For an American, eating in Madrid is an athletic endeavor. It’s not a matter of quantity (except in the aggregate sense), it’s the sheer frequency that threatens to exhaust all but the most fevered and dedicated eaters. One doesn’t have to eat six times a day. Indeed, no. But, you’ll want to. Hence…the pretapas tapas.

Designed to hold you over between your lunch of bean stew, lamb, bread, a bottle of wine, desert, and a coffee and your inevitable pilgrimage to the tapas bars, the pretapas tapas can be had anytime after five or six in the afternoon (Madrid time). Best choices are something with a little substance, both to keep you from getting peckish and as a way to ward off the effects of the two bottles of wine you’re likely to enjoy over the next eight hours.

Here we have jamon (of course) on toasted bread with a drizzle of olive oil, and anchovies with tomatoes (also on bread with a drizzle of olive oil).

Madrid, like most European cities, is made up of some main vector points, main avenues, main points of reference, and then somewhere around 12.43 million little streets going absolutely everywhere other than exactly where you want to go. In Madrid it is possible to get there from here, just not directly. But then, that is what makes traveling outside of the Roman gridlined cities so pleasant. For instance, New York and Boston are both wonderful cities, but Boston’s roads are made up of blacktopped cow paths, whereby those of the Big Apple are built for precision moving to and fro in carriages/cars/and someday jet packs.

So, in Madrid, should one wish to travel from, say, the Puerta del Sol to anywhere directly out of your line of site - presuming you are standing on the corner of Calle de Arenal and Calle de Preciados - then it will take you two hours. Two perfectly pleasant hours of wandering about, but two hours nonetheless.

Here’s the thing, though. All that wandering about makes for hungry wanderers.

Enter the bocadillo.

It is true that the Brits can lay a righteous claim to the best sandwiches in the world. But that claim rests on the propensity on God’s Sceptered Isle to put almost anything that can be placed between two pieces of bread between two pieces of bread. The results are often as stunningly delicious as they are confusing. Not so elsewhere, for sure.

The chorizo or jamon bocadillo is what happens when everything superfluous gets out of the way, and nothing but unencumbered (and I’m going to use a term of art here, so bear with) umph remains.

Nothing more than a delicious bit of chorizo or delicious jamon between two pieces of crispy, and often still warm bread, the bocadillo has a lot going for it. If, at the hour mark, after passing that delightful but slightly decaying monastery (for the third time), an opportunity for a glass of wine and a fortifying bocadillo presents itself, what is one to do?

So. Clearly it’s taking me an ungodly amount of time to actually get the highlights of the Spanish trip posted. This has absolutely nothing to do with the usual litany of time pressedness, forgetfullness, or plain ol’ time managementness. No, there is a much better excuse, which I’ll mention here and then get back to regularly scheduled programing.

Here’s the thing…as an extra special soon-to-be-birthday gift, I got a brand new standing mixer. Oh, yeah, actually…it’s a brand new RED standing mixer. With meat grinder and pasta cutter included. I’ve been involved in some very, very decadent, even naughty culinary liaisons. There was a particularly exhausting evening with pork lard and unbleached flour, and I just finished my post-whatever cigar after an evening of making spaghetti carbonara from absolute and complete scratch (minus the pancetta of course, which can only be purchased after an awkward conversation with a guy in a white coat, who wants to talk about size). None of which has a single thing to do with eating one’s way through Madrid, except perhaps a difficult segue from pork lard to tonight’s posting (but you get a sense of my difficulties)…

There is no better place in Spain to wander bar to bar eating tapas than Madrid. The insistence amongst Madrileños that one is unable to appreciate fully a little snack until sometime around 8 in the evening is both charming and slightly terrifying for those of us who’ve learned that sensible people require eight hours of sleep and that one should never, ever eat right before going to bed. Combining that timeworn dictate with another — that the yummy bits of the pig have the words loin and chop associated with them — gives any mildly interested eater in Madrid fine opportunity to be all rebellious and even deviant.

Orejas de Cerdo is a good place to start. This Madrileño specialty is nothing more than a couple of pig’s ears, roughly chopped, then caramelized over a fire. What makes this really interesting is both the enormous richness of the dish (lots of cartilaginous lubricating material as well as fat) and the competing textures of the cartilage itself, the meat, the fat. A little bit goes a long way.

Orejas wasn’t even on my list of things I HAD to try in Madrid. Bull’s balls, check. Baby eel, check. Morcilla - the awesome blood sausage - check. Spanish cod roe, check. Orejas, no. It’s not that I have anything against the pig; some of my best and tastiest friends have been pigs. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I’d crave ears. That was, at least, until I saw what may be the best (and most compelling) presentation in the history of pigs’ ears.

Imagine a space a couple of closets wide, but deep, like Narnia wardrobe deep. On the right hand side as you walk in there is a roaring grill, and you can smell the onions sauteing in the flowery olive oil before you see it sizzling behind a pile of sausages smoking at the front of the grill. Between the fire and you is a long table of tapas, of almost every variety. Sausages, mushrooms, little omelets, shrimp three ways, calamari both dusted with flour ready for the oil and stuffed ready for the grill, piles of peppers to be roasted with a few flakes of sea salt, stuffed pimentos lacking only a little drizzle of olive oil, and then…innocently nestled between the jamon and the something stuffed in pastry, was a bowl of freshly chopped ears.

How could I possibly refuse?

Jamón ibérico, aside from a few painters, a discoverer or two, some okay football teams, and a couple of architects, is perhaps Spain’s greatest contribution to civilization. These long cured, deeply flavored, profoundly inspired examples of charcuterie sit squarely next to fois gras, pesto, and tuna sashimi as examples of what we can do with simple ingredients to make them stunning.

Ordered as a tapa, the jamón arrives thinly sliced on a plate, sometimes with a light drizzle of olive oil, sometimes with an accompaniment of manchego, and sometimes with nothing at all. The color is a deep, almost purple, red with stripes of fat running throughout. The taste is complex, slightly salty, barely meaty, with a hint of vegetable. The fat is buttery and sweet. Forks are okay, but almost everybody uses their fingers.

The flavor is unique, and is due in no small part to the way the pigs are raised. Jamón begins as little piggies are weaned off their mothers and let loose in forests to eat acorns and frolic amongst the woodland creatures (think Winnie the Pooh, only little Piglet is much tastier). The result is a bunch of well-fed pigs with an appreciation for the open air. Later (when they are no longer being used) the legs are salted and then cured for anywhere between six months to two years plus. This unique combination of pig sort, free range munching, and curative good Spanish air, creates a delicacy that stands up to Italy’s prosciutto and smacks it around a bit just for fun before completely dismissing the entire boot shaped peninsula as wannabe.

And, according to the FDA, they’re bad for us. Like real cheese, the FDA has declared that we are all likely to die a horrible, bacteria-laden death should we even contemplate eating such a thing. The thousand or so years of human trials in Spain have proven only that Spanish people don’t die from eating jamón. The Spanish may have managed to land successfully on our shores five hundred years ago, but that was just a couple of ships, some cannon, and European civilization. A pig leg is, as they say, a whole different animal.

There are rumors that jamón ibérico will be available in the States sometime next year. Even at $1100 a leg, I expect it’ll sell like rich, marbled, meaty hotcakes (with manchego).