The Spanish Mediterranean Islands Cookbook | Jeff Koehler

Suzy Chase:                   When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and homecook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.

Jeff Koehler:                 My name is Jeff Koehler and my latest cookbook is called The Spanish Mediterranean Islands Cookbook about the Balearic Islands.

Suzy Chase:                   This episode is where food history and tradition come together. It's all about discovery, deep connection, and a shift toward a simpler, more intentional way of life. Might I add this book is number nine for you. So your personal journey is one of embracing a place not just as a visitor, but as a true participant in its culture through food, community and tradition. You found home in Menorca, you settled in Barcelona in 1996 after meeting and marrying a Catalan woman, and a few years later you visited Menorca for the first time, and by 2010 you began spending summers in Es Mercadal. That's a quiet inland village. And then in 2014, you purchased a traditional 19th century townhouse in the village. So please start things off chatting about how you fell in love with its rural charm, tightly knit community, and the island's deep culinary roots.

Jeff Koehler:                 You said. We went to Menorca for the first time a long time ago, but then we started going back and kind of coincidentally from some friends, we started renting this little farmhouse outside of Es Mercadal, which is dead center of the island. And it's a traditional village. It is not a tourist town. There's five bakeries and three butchers and two hardware stores and a school. So it's a 5,000 person, perfect sized community, very tight knit community with two main squares and very social people are very friendly and we just completely fell in love with the village. The island itself is quite rural. I mean it's a stunning island. It's quite small, but the village itself is just charming. And we started spending summers and pretty soon we were looking at houses and we bought a house right in the middle of the village just down from the old church, typical three story village townhouse made of the local poorest stone with a garden in the back.

                                    And slowly we refurbished it and now we spend, or I spend four months a year there, it's become a big part of our life When we're not there, we're thinking about being back there. And for me in the kitchen, it is a big shift because in Barcelona here I have everything available and in Menorca it's a little bit more limited in ingredients. I find that how I cook and how I look at what we're going to eat changes when we're on the island, much more connected to the seasons and much more connected to the very specific island itself.

Suzy Chase:                   So when you first went there, I know you loved it, but you didn't feel like an outsider?

Jeff Koehler:                 No, and I mean I think that's a little bit special in Menorca because a lot of islands have this idea of traditionally from people always coming and this rean island, almost all, they've had thousands of years of people arriving and conquering and saying, and so there's this natural, weird kind of wariness of outsiders. But Menorca completely, no, they were very welcoming. We made friends quite easily. I mean, we knew people already in the village when we started going there, who went and we just kind of fell in. We made very good friends quite quick, either people who lived there all year round and people who also have a house like us. My wife is Catalan and my kids, of course that helps a bit. There's that connection. Yeah, we just found it's a very lively, very, very social place. People are out almost every day on our street is very traditional that the people, some of the neighbors, they put their chairs out on the street in the evening a bit cooler, so they're out from dinnertime until quite late sitting just kind of talking and you pass by.

                                    So you chat. I mean, the one thing I find in when I'm in Roca is that I will speak on the street more in one day than I will in Barcelona an entire month. The bakery is a one minute walk away, but it takes me 10 minutes to get there. You're always stopping. It is very much that kind of village life and very sociable. I love that. I really like that a lot. I mean, it's impossible that you go anywhere and you don't see people that you know and chat a bit. And the last few years we've had this small dog, and so I am always walking around with our dog and that dog's kind of well known in the town and everybody stops and pets our dog. And so it's kind of that connection, but it's very easy to talk to people there. So this was one of the things we looked at. Sometimes you go to the mal team or some other village and you do always feel like an outsider, but we never ever felt that in Menorca.

Suzy Chase:                   So you have a piece she wrote in the book called At the Thursday Market for over 700 years as smirk al's. Thursday market has been the beating heart of Menorca, a place where you wander through stalls, bursting with fresh produce, taste traditional baked goods, and discover artisan cheeses and cured meats that tell the story of the past. Chat a little bit about the market.

Jeff Koehler:                 The king who ruled the islands at that time in about early 13 hundreds said this is going to be a market village. It was a very specific designation and the name is Al comes from that. It means the place of the market. So it is literally the geographic center of the island. You have two Menorca is kind of bean shaped. It's about 30 miles long by about 10 miles wide. And you have a major city on each end. We're in the very middle. And so it was an obvious place for a central market. And so for centuries it's been had this weekly market, it's on Thursdays now in the morning during most of the year, and then in the summers it's in the afternoon. In the winters it is mostly produce, but in the summers it becomes a much bigger thing and it's certainly the far and away the biggest market and most important market in the island.

