Even when I’m not in Spain, I love it.

Sunday Night Dinner was celebrating (loosely and late) Columbus Day with Spanish food, and I’d worked up a varied menu, but really, I was just looking for an excuse to buy a ham. Several years ago, some friends of mine got married in Spain, and at one of the parties, they had a ham hanging from the rafters, and everyone could just go slice off a bit–I always thought that was classy.

So yesterday I biked to Despana Brand Foods in Jackson Heights to buy a ham.

This was the first time I’d be buying a whole entire jamon, still on the bone, and I was excited. I’d never been to Despana, because for a while we had a Spanish grocery right in Astoria (now taken over by Croatians, alas).

Despana isn’t the most welcoming-looking place–there’s no display window, just a granite facade. So I walked in, blinking in the dim light (and waiting for my stupid glasses to adjust–Transitions, you suck). The place is quite small, it turns out, considering it is Spanish Ham HQ in NYC–and I was a little disappointed that there weren’t hams hanging from the ceiling.

Just on my right were a couple of shallow shelves, though, and they were filled with paper plates. The plates, in turn, were filled with five different sorts of chorizo, three kinds of cheese, wedges of quince paste, olives stuffed with anchovies, a heap of boquerones…and there was also an open jar of Spain’s answer to Nutella, as well as a little basket full of turron (nougat). They looked like plates of samples, but never in my life have I seen such heaping plates of free samples. There was a little clay bowl full of toothpicks, though, so I picked one up and speared a chunk of Las Cuevas del Mar cheese.

Just as I’m lifting the cheese to my mouth, a man springs out from the back of the store. “Debestomarelvinotambien,” he rattles at me.

Huh–I could’ve sworn I heard the words ‘drink wine,’ but I haven’t really spoken Spanish in a couple of years, and really, he must be joking, right? It’s 10:30 a.m. And where would I get any wine, anyway?

Well, out jumps another man, wine bottle in one hand and plastic cup in the other. Glurk, glurk, glurk…he fills my 8 oz. cup nearly to the brim, and hands it to me.

“El vino,” he says.

“Gracias,” I stammer.

This was all before I’d made any indication that I was a grocery high-roller, that I was about to plunk down $190 on an animal haunch. This is how they treat the common man in Despana! Did I mention it was 10:30 a.m.?

I finally managed to drink all my wine, and then I loaded my 17 pounds of pig into my bike bag (along with some of that cheese–the samples had worked!), and then I weaved home. (I blamed that on the fact that my bike was out of balance, not on the wine.)

Our dinner guests, predictably, made only the tiniest of dents in jamon, and now it’s hanging in our pantry. It was funny–I was thinking what a shame it was that the Spanish grocery here in our neighborhood closed, because it was a little more deli-like (whereas Despana is more of a wholesaler of prepackaged stuff), and I think it would’ve been able to buy pieces of ham bone there. And then I realized that, duh, I am the proud owner of a whole lot of ham bone. I just have to get to it.

I think this might be the beginning of an annual tradition of ham purchasing–though I’ll definitely be going back to Despana before then. Maybe next time I’m thirsty.