Heavenly Ham

My first exposure to the Spanish national obsession with pork came during an ill-timed August visit to Madrid. Wandering the sun-baked, deserted midday streets I stumbled upon a place called the ‘museo del jamón’, its windows filled with aged pig haunches. Strange, I thought, they have a museum dedicated to ham here. Then, not more than a few hundred scorched metres from the first, I passed a second ‘museo’. I poked my head inside to find a cafeteria specialising in ham. It was air-conditioned. The tile floor was covered with crumpled serviettes, breadcrumbs, and partly used sugar packets. They had cold beer on tap. I spent the rest of the week at the museum, dodging the midday heat, drinking beer, and eating Serrano.

Coming as I do from a culture that has perfected the industrial degradation of the pig, how could I have known that my little forays into the museo barely scratched the surface of the Iberian pork phenomenon. Over the subsequent years the bulky, complex mass lurking beneath the tip of the ham iceberg became apparent. I saw the film, Jamón Jamón, a self-styled tale of ham and passion starring Javier Bardem as a ham deliveryman who bullfights naked in his spare time and seduces Penelope Cruz with a never ending barrage of ham-related sexual references. I heard stories of Spanish ex-pats travelling home just to cram suitcases full of their beloved jamón, enough they hoped to see them through another stretch of ham exile. Names such as ‘jabugo’ and ‘pata negra’ started popping up. Forget Serrano, the specialists whispered, this is what Spaniards keep in their private stash.

Amongst all the innuendo, the stories and the scuttlebutt, one name kept appearing on the radar screen again and again – Extramadura. To even begin to grasp the true nature of ham and its place in the Spanish psyche, I was told, one had to first experience the ruggedly beautiful landscape of this frontier region where entire herds of ibéricos, black Iberian pigs, roam the countryside grazing on acorns, wild herbs and grasses. So I did.