Spanish Home Cooking/ Cocina Casera Española

by Miriam Kelen Cocina Casera Inc., 252 pp., $34.95

Fixing a dish for someone you love is like giving that person a hug. Whether it’s your spouse, your mother, a friend, or a neighbor, you think about them and ask yourself, “what would surprise them?” — Rosa Prats i Novau, recipe contributor from Valencia, Spain

In recent years, the American imagination has been piqued by the concept of Spanish tapas (tasty little bites traditionally served in bars), as well as by the cutting-edge culinary exploits of Spanish chef-artistes, such as Ferran Adria, who regularly breach new frontiers of gastronomy, accompanied by rapt worldwide media attention. In direct contrast to such “restaurant food,” this utterly charming, self-published (but beautifully produced and widely available) volume celebrates the traditional, unpretentious dishes served in the home kitchens of Spain.

After traveling to a wedding in Spain in 1994, Minneapolis poet Miriam Kelen joined a Spanish-speaking Internet group to practice her language skills. During an online discussion of recipes, one participant suggested collectively writing a cookbook (something like the teenage Mickey Rooney exhorting, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”). Kelen took the suggestion to heart: She began food dialogues with her online contacts, expanded to their friends and relatives, and traveled to visit and interview Spanish home cooks — listening to family stories, eating in kitchens, capturing recipes, and snapping excellent photos of both the cooks and the food.

The result is a captivating compendium of traditional family recipes from eight of Spain’s provinces, from the Basque Country to the Canary Islands. (There is a preponderance of dishes from Catalunya — OK with me, the cooking from that region is superb.) Each recipe is accompanied by a portrait of the cook, their quote about the recipe’s origin, and an appetizing photo of the finished dish.

Oven-baked trout, squash soup with clams, cumin-scented spinach with garbanzos, almond shortbread … seldom does any dish require more than six or eight ingredients, and can be put together with minimal fuss. And with a few exceptions (dried salt cod, Spanish chorizo, squid ink), rarely are any components beyond the reach of the average American supermarket.

Although this is a large hardback volume brimming with beautiful photographs, Spanish Home Cooking does remind me of those spiral-bound cookbooks routinely created by American church-ladies groups — like those little books, it is a collection of beloved, fail-safe recipes, presented with pride and representing the soul of traditional, regional home cooking. It is like nothing so much as getting a big hug from a group of people who are delighted to share their family recipes and regional food traditions. As the song says, “Me lo Como Todo (I Eat It All Up).”

This article appears in October 10 • 2003.

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MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.