¡Madrid!¡Madrid!¡Madrid! 🇪🇸

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to try eating and cooking like a Spaniard, happy, fatty, and sodden in olive oil.

Hi there!

I spent 48+ hours in Madrid, Spain. Two days that started with a fried squid sandwich and ended with a café con hielo, the works. Except the early flight made me skip the grilled sardines.

This issue is made of some of those happy hours. A few dumb photos I shot. Some book insights. The recipes of almost everything I ate in that beautiful city.

I hope it won't read as a boring monograph.

I'd love for a bit of that pleasure to stick with you, the same pleasure we always bring back after visiting Spain and its splendid, ravenous people.

Piero

✹George Orwell. Was he wrong? Can I say that while serving this quote over the juicy image of the orgasmic Tortilla de patata by Casa Dani?

One Spanish abuela to rule them all

Friday evening. After eight hours in the hotel working, I go out to finally see Madrid. I spot a kind of specialty coffee place. I should look for something less standard, but I dive in anyway, drawn by the name: El Gordito, "the little fat guy". It charms me. A bit of karma, too.

I drink my coffee. Promoted. Then I take a side street. A few steps later I end up in a tiny bookshop specialized in photography and independent publishing, with another great name: Cabeza de Chorlito, literally "plover head," a Spanish idiom for a scatterbrain (check their catalog, it's pretty rad)

Inside there's a small room with three mini exhibitions.

One catches me: an elderly woman photographed while cooking. The woman is Fina, about to turn 85. The book documents her weekend cooking sessions, and it weaves her recipes with memories of migration, postwar life, and scarcity, alongside images of everyday beauty.

I grab the book in a flash, plus something else. And I move on. I have to say, I recommend it. Authentic, well made, and it holds a handful of recipes built on plenty of oil, layered frying, and sincere love.

Only later would I find out that the book's launch had Fina herself, the real grandmother, cooking live in the shop window.

I hope I'm not doing anyone wrong by posting here three recipes from Fina's book, photographed from the copy I bought. I loved them a lot. And I also discovered Tabletimes, this Spanish publisher specialized in food books, you should check them out.

¿Y qué comemos mañana? Editorial Tabletimes. Historias y recetas de Josefina Barbero Jiménez. Fotografías de Andrés Ramírez Ruiz
→ Shortplot: 🇪🇸 👵🏼 🍅 🍳

Some like extreme sports. Some are adrenaline junks. Some go to Madrid when its 38°C during the day, then have dinner in one of the oldest food institution and order the Cocido, the typical stew of Madrid (I'm not sharing any recipe with you because it works only there).

What is that?

• Soup with angel hair noodles,
• Brunete chickpea from farm (a lot of chickpeas),
• cabbage and carrot from Carabaña,
• potato from Granja de los Monjes,
• chorizo sausage from León,
• black pudding from Valle de Arán,
• truffled sausage from the mountains of Madrid,
• Iberian bacon,
• Galician beef shin,
• Galician cow marrow,
• Iberian ham from Huelva,
• crispy Iberian ear with Lhardy brava sauce,
• Iberian rib from Sierra of Villuercas

All of this is accompanied by:

• garden tomatoes
• a small selection of homemade pickles of radishes, red onion and piparra peppers.

For finishing

• Soufflé Lhardy (flambé with rum, why ask?)

The secret ingredient for surviving:

• 330 ml of Coke when you get back home

🍹Tinto de Verano is the best answer to the question: this summer it's friggin' hot, but what can I do with this opened bottle of average wine? (★recipe) 🦑Sailors and inland traders brought squid up from the coast, then people from Madrid fried and scattered them on a sandwich that should not exist, but it's there (★recipe) 🍅Tostada con Tomate is the most Mediterranean breakfast looking like an Italian appetizer, I had an excellent one here 🥧Merlitiones are super-sweet mini pies, very good with strong coffee, had mine in this pastry shop that makes them very irregular, then mostly looking like "true" (★recipe)

Your Guide to Madrid

Andrew Ferren / The New York Times

Madrid is on the rise. It has overtaken Miami as Latin America's unofficial offshore capital. This guide covers what you need for your first trip to Madrid and beyond. Essential charms remain: the Prado, the Reina Sofía, Plaza Mayor. New directions are worth exploring too: Mexican cuisine, a growing artists' quarter. Madrid grew as neighborhoods drifted into one another, giving it an offbeat beauty and a patchwork of architecture that hints at each barrio's character.