Barcelona, 1969: the apple turnover enters my life
I don’t remember my first family holiday abroad with any great fondness. In fact, as an only child of unsocial parents, family holidays tended to mean simply greater swathes of time than usual spent in each other’s company. That usually spelled trouble.
This first foray abroad involved an overnight train from Edinburgh to London and then a flight to an airport near Barcelona. This was 1969 and I was 12. Spain was just then becoming a destination to rival Blackpool for Scottish holidays. We had done Blackpool previously.
Although I had flown a lot as a baby — to and from Africa — this was the first flight I had taken as a fully conscious being. And I still remember nothing at all of the flight. Or, indeed, how we got from the airport to our final destination.
Our hotel was in a small resort on the Costa Dorada, a train ride from Barcelona. The train tracks separated our hotel from the beach, in fact.
But what I remember most from this holiday is that I tasted my first apple turnover.
And was smitten.
We caught a local train into Barcelona and close to the city’s main station was a bakery. I pointed to what I wanted. My parents chose the same thing and we left the shop with three large pastries that the woman behind the counter had seem to call triangulos. It made sense, given the shape.
They were large. It may be the exaggeration of memory but I don’t think I have ever had a turnover of such proportions since. Best of all, the pastry was flaky and crisp and ever so slightly burnt at the edges. Even before the cool flavour of the apples exploded into my mouth I was happy. I suspect I could have eaten the pastry only and been satisfied. Like a tricorn-shaped airy palmier. The apples just took the joy to a new level.
Again, hindsight renders these pastries perfect. We ate them walking in gardens from where we were chased from the grass by park police blowing shrill whistles. The idea of a park in which the grass was for avoiding rather than walking across or sitting on was novel.
Now here’s the thing. A quick search for triangulos or Barcelona pastries throws up nothing about apple turnovers.
My imagination? A false memory? Given that I had never eaten a turnover before, it would be strange to concoct such a confection for my holiday memory.
It matters not, really. It acts as a focal point for the better memories of times with my parents. The turnover and the scampering off the grass are connected and I know my mother and I would have been laughing at the anger of the police and my father’s embarrassment and trying to catch the flaky pastry crumbs in our hands as we moved quickly onto the path and continued eating.
My mother is dead. And my father has started asking me to add an apple turnover to the shopping I do for him each Wednesday. I don’t remember my father eating an apple turnover in all the years since Barcelona.
My expanding girth, on the other hand, is evidence of a more regular consumption of apple turnovers in the intervening years.
And I’m picky, too. Not for me those soggy rags of pastry that sit in supermarket plastic boxes like old rags used to mop up spilled apple sauce. I still look for the slightly caramelised sugar coating that guarantees a certain burnt crispness. When I bite into the turnover I fully expect — and look for — pastry shrapnel to scatter across clothes and floor. Eating a quality turnover is a messy business. The apple, too, needs to take you by surprise. It should nestle in strange inner chambers and, when released by a careless bite, ooze down chin and fingers.
I may have to start eating these things in solitude.