                                    Thursdays is my favorite day of the week. There's no question. And it's great to see those slight changes. One of the things about the islands that is very important is it developed in quite isolation, meaning the food is very connected to what can be grown, caught foraged, fished, captured. So for instance, right now I know it is full of these wild asparagus, these skinny little tall, wild asparagus. There was a lot of rain in the past month. This is something you see for a handful of weeks. You go in June and it's full of apricots. The one thing about the market is that these kind of markets, they're mostly sold by the producers themselves. So that cheese makers are actually selling the cheese. The people that are selling their fruits and vegetables are actually the farmers. It's that kind of market. It's not somebody selling organic fruit from another farm.

                                    This Thursday market are the producers. And you really get a true sense of what's growing around and the nuance is a difference. So even with the cheeses, you see a difference when you go in the winter in the fresh cheese than in the summer because of course it's a different, what their cows are eating is a different percentage of fat. So I mean it is a small difference. But when you're shopping every Thursday, I mean for me that's one of the great pleasures is those nuances along with I love the wild asparagus now and I love when ammal mushrooms come in the fall. But even with some of the cured pork products, some of the cheeses, just this variations throughout the year when they're producing. And of course you're buying from the person who's making the cheese. So you can ask any question you want to or the farmer and you also see a lot more varieties. So there's just dozens of kinds of melons and a lot of them don't have necessarily specific names, kind of like what we translate to the yellow one or the one with the white inside or something. Having worked in Safeway in high school growing up, seeing essentially what I remember is quite similar all year round, a lot of year round stuff. And so Thursday is for me, my favorite day of the week,

Suzy Chase:                   Gosh, that's magical. So nearly attached to the southern tip of Ibiza is the tiny island of Formentera. So what's the famous dried fish?

Jeff Koehler:                 Formentera is tiny. It's probably 12 miles total kind of Z shape and at some point just a mile wide. And they really don't grow much besides figs, famous for the figs and lots of great goat cheese. But one thing that they do is called PEs sec. It's this dried fish. So you have this tradition of curing pork products all over Spain and in the islands charcuterie and these kind of things. There's really no pigs growing on the island. So what they do dry is they dry fish goes way back. It goes back thousands of years to the salt pans there and you take a ray or a skate or maybe a dog fish and they dry it, they salt it and they air dry it for a few days and then they cut it up and they submerge in olive oil.

                                    And then you have this for the rest of the year. Because the whole point of these kind of islands that were quite isolated is how can we produce something in order to sustain ourselves for the whole year? And for them, this dried fish was one of the products. So it tasted kind of a cross between an anchovy and really good tuna. It's kind of fishy, but a little bit stronger and it's a little bit stringy. So you take it out of the olive oil and you tend to eat it on a salad. So either just fresh tomatoes with that, with this incredible combination of flavors. So it's that kind of sini salty, fishy flavor with the tomatoes. Or they make what they call a country salad that has big giant, a crouton with maybe roasted peppers and tomatoes and different vegetables with this dried fish. And it is just a way to becomes a meal essentially.

Suzy Chase:                   So Ibiza is only 221 square miles. And fun fact, in the summer the population swells to around a million. I can't imagine even living there. That would make me crazy. So anyway, talk about how wild herbs have played a role in the culinary and cultural traditions.

Jeff Koehler:                 I mean, Ibiza is Europe's most famous summer playground. The discos are the most famous. And N you said a lot of people go, but if you get outside of a handful of these areas, the island is surprising a rule. A lot of almond trees in the spring, it's unbelievable with the almond blossoms, but there's a lot of wild herbs. And you see in the springtime people picking a lot of these herbs and the most famous use for these, apart from there's a lot of recipes you add these herbs to, but they make this drink where they macerate a dozen up to 20 wild herbs in anise liqueur and it's called the hierbas. And this is the most famous drink in Ibiza. And this is really interesting to see, especially in the spring. You're driving around the north of Iita and you see these people on the side of the picking herbs and they go back home and people still make this drink at home very popular to make home versions.

                                    But again, it comes to that idea of really an island that was very hard to produce food to live. And so people did everything they could in order to survive. And so these herbs that people gathered in order to get food and to help kind of flavor some of their dishes, they gradually become these great culinary treats. This yorubas, this drink probably began as some sort of medicinal concoction that kind of gradually took on other characteristics and became this very popular drink that is both a petite and a kind of digestive drink as well. It can be sort of cold, it can be look warm, it's just very popular. But it started as something practical. And I think this is an underlying thing of so many of the great dishes in the islands is they had a real practical basis of why you were making 'em like that or why that tariu had that. And then they gradually became through years with relatively limited ingredients to make them something really special.

