At Home, part 15

All that weekend, any time we passed a large outdoor staircase, I asked, “Are those the Spanish Steps?” Apparently my poor memory of Rome was not limited to the Sistine Chapel.

“No,” Mike would say, with infinite patience. Of course, when we finally passed the Spanish Steps, he had to point them out to me, because by then I had given up trying to find them.

That night we were taken to dinner in Trastevere, a newly fashionable restaurant district, by Richard and Kathy Cordova. Richard was an American Price Waterhouse employee who’d requested a transfer to Rome when Kathy’s employer transferred her there, and they were having a great time in Italy. “The funniest part is our car,” Kathy said. “I got one with an automatic transmission, and the Italians don’t even know what it is. I think it’s a pretty effective anti-theft device—the thieves look at it and go ‘What the hell is that?’ and they just move on to another car.”

We had decided to spend Sunday on an all-day bus trip to Pompeii. It was a long and grueling trip, but well worth it—neither of us had ever seen Pompeii, and both of us were astonished by how well preserved the city was. The famous murals and mosaics—and the infamous pornographic ones—looked almost new, and there were streets and streets of nearly intact houses and shops.

We returned to Rome and met a PW colleague of Mike’s from Barcelona, José Luis, at a restaurant near the hotel. We decided to start with a plate of prosciutto, and we passed it around once, with everyone having a slice. Then we passed it around a second time, but José Luis decliined.

Looking at the full plate, Mike said, “You don’t want any more?”

“I prefer the Spanish ham,” he replied.

This confused me. As far as I could tell, Spanish Serrano ham, which was air-cured like prosciutto, was essentially the same thing as prosciutto. I occasionally bought myself a vacuum pack of sliced Serrano ham, which I would eat for lunch, and I couldn’t tell the difference. Boy, was this guy picky, I thought.

But over the next year I scaled the ladder of Spanish ham, passing the unexciting Serrano and moving on to the more luscious (and expensive) Ibérico—and then to the outrageously good (and ridiculously expensive) Jabugo.

This was a self-education process. Mike and I learned to distinguish the quality of these hams by tasting them a lot in restaurants.

A plate of Serrano ham, hand sliced by a restaurant’s bartender, might cost $20. It was the great achievement of the U.S. Ambassador to Spain in 1994 to get Serrano ham back on the list of approved food imports. Some decades before, it seems, some spoiled ham was shipped to the U.S. and made some people sick, and thereafter its importation was banned.

Jamón Ibérico was another level of ham. What the pigs were fed and how the meat was cured were mysteries to us, but they resulted in a less-salty, more flavorful ham. Oil beaded on the thin slices on your $40 plate of jamón Ibérico.

And on a trip down to southern Spain some months later we encountered the absolute emperor of Spanish ham, jamón de Jabugo. We were near the town of Jabugo, where the pigs in question were raised and the special curing process took place. I did know something about what made this ham so special: acorns. Little old men went around collecting acorns to feed to the Jabugo pigs. Whereas acorns might form a part of the diet of a pig destined for Serrano or Ibérico ham, Jabugo pigs ate acorns and acorns only. This made for a rich, nutty taste and a superbly smooth feel in the ultimate ham. And it might cost $75 for a plate. And it would be worth it.

But that night we just looked at José Luis as if he were crazy and went on to have a pleasant Italian meal.

I spent another day walking myself around Rome while Mike and José Luis worked with a client, and on Tuesday I went to the airport to catch my 12:50 p.m. flight (Mike would be leaving separately that evening). But in an action of a kind we’d become used to in Spain, Roman airport workers had decided to stage a sudden strike that would begin at 12:30 p.m. The first I heard of it was when I arrived at the airport at 11:50.

“Signora,” the woman at the counter told me, “to avoid the strike we are moving up the time of your flight. It will be leaving at 12:30, so you must go to the gate right away.” I hustled down the hall and got on the plane, which pulled out of the gate at 12:25 and was airborne at 12:45.

Mike knew nothing about the strike, and I wondered how his 7 p.m. flight would fare, but I was happy to arrive home a little early and settle in with the kids.