jamon

A few words about the jamon (ham). It is beloved here, like it's own food group. It's on pizza, on burgers, it makes up more than 50% of the items on any given menu. They are devoted to ham here in all it's forms. Sliced ham. Smoked ham. Jamon crudo. Cubed ham on mashed potatoes. Jamon y queso sandwich. Getting a milanesa - I bet you'll find a little surprise under that cheese topping! I'm going to try to explain some of what makes this an interesting subject for us.
I think I would have to say that jamon here is not considered a meat but more of a ...let's say garnish. Chicken sandwich? How about a slice of jamon on that. Genevieve ordered a vegetarian sandwich - no the sandwich did not have ham on it. It was strictly bread, cheese, a little pesto. BUT, there was a lovely little piece of jamon crudo on the side of the plate - like a little sprig of parsely. In the US, you might see a slice of orange. Here, we see a nice slice of smoked ham.

Or maybe not a garnish, maybe a flavoring, like pepper or salt. Prime example: serrano ham flavored potato chips. I'm not kidding. Evidentiary photo attached.



And people don't believe us when we ask for items without ham or understand us when we act befuddled about all the ham-centric eating. We told our spanish teachers about the "vegetarian sandwich garnish" and they just looked at us, blankly, as if to say, "yes, and...is there something strange about that you hamless American?"

We also notice that generally speaking, there can be queso without jamon, but almost never is there jamon without queso. Scan a menu, you'll see the left side of most menus are variants on the jamon-queso family.

Maybe the closest thing I can describe in the US is in LA. In Los Angeles restaurants don't believe you when you say you don't want mayonaisse and they like to put a little bit on there so you won't have to go without.

So ham, it's not just for breakfast.