Suzy Chase:                   The most classic soup of mMenorca is Oliaigua.

                                    Can you describe your tomato soup with fresh fig and its on page 60.

Jeff Koehler:                 It's the most basic thing. I mean the name means Oliaigua means oil and water. There's more to it than that. It's basically some onions, tomatoes, and peppers and it just kind of sauteed a bit with some water cooked. The whole key, the most important thing is that it's not boiled. You can't see any foam, you can't boil it. So it is very basic soup you call it that, that is eaten over these very thin slices of dried or old bread. Again, it's substance cooking. I mean, you have leftover bread, how can we utilize, we're not going to throw away this all bread, how can we use it? So you have these little thin slices of kind of dried bread. You'd lay all this soup over and the time of the year to eat this soup when the tomatoes are at their fullest and the gardens are full of 'em is the same season as figs and figs are everywhere. So you traditionally eat this soup with fresh figs. And actually the combination is just magical. It sounds very basic, but it's a really beautiful combination of the sweetness of the freeness, of the fresh fig with this kind of tomato, onion and pepper soup. You call it that over the bread. It's very, I mean it's the ultimate country, basic home cooking. You don't find it in the restaurants very often, but in homes, certainly in the past, but even now is Menorca iconic soup.

Suzy Chase:                   Well popularized in France, mayonnaise has its true origins traced back to Menorca. Who knew in 1756 it was developed and named after the islands called Mahón.

Jeff Koehler:                 The capital.

Suzy Chase:                   Yeah. So talk a little bit about the history of emulsion.

Jeff Koehler:                 I mean mayonnaise, it became globally popular because of the French, but it comes from Menorca and it's named after the capital or the main port of the island is called Mahón. Now the English ruled Menorca for the 18th century except for a seven year period where the French took it over. And mound is basically the most protected port in the home Mediterranean, arguably. And it was this great port. So the French came for seven years and when the famous Duke who ruled the leader, the French leader who ruled the island was served this egg yolk and olive oil kind of emulsion and supposedly founded a typical thing they put on meat or something and went back in France and made a few changes and called it mayonnaise after the town of Mao where he'd been Now until that point, and in my research and all which I've ever done, it does not exist this thing before this period in Menorca.

                                    And it wasn't even that common for the French to cook with olive oil outside of say Provence at that time. But in Menorca this was classic because first you have oli, which is the olive oil and garlic emulsion that is staple. And then if you look in the old cookbooks in Menorca, you have what they call oli bow, which means good olive oil. And that was with the addition historians think with the addition of egg yolk make it richer. And so this was mayonnaise, but it wasn't called mayonnaise then. But this moss was very popular on the island and it's still eaten everywhere, spread on bread. One of my favorite things, and in the book I think a fun recipe is mussels because they grow mussels in the port of Mao. So it's an amazing port and you have all these musel beds. So you having mussel from the port of mound with some homemade mayonnaise for us is kind always kind of a double, the double treat of the mound connection.

Suzy Chase:                   Stews, soups and rice dishes usually begin with the base and build up from there. So what's the first rule to a good sofrito?

Jeff Koehler:                 The sofrito is this slow cooked base. Onions and tomatoes, usually garlic, sometimes green peppers. And if you're doing seafood often a little bit of cuttlefish maybe, but you have this base so you're building upward this like architecture. You start at the base and you kind of grow. And many dishes start with this sofrito or so Jit as they say it. In Catalan, the most important thing is you cannot rush it. I mean, I can remember when I first moved here back in the mid nineties, my in-laws were here and they came over and it said, let me just make a quick sofrito and we'll make whatever we're going to do. My mother-in-law laughed and she said, that does not exist. That is an oxymoron. You cannot make a quick sofrito. I mean there's no way that you can rush it. You need to start with the onions and you need to slowly cook them.

                                    Takes about eight to 10 minutes. They kind of turn that sweetness before you can add the tomatoes and the tomatoes will take you kind of grated or chopped, say 10 to 15 minutes. This is at a minimum. And then you got other things that you can add in there way. But this is the minimum and there's no way that you can rush that here's what it is. That base is going to reward you because this is the foundation the whole dish is based on, and you're going to be rewarded with that time you take. They always say, for instance, if you have a good stock, you're going to have a good rice dish or a good dish. This is fundamental. It's the same if you allow time and you make a good sofrito, you're going to have much deeper flavors and it gives you that base where you can the rest of the soup or the stew or the rice dish, it comes in half the recipes in the book, you could argue can have a sofrito to start with.

