One of my favorite things to do with American visitors when I lived in Barcelona was to take them to the butcher shop. “Oh, let’s get some nice Manchego cheese at the carneceria,” I would say.  Then I would open the door and walk in ahead of them so that I could see the expression of utter disgust on their faces when they saw the cured pig legs hanging from the ceiling by their hooves propped up on the counter with deep, shaved grooves to sell hamon serano. It was like they had walked in on their parents early one morning doing IT: They had already known what had transpired between mommy and daddy to bring them into this world, but they just pushed the repulsive thought aside. Likewise, they let the cellophane covered pork chops at the American grocery stores with the label pork lull them into a blissful ignorance of the fact that they were actually eating Wilber: No spinning of Charlotte’s Web could save them.

Only second to this was helping them order some fresh fish at a restaurant that I knew would come with the head on it. “How are you supposed to tell if it is fresh?” my Catalan friends would explain, “The eyes should be brilliant!”

I was 20 at the time and just learning to cook real meals for myself, so I became reliant on this knowledge to pick out the fresh fish to take home and fry up for dinner. It reminded me of a children’s poem my dad used to recite to me at bedtime:

Fishy fishy in the brook,
Daddy caught him with a hook.
Mommy fried him in a pan,
and baby ate him like a man!

It was actually very difficult to return the US and re-conform to the censored supermarkets. The decorative dead heads of the fish have blurred eyes and I knew that the fish had probably traveled thousands of miles versus the short jaunt from the Mediterranean waters to my frying pan in Barcelona.

So today I was thrilled to walk into the macelleria (butcher shop) and pesheria (fish market) in Urbino to see legs ready for selling proscuitto and the store clerk ripping the heads off sardines for a woman’s order. A lucky bambino is going to eat like a man tonight!