eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Once an undiscovered gem among Europe’s culinary traditions, the cuisine of Catalonia, a province of northeast Spain, has become an inspiration to some of the world’s top chefs. Catalan Cuisine is the definitive guide to authentic Catalan cooking—the book that introduced this remarkable cuisine to America, and a volume that is found today in the kitchens of some of Catalonia’s most famous chefs.
Using many of the same fresh ingredients as other Mediterranean cuisines—tomato, garlic, olives, beans, pasta, fruits, and a bounty of meat and seafood—Catalan cooking combines them in unexpected and mouthwatering ways. With 200 memorable recipes that are easy to prepare and sure to amaze, plus fascinating facts about the traditions, history, and culture of Catalonia, Catalan Cuisine is required reading—or eating—for any adventurous gourmand or Spanish food aficionado.
“An intelligent, superbly written, profound study of a great and fascinating cuisine.” —Paula Wolfert
“Colman Andrews is one of the most important champions of Catalan cuisine. This significant book expresses a great love for our culture.” —Ferran Adrià, chef/owner of El Bulli
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909808362 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 196,042 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Where, Who & What
I. Catalonia and els Països Catalans
Food is of and from a place; it needs a context to give it authenticity. A dish that comes from nowhere lacks weight, lacks resonance. Catalan cuisine comes from somewhere, to be sure: Catalonia and the related països catalans. But not everybody, I realise, knows exactly where (or what) those regions are - and thus a brief tour of the Catalan lands might be in order here.
Officially, then, Catalonia is the northeasternmost administrative region of Spain - just under 12,500 square miles of farmland, seacoast and mountains extending from the Pyrénées and the French border in the north to the Cape of Tortosa in the south, and from Aragon in the west to the Mediterranean in the east. The region encompasses four provinces, Barcelona, Girona (Gerona), Lleida (Lérida) and Tarragona, each of them divided into a number of comarques (singular: comarca) thirty-seven of them in all. A wide variety of terrain and climate (from alpine to continental) may be found here, and there are few European crops that are not grown, at least in token quantities.
In 1977, after the death of Franco, Catalonia was granted regional autonomy. It now has its own local government, the Generalitat - a descendant of the body of the same name established in the thirteenth century by the Corts Catalans or Catalan parliament (which, incidentally, predated England's by roughly a century). Catalonia has a population of over six million today, and is a wealthy region by Spanish standards, accounting for about 20 percent of the country's gross national product.
Barcelona, Catalonia's capital, is the largest city in Spain, and an important industrial centre. It is also one of the most beautiful, elegant and immediately engaging cities in Europe - offering visitors an embarrassment of attractions, including a well-preserved Gothic quarter, a wealth of turn-of-the-century Moderniste architecture (most notably that of native Catalonian Antoni Gaudí), a number of fine museums (among them one dedicated to Catalan artist Joan Miró and another to one-time Barcelona resident Pablo Picasso), the famous Ramblas (the tree-lined promenade leading down to the sea that is the main artery of the city's highly animated street life) and a large population of very good restaurants. (The local restaurant association claims 1455 as its founding date!)
The province of Barcelona fans outwards from the city, reaching up into the Pyrénées and down into Catalonia's best vineyard land (in the comarques of the Alt Penedès and Anoia, where most of Spain's cava or "champagne", among other good wines, is made).
Northeast of Barcelona province, abutting the French border, is the province of Girona - stretching to the edges of Andorra in the Pyrénées but best-known to the world for its Mediterranean Costa Brava or "Wild Coast". It is tempting to suggest that the only thing still feral about this overbuilt strip of shoreline is the traffic on its little highways on a summer evening, but in truth, its thickets of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels and its annual inundation by half-naked northern Europeans notwithstanding, the Costa Brava's great, wild, natural beauty somehow seems to keep shining through. Beyond the inevitable take-away chicken stands and burger bars, the area is also home to a high percentage of Catalonia's best and most serious restaurants.
Lleida is the only one of Catalonia's provinces without a seacoast. The city of Lleida is primarily an industrial centre, but it is surrounded by flattish plains filled with prolific market gardens, and is near important orchard country and olive groves.