Suzy Chase:                   So what's the story behind Menorca's most celebrated dish? Spiny lobster stew, which is on page 52.

Jeff Koehler:                 So there's two kinds of lobsters, basically two main kinds. The normal one with the big claws or the what we call the spin lobster, which has no front claws, but it's sweeter. And this is the classic lobster that grows or they catch just north of Menorca. So the most famous town for this dish is in, it's called Four Nails, a little fishing village. And again, it's a pretty simple dish now is one of the most celebrated and one of the most expensive because these funny lobsters are quite valued. But it is just a good sofrito as a base, a good stock, and basically between a stew and a soup, again, you eat it traditionally ladled over those thin slices of dried bread. So it's kind of interesting because you think there's nothing more poor or inexpensive than thinly sliced pieces of dried bread and these beautiful lobster stew, but it's just a way to make it go further, to make it last. Some cultures you had rice or you had pasta, whatever, something like that to make it go further. Here they use a lot of these thin slices of dried bread, and this is a classic example of that. It's still one of the great dishes. A lot of people in the summer you go for your calta at least one time in the summer, kind of your big dinner out or your big lunch out. Having the calta, it's still considered one of the great treats in Menorca.

Suzy Chase:                   Do you think tourism has impacted traditional food culture on the islands?

Jeff Koehler:                 Yes, in the sense of you get a lot more international things available. Of course there's a Nobu hotel in Ibiza, so you got a Nobu restaurant there. As I say, avocado toast is inescapable, but these are additions, not substitutions. I really think that the traditional flavors are so beloved and so delicious that they're not being forsaken for other things. People want to go out for other things, but these traditional flavors, traditional dishes are still very much there.

Suzy Chase:                   Talk a little bit about the cover of the book.

                                    My publisher Phaidon is well known for its art books and its design books. And every book they do, whether it's art or a food book, has a lot of, they put a lot of effort and energy and emphasis on its design and every book is different but quite fight. You can tell that it's a fight on book in my case. So they work a lot of different designers and in my case it was a woman called Astrid Starva who Italian designer grew in Madrid, studied in England and lives in England. Very well known. I think she spent quite a few years working in Majorca. Often you see, I mean you're not quite what you imagined and I wasn't expecting this. And when I saw it, I immediately fell in love. The blues from the sea and the greens and that kind of orangey red.

                                    It just captures the eye for sure. I mean the eye goes to it. I mean for me, you can see it is a sunny place Mediterranean, but the colors of the islands are captured there has that texture. So I was extremely lucky with this. A lot of that goes to fight on because they put a lot of effort goes into how it's going to feel in your hand and those embossed letters and just when you pick it up that you want to hold it, I want you to dig into it. It's 150 recipes and have in the kitchen and get it dirty and make everything. But on the other hand, when you hold it, you also want to keep it clean and give it as a gift. And it kind of has that nice balance of two things that I think that I know some people, I can see them getting two copies, one to keep out and one in the kitchen they know is going to get all splattered and dirty.

                                    So now for my segment called The Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe the perfect bite of your favorite dish out of the cookbook.

Jeff Koehler:                 Sardines and escabeche. So Escabeche is this ancient kind of hot olive oil and vinegar and herby marinade. So in the summer when the sardines are running, we love to grill 'em on a barbecue, have people over make a big batch of sardines. So we often get sardines and I always take about a dozen and you kind of flour 'em and you kind of briefly fry 'em, and then you lay 'em in a pan and then you make this hot marinade with some onions and lots of herbs from the garden and the olive oil and the vinegar and garlic. And then you boil it and then you pour it over the sardines and then you put it in the fridge and has to sit for a couple of days to take those flavors. And then you take it out and you serve it usually in a room temperature.

                                    And that kind of combination of hearty urbanness from the marinade with that kind of bold blue fish flavor of the sardines. And it's kind of sweet because usually with the onions it's just the perfect appetizer and people come over for an ape, TiVo for a vermouth, say six or seven in the summer and you put a tray of these out. They're just beautiful looking how they look on the platter and it's that flavor is just for me, summer and the islands all kind of wrapped up and it is just perfect. It just my favorite moment. It's a six with a nice glass of vermouth and maybe some bread and that's it. People coming over in the garden.

Suzy Chase:                   Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Jeff Koehler:                 In Instagram. So Jeff Koehler, you'll find everything on Instagram.

Suzy Chase:                   This has been so great. I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show.

Jeff Koehler:                 Oh, my pleasure. Absolutely. Enjoy our chat today.

Suzy Chase:                   Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack Suzy Chase.substack.com. You can all also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.