The weeks have passed quite rapidly, and now I am finding myself winding down the last few weeks of a busy summer season of travel. I have been meaning to write about an extra special experience I was able to enjoy a couple of weeks ago, however, time has got the better of me. But there is no time like the present.
I have been lucky enough on a couple of occasions now to be invited to a sociedad gastronómica, to enjoy an evening of food, wine, and appreciation of a very special and unknown part of Basque Culture.
Traditionally in Basque culture, the woman is the king of the castle. The man goes out for a hard day’s work, and at the end of the day, the paycheque is handed over to the woman who decides what to do with it. This prompted an interesting kind of social club – a sociedad gastronómica – known in euskera, the Basque local language, as a txoko. Men would become members of these incredibly exclusive clubs (even today, many txokos will only allow membership to be passed down from father to grandfather to grandson) as a way of meeting with their friends, drinking, cooking, and eating together.
Previously women were not allowed to enter, and even today women may enter but are still prohibited from becoming members or having any control or hand in the cooking and preparation of the food. These txokos have basically represented themselves as private gastronomic societies – a private club based around the idea of communal cooking and dining. They have been very important in firstly, preserving the traditional Basque cuisine thanks to the insular nature of the clubs, which means the traditional recipes have been preserved, and secondly, evolving Basque cuisine, as friends got together and experimented with ingredients, favours and dishes.
It was a rainy Thursday night in San Sebastian. If it wasn’t for that we had such a special invitation, I honestly would’ve bailed – by rainy I mean bucketing, and there was not a dry inch of clothing to be found on anyone. We burst into the door of the txoko, clothes drenched, wet, stringy hair sticking to our faces, umbrellas failing and flailing. Our host Xavi, was waiting, slightly bemused by our dramatic arrival, though welcoming us with a warm smile.
Xavi’s family have long been members of this particular society (which I will leave nameless in an effort to protect the club’s privacy) which was founded in the 1930s has around 100 members. Xavi explains to us that Thursday night is a popular night to meet, so there are a few other members and their guests also hanging out at the txoko that night. Inside is quite small – there are probably around eight tables surrounded by benches that would sit around six to eight people. There are a couple of other groups of local men of all ages inside the club, drinking, chatting loudly, laughing.
We take a little time to take in our surroundings. The club has a coat of arms, representing the sun, the sea, the wine, and the stairwell down into the club. The wall is adorned with photos and memorabilia of the club and its members. There is an old photograph dominating one wall, of a man dressed in local costume performing a traditional dance in shoes similar to those for Irish dancing. “That photo there,” Xavi explains to me, “is that man sitting over there!” I look over to who he is indicating and I see a much older man than in the photo, sitting down with a wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, in his pressed linen trousers and a pink collared shirt. His outfit and presence do not indicate that he encountered the same fate in the rain outside as we just did. He is well dressed, calm but jovial. He is many years older than his companions but from the laughter and smiles, he seems to be enjoying himself as if he was the same age as them again. He realises he is the subject of the conversation and takes the opportunity to curiously inspect the foreigners. “It was when I was much younger”, he tells me so matter-of-factly. I tell him he is still young. He likes that.
We are lucky tonight that there are other members using the club, as it is a nice way to see what goes on behind closed doors, and no doubt later we will be sharing leftovers and asking questions of each other.
But for now – the food. We are lucky that Xavi, aside from being passionate about Basque food, is a cooking teacher at a local school. The club has no chef – the point is the friends come and cook together – but Xavi is taking care of the main affairs of the duty for us this evening. In our party there are several males, and whilst the females are under strict instructions to do nothing except eat, drink, and look pretty, soon enough the men folk are up, bouncing around, fetching plates, glasses, pouring wine, helping serve the courses.
Xavi’s ‘speciality’ is an amazing seafood soup, made out of prawn, leek and onion. However, I warned Xavi in advance that we had in fact sampled his speciality already as we ate at a restaurant of a former student of his earlier that day. And what do you think came out in the menu del dia? Xavi’s special soup, of course! So I am anxious and curious to see what awaits us.
Anxiety is not something that is needed with Xavi’s cooking. The first course is a hojaldre, a puff pastry parcel of sorts, stuffed with any combination of ingredients. Xavi has prepared us hojaldres with prawns and garnished with a salsa de pimiento (sweet red pepper sauce), the perfect compliment. The rest of our party is served a perfectly balanced, perfectly tender, entrecot (steak). Surprisingly to many, I don’t eat meat, so I am served a revuelto with prawn. Revueltos are, for lack of a better description, fancy scrambled eggs, but instead of being served up with your toast in the morning, it is a common second course for lunch or dinner. This may seem surprising to those well adjusted in brunch-munching societies, but to the Spanish, it seems equally as mad that people would even consider eating eggs for breakfast. A friend of mine looked at an eggs benedict once and expressed disbelief/borderline disgust that this such a dish even be considered a morning meal.
There is that home-cooked touch in everything placed on the table – we are, after all, not in an ordinary restaurant. The txoko will continue to exist as a private social club, and the members will continue to eat, drink, and socialise. It will also continue to remain to be a curiously hidden part of Basque culture that only a few lucky outsiders will ever get to properly experience. We may have arrived as a group of curious foreigners, but in the end, we have left as friends.
[…] am lucky enough to know someone who is a member, so I have visited a txoko on a number of occasions, but if you want to have the experience too, San Sebastian Urban […]