The pleasant city of Tarragona, in the province of the same name, was long the capital of Roman Spain, and is rich in ruins of the period. To the south, rice paddies and lagoons alternate with pretty resort towns along the province's Costa Dorada - which ends in the citrus groves of the plain of Alcanar. Inland is the Priorat, famous for its severe mountain landscapes, its attractive hill towns and monasteries, and its good, strong wines; and the Alt Camp, home of the remarkable culinary celebration called the calçotada (see pages 173–175).
Beyond these four provinces, in three directions, extend the rest of the països catalans. The usual formula for defining their boundaries is, "From Salses to Guardamar and from Fraga to l'Alguer". Salses is about ten miles north of Perpignan, well into France. Guardamar de Segura is south of Valencia, south even of Alicante (Alacant in Catalan), in the heart of the Spanish Levant. Fraga is in Aragon, just across the border from Lleida. L'Alguer (Alghero) is 300 miles or so from the Catalonian mainland, past the Balearics, on the northwest coast of Sardinia - an isolated reminder of the one-time breadth of Catalan power in the Mediterranean.
Most of French Catalonia today is in the département of the Pyrénées-Orientales - but the area is widely known under its old provincial name, the Roussillon (El Rosselló in Catalan). The region's capital is the handsome metropolis of Perpignan, considered to be the "second city" of Catalonia (after Barcelona). The Roussillon in general is an important agricultural area, with nearly 40,000 acres of orchards and vegetable farms, mostly in the Pyrenean foothills. It also produces good wines, constantly improving, both on the coast and in its haunting upland valleys, watched over by the remains of ancient Cathar castles.
The "suzerainty" (for want of a better term) of Andorra has been accessible by surfaced road from Spain only since 1913 and from France only since 1931 - though it is administered jointly, and has been since 1278, by the bishopric of Urgell (in Spain) and the head of the French state. It has no taxes, no military service, and no constitution, and shares the postal services of both Spain and France. Andorra has long been famous, as both its legal and its geographical situation might suggest, as a smuggler's paradise. Today, it is also a major market for tax-free cigarettes, alcohol, perfume and cameras. Little food is produced here, with tobacco being the main farm crop.
The païs valencià or region of Valencia begins where official Catalonia leaves off in the south, and hugs the coastline down through the provinces of Castelló (Castillón) de la Plana, Valencia itself and Alicante. This is the region, above all, of the huertas (hortes in Catalan), the intensely cultivated citrus orchards and flower and vegetable gardens that flood the countryside with thick waves of rich, dark green. Further inland, in drier zones, olives, carob, wine grapes, and the region's superb almonds are grown. (Xixona [Jijona], in the dramatic interior mountain-scape of Alicante province, is the centre of Spain's turrón or nougat industry.) Valencia itself is the second largest port in Spain and the third largest city. I find it a strange place, hard to get to know - but it has an undeniable and not at all unpleasant baroque flamboyance overall. South of Valencia, along the coast, is a vast marsh, full of rice fields, called La Albufera (from the Arabic al-buhaira, "the lake") - and it is thus not surprising that Valencia is noted for its rice dishes, one of which, paella, is certainly the most famous (if most frequently debased) representative of Spain's cooking in the world.
The Balearic Islands - Ibiza, Minorca and Majorca being the main ones are clustered close together roughly fifty miles off the Spanish coast. The three are so different from one another, though, that they might just as well be scattered all over the Mediterranean. Ibiza, a Phoenician port 3,000 years ago, is today best known as a sort of bacchanalian summertime fantasyland, full of nude sunbathers, wealthy Euro-trash, and what are still referred to locally as "hippys" - all the usual colourful flotsam, that is, that traditionally rides the fair-weather currents of Mare Nostrum. But the island against which the bacchanalia is set is very pretty by itself, with its jagged, rocky coastline, its serious little mountains wooded in juniper and pine, its blindingly white houses with their tiny windows and flat roofs (always with a cistern on top to catch badly needed rainwater) - and there are some very good local culinary specialities, though they are rarely served in the island's restaurants.
Minorca was under British rule for most of the eighteenth century, and bears many traces of the occupation. It is said to be the only place in Spain with sash windows, for instance, and the only place with rocking chairs. The British also brought dairy herds to the island, and Minorca is famous today for its ice cream and cheese. It's a peculiar-looking island, rather claustrophobic somehow, with few vast open spaces and with low fieldstone walls everywhere, like veins pushed up through the skin of the land. Maybe partly for this reason, it remains relatively unspoiled, and is a popular resort for Spaniards - and of course for the British.
