Spanish food is deliciously obsessed with death

The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on mere ‘mediocre’ fills me with crippling guilt over wasting not just money but time. What if I die before I see Paris again? I would be ashamed that I had wasted my precious mortality eating that Pret tuna niçoise salad.

The price of this neurosis is that I tend to travel alone to save others the trouble of putting up with me, and never have anyone to share an adventure or a meal with. I decided that booking myself onto a ‘cooking retreat’ with ten strangers in a remote village in southern Spain would remove the stress of the restaurant search, and if I still proved to be a difficult travelling companion, there’d be no friendships harmed.

I arrived at Las Chimeneas in Mairena, a village far enough south and high enough in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains to see, on clear days, the coast of Africa beyond a short stretch of sea. I was the youngest in our group, where the average age was around 60; the oldest was a jovial, rambling Kiwi who at 84 had made the trip with his wife.

Our first class began with the artichoke. Following the instructions of chef Henry, we spent a good 20 minutes preparing them, peeling off their scales, pulling strings of fibre, whittling down their stalks until only the tender core of the heart remained. They were then cut in half, and using a teaspoon we scooped out the bristly core, the choke. Looking at the vegetable, assessing which bits are actually edible, you might think it was some hardy northern plant evolved to shield itself against wind and cold. Indeed, it blooms in purple florets like a giant Scottish thistle. Making a meal out of it feels desperate, as though you will leave the table hungrier than you came.

But the artichoke’s Spanish name – alcachofa – has the Arabic al- prefix which many things in Las Alpujarras, including the region’s name itself, bear as a holdover from the years of Moorish rule. There is alcaparra (capers), albaricoque (apricot) and albahaca (basil). Alcohol, even. We served the naked hearts with ajo blanco – a cold almond-based soup made with garlic, olive oil, apple and cucumbers so creamy it made me sorry that almonds had been wasted on fake, watery milk – and slivers of very un-Moorish jamón.

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Jamón was often used during the Catholic Reconquista as a tool for rooting out Jews and Muslims, whose faiths prohibit eating pork. I began to understand their aversion. It is a delicious but grotesque food. We took a field trip to the local producer, Jamón Muñoz, where they cure thousands of legs of ham, tied up and hung in rows from the ceiling of a hangar – a cross between a morgue and the gallows. A coat of lard and olive oil gave the tennis racquet-sized legs a sallow hue and an almost translucent sheen. The air smelled sweet, slightly meaty, not dissimilar to the odour of a wet dog.

I was reminded of stories about morticians who are struck with a craving for hamburgers after spending hours inhaling formaldehyde fumes. The salt-cured air had apparently whetted our appetites. At the end of the tour we feasted on jamón ibérico and crusty bread, with a light, peppery red wine poured from a plastic pitcher into plastic cups.

When we returned to Mairena, it was straight into a demo: how to debone a chicken, which was then marinated and cooked with almonds, wine and grapes. There was little time for anything that was not cooking, eating or walking. It was easy to forget what life consists of beyond these things, what I fill my free hours with in London.

In the mornings, David, our host at Las Chimeneas, guided the group on walks to the orchard below the village. I picked up almonds along the way, still in their green shells covered in a soft down, like the peaches they are related to, but impossible to pry open. More useful were the ripe oranges we brought back. These were chopped with dates for dessert, blended into a cold soup called porra, zested into pastry filling for filo-like warka and steeped in a pickling liquid for escabeche, a marinated mackerel dish.

One evening, David led us to the neighbouring village of Júbar. Its whitewashed church was once a Roman temple, then a synagogue, a mosque and now a church, though used infrequently. The civil war is still closely felt, he explained, and churchgoing is associated Franco’s fascist regime. There are no regular Sunday services, but on the Fiesta de San Marcos, people still walk on their knees weeping with religious fervour.

Laurie Lee described Spain as a place of ‘distinct appetites: chivalry, bloodshed, poetry and religious mortification’. But what of its most literal appetite, the food and drink its people crave? I suppose Spain’s cuisine is wrapped up with all those things – passionate, rich, enigmatic, fascinated with death. It is not food to eat disinterestedly, or to eat alone.

Favorita is a catering company based in London run by husband-and-wife team Laura and Henry. Their cooking holidays start at £1,350 per person and can be found on their website.