Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s years in Spain began in 1930, and from then on the country settled into his life as a fixed part of the routine. Beginning in the 1930s, he spent considerable time there, returning often enough that Spanish eating and drinking became part of the background of his work and habits. Restaurant Botín in Madrid, Spain was one of the places he kept returning to, the kind of dining room that can mark time as clearly as an address. The appeal was in the food itself: Spanish food and drink, and especially the roast suckling pig, gave the table its hold. At Botín, Hemingway found a place where the meal and the place were hard to separate, where the character of Spain came through in the plate as much as in the room. That kind of eating leaves a longer trace than a single visit; it becomes part of the record. His language about the food was plain and exact, which suited the scale of the praise. When he wrote about the ham, he gave it the sort of distinction usually reserved for the rarest things at table. The sentence is direct because the judgment is direct: a piece of food measured against everything else he had eaten, and found to stand apart.