Yesterday she talked with another guest, Isobel, about food, proper food not 'take-away rubbish'. Food that someone has made with care and love. Isobel asked her if she knew and liked black beans.
She remembered eating them in Texas as Edgar's housekeeper used them a lot in her cooking and eating them in Portugal where.. shock horror.. she worked forty eight years ago!
She's just had this thought.. how did she get to be so old? Is it really forty eight years ago that she worked at the Dona Filipa Hotel, Vale do Lobo at Almansil in the Algarve? Yes, it is.
Liz Brewer was running the famous discotheque called the '7 & a 1/2' in Albufeira, there were a large happy bunch of them and she was dating an absolute charmer, a Frenchman called Pierre Barange.
But she became very ill and had to be flown to Lisbon and the only way she knew* how to get in touch with him was to ask her disco side-kick to tell him what had happened and how to get in touch with her in Lisbon and then in London.
No response ever came from Pierre and life moved on.. thirty years later she met the side-kick, who gulped when she saw her, then said.. "Oh, I owe you such an apology, I lied to Pierre, I didn't tell him that you had been invalided out but said you had left to come back for a party which a boyfriend had invited you to and that you had been sacked for going back without giving the hotel notice, I'm sorry and deeply ashamed".
She went icy and said "Wow, what an incredibly nasty thing to have done, I'm not interested in why you behaved in such a duplicitous manner but I'm not surprised you are deeply ashamed of your behaviour" and turned on her heel and left.
Such is life.. Dear Readers..
Getting back to black beans, there was an old quinta restaurant on the road to Vila Real de Santo Antonio where they did a pork stew with black beans, a pork stew to dream about served with rice and sliced oranges.
Southern Spain and Portugal in the '60s and '70s weren't the wealthy tourist areas that they now are and this quinta, where she ate quite often with two very nice friends, Mercedes and Fitzwilliam Sargeant, was owned by a family who had known 'better' times.
The food was exquisite. Mercedes knew the family well and for her birthday, Fitz asked them if he could hire the entire place and the garden for a private party. She went over early to help them set up and boy, did they get a shock!
For the family certainly had known better times.. bless them, they had pulled out all the stops for Mercedes, beautiful linens were on the tables, with old silverware and glassware.
It is a night she'll never forget.. people came from as far away as Jerez and down from Lisbon. It was a night of music.. of Copla, Fado and Jazz.
It was a magical evening, one she hasn't thought of for.. oh, who knows how many years.. but because Isobel asked her if she ate black beans, she's remembered it.
Today having had her memory given a nudge, she bought small amounts of different cuts of pork, two chorizo, a trotter and a pair of ears from her butcher today, everything else she needed plus the black beans, she had at home.
The pork bones are in a pot and have simmered for three hours, they'll provide the stock, the black beans will soak overnight.
Tomorrow she'll cook a wonderful Portugese stew. A Feijoada.. which she hasn't tasted for 48 years.
Happy days folks.. let's hope there are more like it to come!
GeeGee Parrot.
March 5th, 2018.
PostScript: In the early '70s there were very few people in the Algarve who had a telephone at home. Life was more structured, you made plans to see people and you could leave them a message at their favourite bar.
PostScript: In the early '70s there were very few people in the Algarve who had a telephone at home. Life was more structured, you made plans to see people and you could leave them a message at their favourite bar.
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