Majorca is the largest of the Balearics, nearly 2,000 square miles in area, with considerable variation in physical features - from sandy coves to flat vineyard and orchard land to pine-covered hills and real mountains 5,000 feet or so above sea level. The capital, Palma de Mallorca, is a handsome, cosmopolitan city, facing a wide bay and watched over by a magnificent buttressed cathedral (on which the young Gaudi worked) on a hill above the port. Majorca was an important wine-producing centre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and there are limited efforts now to revive the industry. Majorcan almonds are famous, as are the island's figs and tomatoes. Majorcan gastronomy, which has a long and fascinating history and boasts many extraordinary dishes, is, alas, today, as a Majorcan winemaker of my acquaintance puts it, "mostly a family matter".
The last little bit of els països catalans is the city of Alghero (l'Alguer in Catalan) on the Italian island of Sardinia - sometimes called Sardinia's "little Barcelona". Alghero was first occupied by Catalan-Aragonese forces in the mid-fourteenth century, and remained part of the Catalan-speaking empire for nearly 400 years. As a result, the city is full of Catalan-style houses, religious edifices and fortifications and some Catalan street names - Carrer del Forn, Plaça del Portal, etc. - are still used. The local citizenry even continued to speak Catalan (albeit in an archaic and somewhat Italian-flavoured form) until recent years - though it is seldom heard on the streets today. Catalan culinary influence was strong throughout Sardinia, to the point that one expert on the island's customs has written that "Sardinian gastronomy in general is specifically Catalan". Recipes for several Algherese Catalan dishes appear in the pages that follow.
II. the Catalans and their Language
If food is of and from a place, it is even more so of and from - and by - a people. And it is axiomatic, I think, that the more complex and colourful a people's history - and the more other races it has come into contact with - the richer and more varied its cuisine will be. (The English, a cynic might point out, are something of an anomaly in this regard.) And the history of the Catalans, needless to say, is nothing if not complex and colourful.
Not much is known about the Iberian tribes that originally inhabited the region, but it is known that there were Phocaean Greek settlements on the Catalan coast as early as the sixth century BC, and that Carthaginians followed in the late fourth or early third century BC. The first full-scale foreign occupation of the area began in 218 BC, when Roman armies landed on the Catalan coast at the start of the bloody Second Punic War - whence, in time, they conquered the entire Iberian Peninsula, remaining in power there until AD 476.
In a sense, Rome made Catalonia; it certainly helped make Catalan gastronomy. Romans introduced the first large-scale plantings of olive trees and grapevines to the region, for instance, as well as techniques for the production of oil and wine - subsequently so important to the local table. They also brought leavened bread to Catalonia for the first time, as well as almonds and hazelnuts (probably), broad beans, chick peas, lentils and other such legumes - and quite possibly taught locals the art of curing ham. (Catalan ham, whatever its origins, enjoyed a high reputation in Rome itself.)
The Moors, who arrived in Spain in AD 711, had even greater influence on Catalan cuisine - even though they remained in Catalonia for a comparatively short time. To begin with, they brought with them or popularised such raw materials as rice, aubergines, spinach, oranges, cane sugar and saffron - all of them now essential to the region's cookery. They also installed (or greatly improved) systems of irrigation throughout the area (creating the lush huertas of Valencia, for instance), established basic local pastry styles, and left Catalonia and the Balearics with a taste for sweet-and-sour flavour combinations.
In the ninth century, a Cerdanyan nobleman with the unfortunate name of Guifré el Pilós or Wilfred the Shaggy founded the long-lived House of Barcelona, subsequently so important in Mediterranean affairs, and became the first to unite most of the surrounding territory under a single rule. Legend has it that he also spontaneously created Catalonia's heraldic symbol, the senyera - four red bars on a field of yellow - by drawing his bloody fingers across the golden shield of his ally, Charles the Bald, during a set-to with the Moors. It is at about this time, too, that the name "Catalonia" (in one form or another) first appeared. Its origins are uncertain, but it is sometimes said to have been a corruption of the term "Gothalaunia", "Land of the Goths" - a reference to the 250-year occupation of the region by Visigothic tribes before the coming of the Arabs.
