Jamón (and my lacking knowledge of meat)

Shortly after arriving in Sevilla, someone asked me what top three words I had previously associated with Spain. The first one I could come up with was jamón, or ham, and two months into my time here, it's still the first word that comes to mind. Part of that is because there is just so very much jamón in this country, in every form; the other part is that jamón presents a distinct phase in my own eating habits.

By my observations, cured Spanish ham (jamón serrano) seems to be most popular. It's also not something that I had ever tried in my life before arriving. In the markets, entire left legs of pig hang from hooks, and vendors slice thin strips for customers. These same legs also dangle in restaurants and bars. I've heard that it's not uncommon for families to buy a whole leg and keep eating at it in their kitchen for extended periods of time, but I have yet to see that for myself. Besides the cured ham, chopped up pieces of ham come in all sizes and types and are added to everything, from pasta to vegetables to eggs to soups. There is just so much ham. 

The very special pork is the jamón ibérico, ham from Iberian pigs. My understanding is that these pigs somehow have more desirable meat and are very flavorful, and only live in the Iberian peninsula.  So jamón ibérico is an even bigger deal than jamón serrano; as far as I can tell it comes in all of the same forms, but is always more pricey.

Here's the thing. I grew up not eating meat almost at all. I wasn't vegetarian and my family wasn't vegetarian (although, Dad, you're maybe vegan now?), but we just didn't eat much meat. We'd eat fish once or twice a week, chicken maybe every other week, and beef a few times a year. We're Jewish, and as good reform Jews, we pick and choose which religious laws to follow - so we never bought or cooked or ate pork at all in our home. Due to this relatively meat-free background, I was never exposed to an abundance of forms of animal protein. 

Ham aside, in Spain the other significant turf protein seems to be ternera. Which I think is baby cow, so I guess it's called veal. For some reason Spaniards are way more into ternera than into regular beef, to the extent that ternera is frequently consumed in place of beef (or at least where I imagine regular beef would normally be found - imagine very soft hamburgers, meatballs, etc.) Veal is another meat new to me.

Because I didn't spend much time around meat while growing up, I don't know how to identify meat at all. My knowledge is simply too lacking. This means that when served meat in Spain, I often have no idea what sort of animal I might be eating (usually ham, veal, chicken, or a combination of the above), and to this I have become quite accustomed. For me a huge part of travel is the food (!!) and so in coming to Spain, I knew that I'd be eating all sorts of meat and I decided that I would eat pork. This is what I'd done while living in Honduras and in Mexico, but in neither of those locations was pork such a dietary staple, and in neither of those situations was every meal prepared for me. So I'm really turning over new leaves here.

Being exposed to meat has opened new doors for me. Since arriving in Spain I have fully embraced pork as part of the cultural experience, not just eating it when served to me, but trying it whenever the opportunity arises and never turning it down. I have had red pork, black pork, light pork, brown pork; hot pork, cold pork, thin pork, thick pork. I do feel, though, that my lack of knowledge about meat has set me back quite a bit in understanding what I'm eating. Because I can't identify meat, once I learn that I'm eating pork, that's all the information I can manage. I'm not equipped to appreciate each cut of pork, the differences between its varied forms, and the specific flavors. Instead, here I am consuming blindly - which I don't mind, but it does mean that I can't actually write about Spanish pork in much detail. I can quickly explain the difference between jamón serrano and jamón ibérico (one pig has black toes, the other doesn't), but I certainly can't taste the difference.

I was in Italy over our fall break with Camila, a friend from my program. Camila loves jamón. As we ate our way through Rome and Naples, my eyes were opened to a whole new world of food. In my previous life absent of pork, any time I saw pork on a menu, I wrote off the dish and looked for something else. I usually avoided meat altogether. But that was never the case in sharing dishes with Camila; my eyes were opened to the world of meat. We ate pasta carbonara with crispy bacon in it, and pizzas with salami or prosciutto or sausage or all three. It's really a whole new ball game out here, and I'm not quite sure what to do with my newfound knowledge of protein in gastronomy.

Final thought: haven't yet decided how I feel about jamón and pork in general. For now it's certainly not bad, and I guess it's quite the thrill to discover what new and unanticipated foods jamón has been snuck into.