The Hemingway Cookbook

by Craig Boreth

  Alternative: To truly recreate the wood-fired stoves of Botín’s, use an outdoor grill and add pine or ash wood chips to the coals.

  Madrid is a city, indeed Spain a country, of endless adventure. Each turn in the road finds succulent diversions for all of the senses. In Madrid your head swims with memories and dreamy landscapes of food and wine. The claybrown plains and stormy dark seas. The mountains and churches, of equal antiquity. In the early hours in Madrid, the world celebrates this land. The gift of Spain shall not go unappreciated. It is in good hands.

  For Whom, the Bell Tolls

  In July 1936, the civil war began in Spain, pitting the right-wing Nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco against the Republicans, also known as Loyalists. Initially Hemingway remained neutral. Eventually, through the urging of many people, including journalist and would-be third wife Martha Gellhorn, Ernest came to see the Loyalists as the lesser of two evils. Much more clearly he saw the conflict in Spain as a prelude to war across Europe, and in February 1937, he left for his first of four tours as war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA).

  Sensing that a larger war was imminent, Hemingway did not wait 10 years to write his novel of this war, as he had with A Farewell to Arms. He began For Whom the Bell Tolls in March 1939, six months before Germany invaded Poland. It was published in October 1940 and was a huge success, becoming the biggest best-seller since Gone with the Wind.

  The novel takes place northwest of Madrid, high in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, late in May 1937. Robert Jordan, a young Spanish professor from Montana, has joined a band of Loyalist guerrillas well behind the fascist lines. Through telling the story of Jordan’s mission—the destruction of a steel bridge coordinated with a surprise Loyalist attack—Hemingway expressed his distaste for both sides and the deep sorrow he felt at seeing his beloved Spain torn apart. He showed us the nightmares of the characters’ present lives and shared their fond daydreams of a past that grew more and more distant each day of the war.

  With the guerrillas in the mountains, we dine on rabbit stew and coarse red wine. Robert Jordan sits with the band of guerrilleros for their first meal, drinking wine and eating together. He meets Maria, a beautiful young girl who suffered terribly at the hands of the fascists. She brings the rabbit stew, prepared by Pilar, the woman of Pablo, described as “Something barbarous … Something very barbarous. If you think Pablo is ugly you should see his woman. But brave. A hundred times braver than Pablo. But something barbarous.”11

  Pilar’s Rabbit Stew

  They were all eating out of the platter, not speaking, as is the Spanish custom. It was rabbit cooked with onions and green peppers and there were chick peas in the red wine sauce. It was well cooked, the rabbit meat flaked off the bones, and the sauce was delicious. Robert Jordan drank another cup of wine while he ate. The girl watched him all through the meal.12

  4 SERVINGS

  1 3- to 4-pound rabbit

  2 cups red wine

  4 onions, coarsely chopped

  4 green bell peppers, coarsely chopped

  1 cup chickpeas

  1 bay leaf

  2 tablespoons paprika

  2 teaspoons salt

  3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  Cut the rabbit into pieces. Place in a stew kettle with the wine, onions, peppers, chickpeas, bay leaf, paprika, and salt. Add enough cold water to cover and cook covered over low heat for 2 hours. Combine the flour with 4 tablespoons cold water and mix until smooth. Add to the stew and stir until slightly thickened. Serve with plenty of crusty bread.

  A Valencia Escape

  For now, newly arrived in the hills and hungry, Robert Jordan savors the simple stew. When the war turns bad in the north, and the food remains the same meal after meal, Jordan, too, may lift his spirits with Pilar’s reminiscence of high-spirited Valencia, and the food and drink that only memory and tragedy can hold so well.

  We ate in pavilions on the sand. Pastries made of cooked and shredded fish and red and green peppers and small nuts like grains of rice. Pastries delicate and flaky and the fish of a richness that was incredible. Prawns fresh from the sea sprinkled with lime juice. They were pink and sweet and there were four bites to a prawn. Of those we ate many. Then we ate paella with fresh sea food, clams in their shells, mussels, crayfish, and small eels.

