Andorra

Funny place, Andorra. Its system of government is a unique form of parliamentary co-principality, with the (elected) President of France and the (appointed) Bishop of Catalonia serving jointly as princes but with the actual government elected on the standard one-person-one-vote model. It’s one of the smallest sovereign states on our list, with a population of just 85,000 people (so about one third as populous as the London borough of Haringay in which Issa and I live). It makes its money – lots of money – from tourism, including skiing, and from being a de facto (if not de jure) Euro nation operating as a tax haven right in the middle of Europe – a sort of warm mini-Switzerland, if you will. It’s a tiny place – I’ve passed within a hundred miles of it three or four times without ever thinking to drop in. And it has the fourth highest life expectancy in the world at 82 years. Whatever it is they’re eating, it ain’t killing them off in any hurry.

I’d looked without any particular hope and not a smidgeon of success for an Andorran restaurant in London and, having come up empty, realised Andorra would be the first of our world cuisines we’d have to make for ourselves. So realising, I decided it would be funniest to cook an Andorran meal the night Issa returned from a work trip to Toulouse, on which she had spent the entire day in the airport a tantalisingly-close two hour bus journey from the Andorra border and indeed walked right past the queue of people heading there.

The standard references are a little thin on distinctively Andorran – rather than merely generally Catalan – dishes. Andorra is culturally, linguistically and historically more-or-less a part of Catalonia, and from London the line between the two is not easy to make out. So with the choice of dishes so limited I picked one from two; the Trinxat (de la Cerdanya), a sort of potato, cabbage and bacon mash griddled into a pancake which seemed like it would be pretty straightforward to make. Alongside it I added a simple leaf salad, the Catalan classic Pan con tomate, a few slices of generic Spanish chorizo to accompany the bread and – lucky find – a very pleasant bottle of Catalan white wine, as close to the genuine Andorran article as we were likely to get.

Pan con tomate is so simple to make as to be almost trivial – toast some crusty bread, rub it with a ripe tomato while still hot, add garlic, eat. We did. It was much as the tomato bread I’ve eaten everywhere from Seville to Valparaiso always is.

Trinxat, though…there’s a more interesting dish. I’ve certainly not had it before. It’s a bit like an Irish colcannon and even more like the English classic bubble and squeak, but after being griddled lightly into a thick, bacony pancake it ends up rather less like either of them and more like the omelettes they cook in front of you on the hot tables at Abeno, the curious Japanese restaurant outside the British Museum. The cabbage essentially vanishes into the potato mash, thickening and binding it, the bacon leaps out in little flashes of meaty goodness and everything tastes slightly of garlic and gently-blackened spud.

Did I manage to cook something authentically Andorran? Not a clue. I’ve never been and neither Issa nor I have any way of knowing really how they cook or eat it there. For me it falls into the “pleasant enough” category without being in any way remarkable – although it is a nice change, for once, to eat an almost-Spanish meal not entirely composed of tapas.

Map image: By Szajd at hu.wikipedia [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons