Salt Bones (Huesos salados)
Salted bones in the Girona market
“And those?’ I asked, pointing to a pile of white things in the corner of the butcher’s counter. “Salted bones,” she said, “huesos salados.” This was in a small market in Barcelona a few years ago. For soup, explained the owner.
So on my salt trail in Catalonia in northern Spain, I mull over salt bones. They don’t quite fit my culinary expectations. I’m not sure I have them pegged right. But here is my mulling for what it’s worth.
Salt bones. Bleached white. Bristling with crystals of salt.
They conjure up images of bones of dessicated animals dead of starvation in the desert. Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Dem Bones. Though none of those are salted, of course.
They hint at a characteristic color of the cuisine. Funny how cuisines have colors. Not so funny, actually. There are reasons that I want to post about sometime. Native Hawaiian cuisine is purple: poi, limu, octopus. Contemporary American cuisine is technicolor.
And then there are white cuisines. North European plates with white fish, white potatoes, white asparagus. Meals of the Mughals on moonlit nights with white rice and white koorma.
White in Catalonia: salt, salt spray, bacalao, white beans, white mold on the cured meats. White for dessication, for salt and hot sun, for bare-knuckled survival.
Bacalao and salt fish in the Girona market
All the time in this the most sophisticated of food cultures with its world ranking restaurants (El Bulli is less than half an hour’s drive, el Celler de Can Roca, second in the Michelin rankings, is in town) a barely-forgotten poverty lurks in the background.
So here in Girona I ask the butcher down the block, how many I need for a pot (using hands to indicate the size) of soup. Two.
And why? To give flavor and to make color. What color? White. Ah. So I exit with two bones (about $3.00).
And next morning I rinse off the salt and add them to a pot of water, reminding myself that in spite of all the hype above, these are not so different from ham hocks, except they are not smoked and have no bits of red meat attached. And that these are used all over Spain, not just in Catalonia, produced on an industrial scale. Recently 20,000 kilos of illegal salted bones, row upon row of hanging net bags filled with white bones, were seized by the government in Cordoba.
And a quick google yields dozens of recipes for using the bones to make caldo blanco (white broth). That color again. Not a broth color in my culinary history where I learned that onion skins helped make a chicken broth yellow, that browning bones and adding red wine gave color and flavor to a beef broth, and that you didn’t make broth with pork bones in any case.
Anyway, just to see this caldo blanco, I rinsed the bones quickly to get rid of the excess salt, and put them in a pot of simmering water.
Salt bones in simmering water
And after a couple of hours.
Salt bone broth (caldo blanco)
I let the water evaporate so you can see the bones. Sure enough there is a white broth. It’s salty, to be sure, but not horribly so and besides it would be used to make one pot meals of garbanzos and vegetables and meats that are descendants of the olla podrida (puchero, cocido, escudella in Catalan). And it tastes surprisingly meaty for two dry bones. And they have given up a surprising amount of fat, perhaps from the marrow in the bones. It did not gel when cold though.
So there you have it. Salted bones for caldo blanco, white broth. Something that rather upset my culinary categories. Always a good thing.
One last thought. So far as I can see, salted bones did not make it to Mexico, either with the original arrival of Spaniards, or with the later waves of migration in the late nineteenth century and then in the Franco era. One more of the many preserved meats that didn’t.
EDIT. And no, for the various people who asked. No you do not de-salt the bones before cooking.
Hum. Very interesting!
Diana.
Rachel I’ve bought the identical selection of goods shown in your first image; salted bones, salted lard, dried ends of ham, when staying near Cadiz. There is a salt production industry around the outlet of the Guadalquivir.
How was salt produced in New Spain and Mexico?
Yes, I suspect it’s pretty common. Tends to get written out in books for foreign audiences.
Mexico had lots of salt. Salt flats on the coast, salt deposits inland from dry lakes. Much went to mining because it was needed for the extraction of silver. Even so, this was not a salt-poor region. So the explanation does not lie there.
Hello Rachel,
You did not desalt the bones prior to boiling?
The salt-products tradition in France and Italy requires a product to be desalted completely before usage. “Sel de conservation n’est pas sel de consommation!” (finger in the air). Salt is then added to taste during cooking. Do the catalans do the same? Can You ask your sources? I’m interested in salt food (and ‘m not in Catalunya)
About colours. I read, more than twenty years ago, in the now disappeared magazine “Punch” an article on “How you know you’re in France”.
One of the telltale signs was: “all the vegetables are white”. I found this a strange observation but not absurd. It is true French cuisine loved béchamel préparation, “au blanc, “blaquette” and so on. Cannot remember, but i think the observation came from Sir Harry Secombe (or sir Clement Freud?)
Finally “in’t groen” (in green sauce) is a traditional preparation for eels in Flanders, taking back to the middle ages. Italy too has a green sauce (cold) of which I wonder if it descends from Noth African Chermoula.
Hi Nick. I’ll ask my butcher and my friend about the bones. Clearly bacalao is desalted. Salted bones crop up on the web but not so often in the few Catalan cookbooks I have assembled (local ones, not ones for the US, that is). What’s your interest in salted products, by the way?
Thanks for the French vegetable comment.
Not sure about green sauces. I’d once thought they had a common ancestry. Now I am not so sure. In part this gets to the question of whether the most important characteristic is color, herbs, or basic sauce making technique. If it’s technique you have herby vinaigrettes, pesto-type sauces, this fish protein thickened sauce (thanks Adam), English bechamel sauce, Mexican tomatillo-based sauce and probably many more.
… now you have the broth. What is next step?
