SEVILLE, Spain — If you ask Spaniards what their favorite food is, the answer will probably have something to do with a pig--fresh or cured, roasted whole or ground into sausage. The Spanish affection for pork knows no limits.
Of course, the answer could be even simpler: jamon, the Spanish equivalent of prosciutto. These dark crimson, explosively flavorful hams are the crown jewel, the pot of gold at the end of the Spanish culinary rainbow. No wedding is complete without jamon, no holiday is celebrated without jamon, and a tapas bar without it wouldn't deserve the name.
Jamon is omnipresent in Spain. And as the most beloved food in a cuisine that increasingly is becoming the focus of the world's attention, it almost inevitably will become so elsewhere as well.
In Spain, the violin-shaped pork legs hang everywhere, in restaurants, small bars, grocery stores, markets and the pantries of people like my friend Paca. Her family has a small meat-processing factory where they cure hams, make sausages and prepare other kinds of cold cuts to sell to regional butchers. If you ask for a ham sandwich at her house, she goes into her pantry with a knife, slices off a few pieces of meat from her jamon, slaps them on a sliced roll and hands you your sandwich. (Though the trimmings of jamon may be used for cooking, the meat itself is almost always served unadorned.)
At the meat-processing factory the jamones are cleaned and placed in a vat of salt for one day per kilogram of weight. Then they are hung to cure in a room that is controlled for temperature and humidity.
Exactly when a jamon is ready is difficult for an outsider to tell. All jamones are sold, the producers say, "at the right time." I have tried and tried to find out what "the right time" means but received only another equally vague answer--the color of the meat has to be the right shade of dark red and the fat a bright white. I suppose that with years of experience you learn the definitions of "the right time," dark red and bright white.
One thing even a beginner can understand: When jamon is "just right," it melts in your mouth like butter.
The usual jamon serrano, made from the white-footed pig, is delicious, but if you really want to impress a Spaniard, serve the kind made from the black-footed pig--the famed pata negra or Iberico. Jamon Iberico is so revered that many Spanish families make a day's outing out of a shopping trip to Jabugo in the southwest of Spain or to Guijuelo in the central northwest, two villages famous for their excellent jamon Iberico.
