Menu del Día was once just that. A set menu of a starter, a main and, if you were lucky, a pot of jelly. Or really, really lucky, ‘flan’, as in crème caramel. It was ‘set’, as in no choices, a simple way to experience a local cuisine, to get a good value meal. We liked its pot-luck elements, only taking recourse to translation app when the offer was an unidentifiable melange of dissected body parts swimming around in a bowl. (Caucau comes to mind: a Bolivian chicken’s viscera). It made for simplified ordering. “Menú para dos, por favor”. Which self-translates as: “just feed us”. If there was a row of white works vans outside, you could guarantee quality as well as fast slick service; the staff needed to serve everyone within that one hour slot, they also needed the workies to come back tomorrow.
That was then.

Possibly because we’re moving through country that has a more international transient visitor, particularly those who are walking the Caminos, there’s an assumption for a requirement for choice.

There’s no printed list, so I listen to the waitress intently searching for recognisable key words, in this situation it’s my default method of selection. Hear ‘pollo’: I’ll have the chicken. “Sopa” is obvious, “frijoles y morcilla ”: beans and blood pudding, I know. That’s the ‘primera’ safely sorted. I can do this. For me and my pitiful language skills, the comprehension comes from knowing the normas, the rules – understanding the format.

Now for the main course.

Por segunda: ‘Lechazo de Castilla’ and I hear ‘main course…lettuce and something local’. There are several other offerings, but that one has caught my ear.

I start with the thick soup of dark beans with a few slices of purple-black sausage, a meal all in itself, accompanied by the inevitable basket of refined white bread.

Now for the main. What arrives requires some anatomical dissection and a modicum of botanical knowledge. The latter is simple; green vegetation is always a low priority with ‘menú’ and most can identify an iceberg lettuce, even if it’s swimming in a greasy puddle. The succulent fat on the lip said sheep, the small thin ribs and the proglottid string of tiny tail bones confirmed it.

So I had partially understood the verbal list; only confusing ‘lechuga’ for ‘lechazo’, lettuce for suckling lamb. A flexitarian’s faux pas, the vegetarian’s nightmare.

Suckling lamb: the ovine equivalent of bovine veal. A thirty-five day old naturally milk fed beast, weighing in at dead weight of 9-12kg. The economics of which at first confuse me; that is until I find on-line sales of a roast leg retailing for twenty euros. That and the cynical assumption that the majority of the dam’s milk goes into cheese production. Presumably the rear-end, the tail must be cheap, ergo its presence on the menú del día.

We partake of a further three ‘menús’ over the next few days and start to recognise a commonality. The multiple choice, the size of offerings, the quantity of meat, and most particularly, the ubiquity of salt. No condiment salt pot graces the table; everything comes pre-seasoned, in particular the chips.

None of this was new to us. I’ve watched steaks being prepared for the Argentine asado. Fistfuls of salt thrown onto the grill, meat turned, more fistfuls to follow. The result a perfection of tenderised beef, never to be matched in northern Europe.

Only after a succession of similarly seasoned ‘menus’, does my gut react with a protest and that previously noted ‘medical hiatus’, leading to the volte-face to our travelling mode. Salt, and possibly UPF processed meats are now off the menu.

So with the rejection of laissez-faire, pot-luck, idle decision making, we take to a translation app. Clarity and enlightenment are bound to follow.

Menú del Día at the railway station has: Deep fried pork lizard, hake meatballs, lean with tomato and grilled headboard.