One of Wilfred's descendants, Ramón Berenguer IV, brought Catalonia and the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon together by marrying Petronilla, the Aragonese queen - and from that time until both were subsumed into Castile in the fifteenth century, Aragon and Catalonia enjoyed a complicated, onagain off-again alliance that made them joint masters, at the height of their power, of most of the European Mediterranean - not just of Spain down through the Levant and part of France (including much of Provence), but also of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, a full half of the Italian boot and even, for a time, a large chunk of Greece.
The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were Catalonia's Golden Age. It helped rule the Mediterranean not only politically but economically, and the port of Barcelona was said to have berthed a thousand ships at a time. Catalan literature flourished. The acclaimed Majorcan poet/philosopher (and pioneering novelist) Ramon Llull was active during this period, as was the great Catalan physician and author Arnau de Vilanova (Arnaud de Villeneuve) - who has been called "the first European nutritionist and dietician", and who is sometimes credited with having introduced the process of distilling alcohol into Europe from the Arab world.
It was in the midst of this literary flowering that the first Catalan gastronomic manuscripts appeared. In 1384, for instance, the Gironan priest Francesc Eiximenis discussed table manners, food service, and wine in one volume of his projected thirteen-part opus Lo Crestià ("The Christian"). Earlier in 1331, the anonymous Llibre del coc de la canonja Tarragona ("Cookbook of the Canon of Tarragona") had set down dietary rules and recommendations for ecclesiastics in the See of Tarragona and described common food products and dishes of the time. Earliest and most important of all, however, was the Libre de Sent Soví (or Sensoví), usually dated at 1324 - one of the very first European cooking manuals, and one of the most influential, even outside Spain. Some of its recipes were reproduced almost exactly in the popular fifteenth-century Italian cookbooks Libro di arte coquinaria (whose author called Catalan chefs the world's best) and Piatina de honesta voluptate et valetudine - and from there entered the European culinary mainstream. The meaning of the term "Sent Soví" is something of a mystery, as is the identity of the work's author (though evidence suggests that he might have been a Catalan chef to the English court), but the work is a fascinating one, demonstrating the extent of Moorish contributions to the region's kitchens, prescribing the use of numerous cooking utensils and techniques still commonly employed in Catalonia, and offering instructions for concocting dishes that with little adaptation could be - and sometimes are produced and happily consumed today.
The other great Catalan culinary text of the Middle Ages - and the first that was a real printed book rather than a manuscript - was the Libre del coch ("Book of the Cook") ascribed to one Mestre Robert, sometimes also known as Robert or Rupert de Nola. (Again, the author's identity is something of a mystery.) The earliest known edition of the book was published in Barcelona in 1520, although some of its recipes refer to Lenten dietary restrictions that were abandoned in 1491 - suggesting that it dates at least from that year. The Libre del coch is a much more "international" collection than the Sent Soví, and includes some dishes that are clearly Provençal or Italian, and even a few that apparently come from Istria or Dalmatia. Like its illustrious predecessor, however, it anticipates the spirit, and often the specific flavours, of more recent Catalan cuisine. Both volumes, incidentally, are much discussed in Catalan culinary circles today and have been extremely important to the contemporary revival of traditional cooking in the region.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Catalan Cuisine"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Grub Street.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
A Note on Spelling and Usage,
Author's Note,
Introduction,
Part One: HERE, WHO AND WHAT,
I. Catalonia and Els Països Catalans,
II. The Catalans and Their Language,
III. How the Catalans Eat,
Part Two: UCES,
Allioli,
Sofregit,
Picada,
Samfaina,
Part Three: RAW MATERIALS,
Almonds, Hazelnuts and Pine Nuts (Ametlles, Avellanes i Pinyons),
Anchovies (Anxoves),
Aubergines (Alberginies),
Eggs (Ous),
Broad Beans, Chick Peas, Lentils, White Beans and Black-Eyed Beans (Faves, Cigrons, Llenties, Mongetes, i Mongets),
Fish and Shellfish (Peix i Mariscos),
Mushrooms (Bolets),
Olives and Olive Oil (Olives i Oli d'Oliva),
Organ Meats (Menuts),
The Pig (El Porc),
Poultry (Avirams),
Rice (Arròs),
Salt Cod (Bacallà),
Snails (Cargols),
Wild Game (Caça),
Part Four: THEMES AND VARIATIONS,
Salads and Appetizers (Amanides i Entrants),
Breads and Pastas (Pans i Pastes),
Main Courses (Plats Principals),
APPENDICES,
Index,