  Then we ate even smaller eels alone cooked in oil and as tiny as bean sprouts and curled in all directions and so tender they disappeared in the mouth without chewing. All the time drinking a white wine, cold, light and good at thirty centimos the bottle.13

  For the paella, we will defer to the forthcoming section on The Dangerous Summer (page 104), in which Hemingway enjoys Paella de Langosta at La Pepica on the Levante Beach in Valencia. For now, though, there remains the delicious Empanadilla de Pescado and the baby eels cooked in oil and garlic.

  Hemingway at La Pepica, Valencia, Spain, 1959. On the far right is Juanita Balleguer.

  Pastry of Fish, Peppers, and Pine Nuts (Empanadilla de Pescado)

  6 SERVINGS

  For the Dough

  1 cup water

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  3 tablespoons butter

  3 tablespoons vegetable oil

  2½ cups all-purpose, unbleached flour

  1 large egg

  For the Filling

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  1 onion, chopped

  1 green bell pepper, chopped

  1 pound fillet of haddock, cod, or sole, cut into thin strips

  1 tomato, peeled and chopped

  2 cloves garlic, minced

  1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

  ½ teaspoon paprika

  1 teaspoon salt

  Freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ cup chopped olives

  1 hard-boiled egg, chopped

  ¼ cup pine nuts

  Oil for frying

  To make the dough, in a medium saucepan, heat the water, salt, butter, and oil over medium heat until butter is melted. Remove from heat. Add the flour to the saucepan and stir, incorporating flour completely. Add the egg and beat with a wooden spoon until the dough is smooth. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead lightly. Add more flour, if necessary, and continue kneading until the dough is no longer sticky. Form dough into a ball, cover with a towel, and let stand for 30 minutes. Roll out dough until very thin and cut out 3- to 4-inch circles.

  To make the filling, heat the olive oil in a skillet. Add the chopped onion and green pepper and sauté until soft, about 10 minutes. Add the fish, tomato, garlic, parsley, paprika, salt, and pepper to taste. Reduce heat and cook, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat, allow to cool, and mix in the olives, chopped egg, and pine nuts.

  To assemble the empanadillas, place a heaping tablespoon of the fish mixture in the center of each round of dough. Bring up the sides of the sides of the dough and pinch closed around the semicircle. Lay the empanadilla flat and press the seam with the tines of a fork to seal. Pour oil into a skillet to a depth of at least 1 inch, or into a deep fryer. Heat the oil until hot. Fry the empanadillas, turning once, until golden brown on both sides. Drain on brown paper or paper towels.

  Sharing a table in Pamplona, Spain, 1926. (Left to right) Gerald and Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest and Hadley Hemingway.

  Fried Baby Eels

  4 SERVINGS

  3 cups (about ¾ pound) baby eels

  ½cup olive oil

  3 cloves garlic, sliced

  Salt

  Rinse the eels and pat dry on paper towels. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. Add the garlic, fry until lightly browned, and remove. Add the eels and toss gently until golden. Drain the eels on paper towels or brown paper, dust with salt to taste, and serve.

  The Dangerous Summer

  Twenty years later, Hemingway wrote the final chapter of his Spanish adventures, covering one of the greatest bullfighting duels in the country’s history. Man
o a manos are unusual. Mano a manos between two of Spain’s greatest matadors are rare indeed. Seldom is there one truly great matador in Spain, let alone two fighting at the same time. In the summer of 1959, there were Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordoñez, both great matadors, both friends of Ernest Hemingway, and brothers-in-law besides. When they fought together, the only two men on each afternoon’s card, fighting three bulls each instead of the usual two, it was a summer of great rivalry and danger. When one man did something in the ring that was truly brave and artistic and without fear, the other must match it if he was to win the competition. It was a supreme display of Spanish pride, and death was never closer at hand.