Have to put in American Kodachrome Technicolor — my mother, who grew up in TN, taught me not to serve white vegetables (especially cauliflower) with chicken, not to use carrots at the same meal with beets or red kale, and that beets didn’t look very good with beef. It was also preferable not to serve two green vegetables (e.g.. baby limas and broccoli) at the same meal. The only place where these rules could be flouted was at church pot-lucks where everybody brought something different.
Lovely Kay. And now food styling makes the message even stronger.
I’m a technoligist in the first place, but with a great interest in history (who hasn’t?). Salted food has completely disappeared (except for imported hams and sausages) from Belgium, , a little country that has allways embraced things new and modern. But in the proces, we lost a lot of perfumes and tastes this way, so I write about it.
Before tomato, daubs and sauces tended to be brown (maillard color, known as Espagnole in French cuisine. A clcassic Bologna “ragu”, the iconic pasta sauce “par exellence”, is not red and contains very little tomato, if at all.
A white dish, not based on “non-enzymatic browning” (Maillard), might therefore be a sign of affluency. In a classic “blanquette” (sorry i misspelled in my earlier comment), there is no prior colouring of the meat, it is a pure white dish (made of expensive white meat: veal). The same goes for béchamel, which is originally a “high” cuisine French sauce.
I’ll add that the vegetables for the rich tend to be white, or bleached in darkness: white mushrooms, Brussels endives, bleached celery, chard, asparagus, bleached scarol, hops sprouts, “mole salad”. The plant kept in darkness has a blander, thus “finer” taste, and there is a lot more work involved. Castle gardens used to have bleaching cellars.
And then there’s white bread, of course.
What would have been the traditional salted foods, Nick?
I hadn’t considered the vegetables before but you are right about blanching.
I’d put all this together under the term refinement, understood both culturally and chemically.
Which means I am not sure where white bones fit.
Rachel,
We’re at the crossroads of Europe. This place became industrial, and cured food was more cheaply imported than could be produced locally (few exceptions). When (canning and cooling) curing became obsolete, nobody cared.
I didn’t use the term ‘blanching’, because that means fixing colour by strongly boiling for seconds/minutes in salted water (and no cover), followed by rapid cooling in cold water.
I use ‘bleaching’, to name the growing of a green vegetable in darkness, therewith preventing it from forming green colour and strong tastes, such as bitternes. I don’t know of any other term in English
Nick, blanching traditionally in English refers to both processes. Nowadays, probably because more of us cook than garden in a serious way, the culinary meaning is commonest. But blanching is also the technical names for bleaching vegetables by growing in the dark.
I think there is a confusion about “blanch” and “bleach” here. To blanch, dip in boiling water and then ice water, preserves color and helps to peel or pop skins off of vegetables&nuts. That seems different from turning vegetables white.
Do the ‘white bones’ have a root in Arabic cuisine? some desert process?
Actually in English the same word is used for both. See Blanching Vegetables, Wikipedia.
I think that the blanching of vegetables (by immersion in hot water, then placed in ice water to preserve colour) has its origin in blanching of almonds. Almonds are blanched by placing them in hot water briefly, then the cooling so that the skin can be removed. Removing the dark skin “blanches” them (makes them white).
Growing vegetables in an environment without light can be done to whiten them, which is less about aesthetics and more about removing toxins and changing flavours (think white v green asparagus), in many cases the unblanched vegetable can be near inedible due to bitterness, so not so much a consequence of being wealthy, more wanting to eat. In rural Tuscany you can see cardoons and chard growing late into the year. The former is blanched, (often both by the growing method of excluding light and by culinary method) as it is really is very bitter without this treatment. Chard on the other hand doesn’t require this treatment. Both plants grown by the same household, but given very different treatments.
Many humble and/or traditional cuisines have complicated processes for removing toxins or unwanted flavours from foods, especially vegetables.
Blanching (making whiter) is often a consequence of “forcing” (growing vegetables out of season). Witloof chicory and forced Yorkshire rhubarb is an example of this.
Mushrooms don’t have chlorophyll and are happy to grow in lightless conditions. The white strain of Agaricus bisporus (common mushroom) is seems to be a 20th century development, you can still buy the brown types, often sold as chestnut, portabello or crimini mushrooms. So not a blanching process.
Thanks Adam. Very helpful.
When I first went to live in Las Alpujarras in Spain I saw these white bones on the countertops and thought they may be for dogs!…some years later when I married a Spaniard his mother taught me how to make traditional Alpujarreanean food. This is when I found out what those white bones were for. They were for making Puchero along with salted spine of pig, salted belly of pork (Tocino), potatoes, chick peas and water. This is now my favorite food of all time. The minimum preparation of these salted items is to rinse and wash off the excess salt under the hot tap or soak the lot in cold water overnight. I once didn’t do any of the above and the result was horrendously salty. Occasionally I washed them under the tap and they were ok but occasionally once again too salty I think because of varying amounts of salt used. The best way is to soak overnight, this does not detract from the wonderful flavor. In the mountains pressure cookers are widely used and you just throw the lot in with about a cup of soaked or unsoaked chickpeas (garbanzos) and enough water to not exceed your particular pressure cooker and cook on high for 45 mins. Remember to let the pressure reduce naturally so that the chickpeas do not loose their skins and eat the puchero with raw onion on the side. If you hadn’t tried it you don’t know what you are missing…really!!!
We are now back in the U.K. and how we miss puchero but I am on a mission to do the salting thing with the help of my friendly local butcher.
What a wonderful story. Thank you for adding to my knowledge of huesos salados. With your permission, I will add this to my post.