WASHINGTON NATIVE Jeff Koehler’s latest book, titled “The Spanish Mediterranean Islands Cookbook” is a love letter to the Balearic Islands, a small archipelago off the coast of Spain that includes Menorca, Mallorca, Formentera and Ibiza.
Koehler has been enamored with the islands since his first visit to Menorca in 1999. In 2010 he and his family began vacationing on the island regularly and bought a home there in 2014. Now, with their two daughters in college, Koehler and his wife spend roughly four months a year in Es Mercadal, the small village where their home is located, using it as a base as he travels to the other, more “popular” islands as well.
“Of the four islands (Menorca) has the worst weather — relatively speaking,” Koehler says. Because of that, when the other islands were being developed for tourism in the 1950s and ’60s, Menorca wasn’t.
“It has more beaches, but it wasn’t developed and remained very traditional,” he says.
Outside of gin — which began being produced on the island during British rule in the 1700s — the cuisine of Menorca has slowly evolved from being food eaten to survive to food with enjoyment as a component.
“Developing in isolation as a small island in the Mediterranean required ingenuity — initially to survive with the available foodstuffs and then, eventually, to great gastronomic delights,” Koehler writes in the introduction. “First came the need to eat, and then the desire to eat well. That is a defining tenet for Menorca and all of Spain’s Balearic Islands.”
What this means for the book is recipes marrying distinctive spices like bay leaf, saffron, marjoram, paprika and olive oil with regional specialties like dried fish, pickled sea fennel, fresh sardines, cuttlefish ink, saffron and sobrassada, a paprika-rich pork sausage eaten with or on almost anything. There are also copious amounts of rice, aioli and lard.
And yes, there are substitutions for those not living close to the islands in question, but not too many.
“I want somebody in Menorca to open the book and recognize the recipe. I didn’t want to make substitutions when selling this book in 110 countries. It’s a global thing,” he says.
Luckily, specialized ingredients can be ordered with the click of a mouse and in Seattle we’ve got wonderful specialty shops like the Paris-Madrid Grocery Store below Pike Place Market that carries many of Koehler’s favorite Spanish ingredients.
If there is a through line from Menorca to Seattle, it’s in the soul of the book. Koehler grew up in Lake Stevens and went to college at Gonzaga. His family still lives near the Skagit Valley, one of Washington’s most fertile areas rich in farmland and steeped in Pacific Northwest culture.
“We always had a huge garden, it was rural suburbia,” he says.
The Koehler family had chickens and raised a couple pigs. They had friends with oyster beds and grew up fishing and crabbing in Puget Sound. The summers were spent preserving and canning and his mom had two freezers in the garage.
“This settler’s mentality it’s not that far from the island ideals. There are certainly a lot of parallels,” he says.
The biggest is the love for the land and the ingredients available. Any Seattle cook can find inspiration in the pages of the book, from simple panboli — a country-style bread rubbed with ripe tomatoes and drizzled with olive oil and flaky sea salt — to Menorcan-style stuffed aubergines, the deep purple eggplants hollowed and stuffed with onion, sweet peppers, tomatoes and parsley.
This is simple food, cooked with care at the peak of seasonality, perfect for our bright Seattle summers teeming with fresh fish and gorgeous vegetables.
“It’s a guide, something to start with,” he says. “It’s the Mediterranean’s Mediterranean diet, all about those principle ingredients.”
Of course, no diet is complete without something sweet. Outside of the sardine escabeche and rice dishes in the book, Koehler’s favorite summer recipes are petal-shaped cookies called pastisset and almond cookies. Served at summer festivals in their village — with a glass of Menorcan gin, of course — it’s an Island must-have during the month of July. “They are to die for,” Koehler says. “We’re serving the gin with the cookies, it’s the perfect combination.”
Petal-Shaped Cookies
(Adapted from “The Spanish Mediterranean Islands Cookbook,” by Jeff Koehler.)
Makes about 30 cookies
2 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
1 cup lard, at room temperature
1 tablespoon lemon zest
2⅔ cups all-purpose flour
Powdered sugar, for dusting
1. In a mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar until dissolved. Beat in the lard and lemon zest. Sift in the flour and work into a smooth dough. Cover with a clean dish towel and let rest in a cool place while the oven preheats.
2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
3. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
4. On a clean work counter, lay out a sheet of baking paper or plastic wrap. Working with about a quarter of the dough at a time, cover with another piece of baking paper or plastic wrap and roll out to ½-inch thick. Using a flower-shaped cutter or a fluted cupcake mold 2 to 2½ inches in diameter, cut out cookies. Ease the cookies onto on a baking sheet. Repeat until you have used all the dough.
5. Bake in the hot oven until just beginning to turn golden, 12 to 15 minutes. Do not let them get too golden. Remove from the oven and let cool completely on baking sheet. They are quite delicate until they are fully cool.
Note: Can be stored in an airtight container. They are best eaten within four to five days. Before serving, dust with icing (powdered sugar).
Jackie Varriano covers the food scene in the neighborhoods around Seattle. She loves digging into stories that discuss why we eat the things we do — and when — in our region and beyond. Reach her at jvarriano@seattletimes.com. On X: @JackieVarriano.