  Hemingway turned 60 that summer. He went back to Spain to cover the mano a manos for Life magazine and to update Death in the Afternoon. Life, which had found great success serializing The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, commissioned Hemingway to write a 10,000-word article. The first draft ran 120,000 words and eventually became The Dangerous Summer, a complete chronicle of the rivalry between the two matadors. Of equal importance is its value as a window into the life and mind of the aging master. In Pamplona, the fiesta is in some ways changed, in others exactly the same:

  In Pamplona we had our old secret places like Marceliano’s where we went in the morning to eat and drink and sing after the encierro; Marceliano’s where the wood of the tables and the stairs is as clean and scrubbed as the teak decks of a yacht except that the tables are honorably wine-spilled. The wine was as good as when you were twenty-one, and the food as marvelous as always. There were the same songs and good new ones that cracked and suddenly pounded onto the drums and the pipes. The faces that were young once were as old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. . . . Nobody was defeated.14

  Matador’s Feast

  There was great food during that summer, including picnics back at the Irati River above Pamplona, lunches of cold, smoked trout, egg-plant, pimientos, and Navarra black grapes before returning to Pamplona for the afternoon bullfights. But the meal that takes center stage during this epic drama is dinner at Pepica’s, on the beach in Valencia:

  Dinner at Pepica’s was wonderful. It was a big, clean, open-air place and everything was cooked in plain sight. You could pick out what you wanted to have grilled or broiled and the seafood and the Valencian rice dishes were the best on the beach. Everyone felt good after the fight and we were all hungry…

  We drank sangria, red wine with fresh orange and lemon juice in it, served in big pitchers and ate local sausages to start with, fresh tuna, fresh prawns, and crisp fried octopus tentacles that tasted like lobster.… It was a very moderate meal by Valencian standards and the woman who owned the place was worried that we would go away hungry.15

  Sangría

  Most sangría recipes you encounter these days have brandy, Cointreau, or other liquor. This classic, simple recipe is just wine, citrus, and sparkling water.

  2 TO 4 SERVINGS

  1 bottle full-bodied, dry red wine

  Juice of 1 lemon

  1 orange, sliced

  ¾ cup sparkling water, or to taste

  In a large pitcher, combine the wine, lemon juice, orange slices, and sparkling water. Add ice. Stir and serve.

  Fried Octopus

  4 APPETIZER SERVINGS

  Meat from 1 small octopus

  3 large eggs, slightly beaten

  3 tablespoons milk

  Salt and Pepper

  Oil for frying

  Prepare the octopus as for Pulpo a la Vinagreta (see page 92), to the point when the tentacles have been cut into pieces.

  Combine the eggs, milk, and salt and pepper to taste in a bowl. Add the octopus pieces and stir to coat. Heat the oil in a skillet over high heat. When hot, add the octopus, a few pieces at a time. Fry until lightly browned, turning a few times. Remove the octopus, drain on brown paper or paper towels, and serve immediately.

  Paella de Langosta

  Hemingway remembered a great many foods at La Pepica that summer. Juanita Balleguer, who still runs La Pepica today in her nineties, remembers Ernest’s fondness for this one dish in particular. I would like to thank Luis and José, as well as Juanita herself, for their generous assistance in developing a written record of this dish. Of course, without the real hardwood charcoal, the paella pans cured over generations, and a certain magic that exists only in the Valencian kitchen, we may only hope to create a respectable facsimile of the genuine article. For the true effect, one must dine, as Hemingway repeatedly did, at La Pepica. It is truly, as Penelope Casas claims, “the paella mecca of the world.”16

  4 SERVINGS

  2 small lobsters, about 1¼ pound each

  3 cups clam juice

  1 cup water

  1 bay leaf

  1 cup dry white wine

  Large pinch of saffron threads

  ½ cup olive oil

  6 cloves garlic, minced

  1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

  1 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped

  2 tomatoes, peeled and seeded

  1 tablespoon Spanish paprika

  2 cups arborio or other short-grain rice

  Salt

  Lemon wedges, for garnish

  To prepare the lobster stock, you must first kill the lobsters. This may be done one of two ways: either insert a knife in the first joint behind the head, which instantly kills them, or place them in boiling water for about 5 minutes. If you choose the latter method, add the lobster pieces to the paella pan just before adding the rice, rather than at the very beginning.

