Manna in Madrid

People say that Big Macs taste like cardboard. I happen to think they taste like really good cardboard, but it’s a shame, nevertheless, to eat one while you’re in one of the great food centres of the world. It’s not often that we’ve had to resort to McDonald’s on this trip, but here in Madrid, we’ve suffered the trials of Tantalus trying to feed ourselves. Temptation is everywhere. Shop windows are stacked with cured legs of ham, pastries and cheeses. But always there’s a pane of glass or a steel rolling shutter with the sign ‘Cerrado,’ closed, pasted to it like an evil magical incantation that keeps food always within sight but never in reach. Madrilenos don’t eat until long after the rest of the world is wracked with gnawing hunger pangs. In the rest of the world, if you go without food as long as your average Spaniard does, the World Food Programme starts sending cargo planes. Breakfast? Lunch? In Madrid, no es posible. After 9:00 pm, well, that’s different. Food is what you do after 9:00. And you’d better, because there’s nothing else until tomorrow night if you don’t.

I’m lying, of course; but only a little. It is quite possible to find yourself at a cafe chocolateria, eating churros dipped in hot chocolate for breakfast; it is possible to eat tapas at five or six dollars a mouthful; it is possible to eat stale, unbuttered baguettes slapped with a slice of cheese and a morsel of cured meat. Some would find this charming. I find it leads to crankiness, so we eat at McDonald’s.



A Big Mac is a triumph of the culinary scientist’s art; it’s a precisely calibrated flavour missile designed to deliver in perfect proportions the three things that homo sapiens sapiens evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to crave in his food: fat, sugar and salt. Certainly, obesity, diabetes and hypertension are modern-day scourges, but we are a viable species because our genetic programming made us so adept at finding fat, sugar and salt. The desire for them is written into our very DNA. The chemical stew that is a Big Mac insinuates molecular tendrils right into our Genetic Code and whispers “Survival.” It is mother’s milk; it is the fatty liver of a freshly killed antelope brought down by tooth and claw; it is chemical manna from corporate heaven. And in Madrid, it is…disappointing.

A Big Mac, it seems, is not always a Big Mac. A Madrileno Big Mac is not exactly a Florentine Big Mac which is not exactly a Calgarian Big Mac. A Big Mac is a subtle thing, varying with exquisite inflections of flavour to exactly satisfy the palate of a fellow brought up on Manchego, rather than Asiago, rather than Cheddar cheese. A cheddar-fellow eating a Big Mac in Spain does not taste a Big Mac like he knows it at home. There is something slightly wrong with it.

Some maps of the world do not show political boundaries. A culinary map of Europe would have no borders: it would show a continuum of more-or-less indistinct flavours from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. If you were to take a journey through this map, you wouldn’t know where you were. What might be, for a moment, a recognizably Spanish paella would gradually morph into an Italian risotto and eventually into a Croatian black crni rizot. You’d never be able to locate the precise moment when one cuisine became another. But the folks at McDonalds know. They have crafted an exquisitely subtle blade, and they have divided the continuum at the precise moment that a Spanish palate differentiates itself from an Italian palate. They have studied this moment, and they have captured it in their Big Mac.

Eating a Big Mac in Spain is like being given whole new set of Spanish taste buds equipped with Spanish neurons firing into Spanish taste centres; it is a chemical shortcut to being Spanish; it is Spanishness stripped to its essence, condensed to a few extra grains of paprika in the Special Sauce, a mote less of salt and a mist more of vinegar. More than any other food in Spain, it is the Big Mac that tells you where you are.