Pà tomaquet not Catalan!

The origins of Catalan cookbook, La cuynera catalana, and a revelatory French description of pan con tomate (albeit soggy) in early 19th century Andalusia. Or: If you can’t make history, make it up.

The Red Plague has generously pointed me at La cuynera catalana (1835), which I didn’t know and is most interesting. One of the key myths in the invention of Catalan nationality has been the notion of a native culture overpainted for centuries by fancypants foreigners, until 19th century patriots scraped away the patina and revealed the purity and glory of the Plain People and their plain diet. French and Italians were grossly overrepresented in hostel kitchens in late 18th and early 19th century Barcelona, but these tasty aliens were put in their place, say the Generality’s fucked translators:

In 1835 a book appeared in Catalan that spoke of an autochthonous cuisine, the Catalan cuisine, which it was necessary to let everybody know about… ‘The Catalan cook’ [ie La cuynera catalana] is a principal text in order to understand the consolidation and evolution of national cuisine. Although it was probably not originally planned as a re-vindicated work, there are certain traits that directly link it to the historical and social time of its publication. In the first instance, the date, which is only two years after the appearance in the pages of ‘El Vapor’ of the ‘Oda a la Pàtria’ [Ode to the Fatherland] by Bonaventura Carles Aribau, The poem, which is considered to be the launching pad of the ‘Renaixença’ movement, in this way anticipates ‘The Catalan cook’, which also identifies an autochthonous culinary taste and sentiment, which must be made known.

Er, nope. In fact this work was prescriptive rather than descriptive, helping housewives adopt best practice from the literary tradition rather than reintroducing them to charred rabbit from the hovels of Barcelona’s mountainous hinterland.

The principal source of La cuynera catalana was actually the 18th century friar Francesc del Santíssim Sagrament’s Instrucció breu i útil per los cuiners principiants, editors M Mercè Gras and Agustí Borrell reveal in the introduction to their edition. And Brother Francis doesn’t mention years of research in the eating houses of Barcelona, but says rather that he consulted the existing literature (not that it was particularly useful, he says–truth or pride?).

The editors suggest that his sources may have included Diego Granado’s Libro del arte de cozina (1599), Domingo Hernández de Maceras’ Libro del arte de cocina (1607), Francisco Martínez Montiño’s Arte de cocina (1611) and Juan Altamiras’ Nuevo arte de cocina (1745), and that he may also have had access to foreign classics like Apicius’ De re coquinaria (ca AD 400), Bartolomeo Scappi‘s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (which Granado ripped off). So not much “autochthonous culinary taste and sentiment” there.

The recipes in La cuynera catalana are certainly simple, cheap, and far removed from the extravagances of some of the medieval compilations (I’ve struggled through bits of Forme of cury), but that doesn’t mean they represent the vernacular. Rather this is a spin-off from R&D conducted over the centuries the refectories of underfunded convents (Francesc was a purchaser).

(On the other hand, I’ve no problem with the contention that this book formed part of a wave of products designed to promote “Catalan” geobranding. The Germans and perhaps the French had been linking place-bound culinary experiences and cookbooks since the late 17th century–I think the 1691 Nürnberger Kochbuch was the first–and there are plenty of examples of differentiation here–“lo que anomenan los espanyols ramillete“, for example.)

Diving into the text, one amusing omission is bread with tomato, which, the mouth-breathers never tire of informing us, is a sine qua non of authentic Catalan cuisine. (Without it hotels lose their fourth star–as if anyone gave a toss about state ratings, as the Brits have sensibly concluded.)

There are various ways of explaining this lacuna. Perhaps, for example, at this stage no one in Barcelona had consumed bread in this fashion: Néstor Luján, by way of Jaume Fabrega, apparently says that the first recorded case was in 1884.

Another explanation might be that people were already eating pa amb tomàquet in Barcelona by then, but that it was regarded as excessively foreign for inclusion in a book with “Catalan” in the title.

