of a yarmulke to save their hides.

We’d believe it. Once my grandmother said to me, after I had turned down an orange by saying that I wasn’t hungry, “You don’t have to be hungry to eat an orange.” The same idea was invoked on Sunday, but with Spinach quiche, which is a tougher sell to the not-hungry. Go re-read the scenes in the kitchen in Newark in Goodbye, Columbus and you’ll get an idea what chance I stood of getting out of Gloria’s without baked apples. And forget trying to leave the building - regardless of the weather – without a jacket. If the next lesson is about how to make croissants into matzoh brei, then really we’ll know we’re on to something.