07
W
MIQUEL BONET
e eat much in the space and little in the time.
To be more precise, our
gastronomic spaces are
waxed ballrooms and
our palatal times small pockets of family
memories. But there was a lapse where eating was understood in the public forum as
we do today, perhaps as at any other time in
history. However, we are going to move up
to a few years later to raise a mystery of the
caliber of the automa of Bélmez: has been
commented on a regular basis the surprise by the reactionary character, decadent
and executor of the gastronomic great work
from the West, El què hem menjat (What we
have eaten) by Josep Pla. Even more, you
could say that the entire postwar foodie literature has been marked by the musty and
rarefied air of the topos of the myth -yes, I
am thinking about Perucho, Luján or Cunqueiro. But no one has explained us why.
So big was the sense of loss after the tragedy that the only refuge had to be a tradition passed through the mythological sieve?
If any reaction has its origin in a revolution, it is legitimate to conclude that this
was opposed to an earlier avant-garde? Who
knows, but one can begin to infer answers
from exhibitions such as War Menus that
this summer has occupied the ground floor
of the Museu d’Història de Catalunya in Barcelona. In its central body, the exhibition
covers what it is certainly the more interesting of this historical period, the resistance -resigned conllevancia- of Barcelona’s
civilian population before the food shortages in the rear. On the flanks, and from the
dialectic between tradition and avant-garde that underlies, multiple tracks to outline
the lines of continuity of the Catalan culinary culture. First, from where we came. So