Where, then, might it have come from? One possibility is Andalusia. I think my tipsy meanderings this hour have turned up the first ever description of something that is recognisably pan con tomate. It’s an aside in a book called Tableau de Rome vers la fin de 1814, published in 1816 by a Frenchman called Guinan Laoureins, who may for all I know have battled Spanish waiters under Napoleon:

En Andalousie, le mets favori du peuple est le Gaspacho. Ce sont … quelques gouttes d’huile sur quelques tranches de pain, un peu de tomate et de piment, noyés dans de l’eau froide.

In Andalusia, the people’s favourite dish is gazpacho. This … consists of a few drops of oil on some slices of bread, a little tomato and pepper, submerged in cold water.

This is a fascinating contradiction of Gautier’s classic description in Voyage en Espagne (1840):

L’on verse de l’eau dans une soupière, à cette eau l’on ajoute un filet de vinaigre, des gousses d’ail, des oignons coupés en quatre, des tranches de concombre, quelques morceaux de piment, une pincée de sel, puis l’on taille du pain qu’on laisse tremper dans cet agréable mélange, et l’on sert froid. Chez nous, des chiens un peu bien élevés refuseraient de compromettre leur museau dans une pareille mixture.

You pour water into a bowl, add a dash of vinegar, some cloves of garlic, quartered onions, some slices of​cucumber, some pieces of pepper, and a pinch of salt. Then you cut some bread and let it soak in this agreeable mixture serve it cold. Amongst us moderately well brought-up dogs would turn up their noses at such a mixture.

Another possibility is Italy. The only item I’ve turned up is the stodgy pappa al pomodoro, which is described in the 1860s and was later a hit for Rita Pavone and Nino Rota. Culinary-historical justice will never be done, but the poets should be content with this:

[I think this was the video intended]

[
It’s curious that Gugel monster doesn’t seem to have whole thing, seeing as it’s in the Biblioteca de Catanlunya and afaik all their post-incunables have been processed.

And, since you didn’t ask, my kitchen bible is Penelope Casas’ The foods and wines of Spain–superb descriptions of how to cook the kind of stuff you found in bars and restaurants until the anorexic vegetarian spacemen took over.
]

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Published
Last updated 03/04/2020

This post pre-dates my organ-grinding days, and may be imported from elsewhere.
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Andalusia (152):

Apicius (1): Apicius is a collection of Roman cookery recipes, usually thought to have been compiled in the 1st century AD and written in a language that is in many ways closer to Vulgar than to Classical Latin; later recipes using Vulgar Latin were added to earlier recipes using Classical Latin. The name "Apicius" had long been associated with excessively refined love of food, from the habits of an early bearer of the name, Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmet and lover of refined luxury, who lived sometime in the 1st century AD during the reign of Tiberius.

Barcelona (1399):

Catalonia (1155):

Cookbook (4):

Forme of Cury (1):

France (228):

Gazpacho (1):

Generalitat of Catalonia (3):

Italy (87):

Kaleboel (4307):

Pa amb tomaca (1):

Pa amb tomàquet (1):

Pa amb tomata (1):

Pan con tomate (1):

Recipe (18):

Renaixença (1): The Renaixença, or Catalan Renaissance, was an early 19th-century romantic revivalist movement in Catalan language and culture, akin to the Galician Rexurdimento or the Occitan Félibrige movements.

Théophile Gautier (1): Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism.


Comments

  1. We’ve got a printed edition at home which we picked up at some event in Tarragona a few years back. You’re bound to find one somewhere this Sant Jordi.

  2. Shit man, you will never edit a tabloid newspaper. Fuck all that scholarly archive crawling about cook books, banner headline: PÀ TOMAQUET NOT CATALAN, OFFICIAL!

  3. Fair enough, but if you don’t pay up, it’s an initiation of force, and I’m setting Von Hayek on you. He owes me a couple of favours after I found him a good Aurochs-herdsman for his East Prussian estate (now a state of the art lapdance facility on the former site of the Kaliningrad Plough Works and Aresenic factory)

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