  Remove the tail and claws from the lobsters, setting the bodies aside. Crack the claws and knuckles and cut the tail (with the shell still on) into 3 or 4 pieces with kitchen scissors. Place the lobster pieces in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate.

  In a medium stockpot, combine the lobster bodies, clam juice, water, and bay leaf. Bring stock to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain the stock. There should be about 3½ cups of stock. If there is more, return the stock to the pot and continue to simmer until reduced to 3½ cups. Stir in the wine and saffron.

  In a food processor, combine ¼ cup of the olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic, and the parsley. Pulse together quickly and set aside. This mixture is known as picado.

  Today at age ninety, Juanita Balleguer pictured with Luis and José, still runs the restaurant.

  Preheat the oven to 400° F.

  Place a 14-inch paella pan or large cast-iron skillet over high heat. Add remaining ¼ cup oil and the lobster pieces and sauté for a minute or two. Add red pepper and sauté for 1-2 minutes. Add the tomato and remaining 4 cloves of garlic and sauté 1 minute more. Stir in the paprika and picado. Then add the rice and stir to coat completely. Stir in the lobster stock and cook, simmering vigorously, for about 15 minutes, or until most of the fluid has been absorbed. Taste the broth and add salt to taste. Place the paella in the oven and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the rice is slightly browned on top. Remove pan, cover, and let stand for 5 to 10 minutes. Garnish with lemon wedges and serve.

  5

  KEY WEST AND CUBA

  Sailing the Stream

  “What do you have to eat?” the boy asked.

  “A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?”

  “No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?”

  “No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.”

  “May I take the cast net?”

  “Of course.”

  There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.

  “Eighty-five is a lucky number,” the old man said.

  —The Old Man and the Sea

  Ernest and Joe Russell raise a toast.

  The Anita was the model for Harry Morgan’s boat in To Have and Have Not.

  Key West

  Hemingway first discovered Key West, Flo
rida, more by accident than design, in 1928. He and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, had stopped there briefly en route from Paris to Piggott, Arkansas, and Kansas City where she would give birth to Ernest’s second son, Patrick. Pauline’s wealthy Uncle Gus had arranged for a man from Ford to meet the Hemingways upon their arrival and present them with a new Ford Roadster. There was no man from Ford and no car, and the Hemingways spent most of April and May 1928 in Key West. Ernest was in high spirits. His work on A Farewell to Arms was going well, and he was discovering saltwater fishing in the afternoons and the saloons of Key West at night (Prohibition never quite caught on in Key West). His fondness for the charming yet dilapidated little island grew along with the manuscript, and when it came time for Ernest and Pauline to return to Paris they chose instead to spend the winter of 1928 in the warmth and sun of Key West.1

  Fitzgerald had a theory that Ernest would need a new woman for each new novel. Apparently there would be new homes as well. Ernest lived in Key West, in the house at 907 Whitehead Street that Uncle Gus bought, until he left for Cuba and another wife in April 1939. In the years between, he became (and remained long after his death), Key West’s most famous resident. The Hemingway House, filled with cats, would become its most famous landmark, and Sloppy Joe’s, his favorite old watering hole, would thrive forever on the legacy of his patronage.

  Hemingway arrived in Key West working on A Farewell to Arms, and some say he left while starting For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Key West years were the most productive in his career, also including Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, and the short stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

  Cuba

  When you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone.2