Sabor: Flavors from a Spanish Kitchen

Mohacho, executive chef of London’s Barrafina, presents the flavors of Spain in this enthusiastic debut cookbook. Regional specialties highlighted include salted anchovies, and the calçot, an onion “between a fat spring onion, and a baby leek” that is blackened over an open flame and eaten with romesco sauce. Mohacho makes excellent use of stale bread in such homey dishes as migas, in which bread cubes are sautéed with vegetables, chorizo, and blood sausage and topped with crispy fried eggs; and a salad of persimmons and goat cheese, for which a loaf is frozen and cut into thin slices for croutons. The many fish and seafood options include a Catalan salad of rehydrated salt cod marinated overnight in olive oil; minced squid and shrimp rolled into balls and served in an onion and saffron sauce; and stuffed squid in a black sauce made with its ink and crab in a spicy tomato sauce. A meat and poultry chapter includes lamb sweetbreads and butifarra sausage (some ingredients, such as the sausage itself, may be difficult to source), and a short chapter on desserts leans mostly on classics, such as flan and sponge cakes brushed with rum syrup until “borracho,” or drunk. Mohacho’s gusto for bold flavors will delight readers. (May)