09
to the chefs of our days. But for sure I am
wrong . What it should be noted without
doubt is the full fidelity of kitchen professionals to the country: working during the
invasion to minimize the havoc in the pantry and adapting in the harsh postwar to
a cuisine of hardship and circumstances,
probably also due to lower political and
symbolic connotation that cuisine must have had at the eyes of Franco dictatorship,
what it sholud save more of an exile, such
as massively happened in other areas of
culture.
With the titanic effort to standardize a
catalan national cuisine with their contemporary European, therefore, war breaks out
and it presents a relative that was thought
had disappeared: hunger. My extravagant
guess is that to the culinary art, the armed
conflict and the hunger games were the
real spur of the avant-garde; a sort of cubism, post-weberian dodecaphonism or an
innerconsciousness flow. There is a detail
that is revealing. In 1937, it was usual to see
Mercè Rodoreda and her friends, like Dorothy Parker brunching at the Algonquin and
talking about sex in New York, drinking
red vermouth and eating heart and lungs
dishes -freixura - in the famous Punyalada,
fruit of the need. It is an image that it looks
to me of an absolute modernity and at the
same time ultralocal. The real extinction of
pigeons, cats, dogs, donkeys and even lizards -donkey sausage documented in that
period would not be misplaced in a menu
of Ángel León, I suspect, if it were not for
its little maritime condition- during the siege of Barcelona connects with our present