Category Archives: Food and Drink

Anguish as a Form of Resistance: Ignacio Doménech’s Cocina de Recursos (Deseo mi comida) in Civil War Spain

By Yanet Acosta

A cookbook is much more than a simple collection of recipes.[i] In the case of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) by Ignacio Doménech, the cookbook is not only a tool of critique but also a form of resistance. It pushes back against the devastation of war, a devastation that leaves its mark not only on bodies, through the absence of food, but also on minds, through the torment of craving what can no longer be eaten.

Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) was published in Spain in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Its author, Ignacio Doménech, had been one of the country’s most renowned chefs before the war. He trained under the legendary Auguste Escoffier at London’s iconic Savoy Hotel and became a major figure in popularizing haute cuisine in Spain, thanks to the publishing house he founded upon returning home.[ii]

A chef displays a platter of fowl to a curious woman.
Fig. 1. Cover of Ignacio Doménech’s magazine, El Gorro Blanco. Image courtesy of the author.

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To fully grasp its significance—and, as we will see, the deep sorrow expressed by Doménech—one must consider the context. Throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Franco’s propaganda repeatedly promised that their victory would put an end to scarcity. Yet the war’s end brought no such relief. Instead, food shortages worsened due to Spain’s international isolation and the abandonment of farmland. Agricultural production didn’t return to pre-war levels until 1950. As a result, the rationing system implemented by Franco’s regime in 1939 became increasingly severe. By 1941, rations were allocated based on social class and profession. In 1943, the system further tightened with the introduction of individual ration cards for every citizen.

Doménech’s critical stance on these developments is immediately evident in the book’s title, which includes the parenthetical phrase “Deseo mi comida” (“I crave my food”). This isn’t a simple grammatical clarification. It reads more like a desperate cry. This plea is not only a response to wartime scarcity but also the profound deprivation of the postwar years.

A man and woman and child eat at a circular table laden with food. A cat waits patiently at the woman's feet.
Fig. 2. The cover of Ignacio Doménech’s Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida). Image courtesy of the author.

The ensuing book is divided into two parts. The first offers a collection of recipes accompanied by the author’s own commentary. What’s striking is Doménech’s shifts between past and present verb tenses. While this might seem like a grammatical inconsistency, it’s actually a meaningful choice. Having authored more than thirty cookbooks—including Marichu, la mejor cocinera española (1919) and La guía del gastrónomo y del maître de hotel (1919)—as well as thousands of articles, Doménech had total command of the Spanish language. His use of tenses appears deliberate; the present refers to postwar Spain, while the past evokes the wartime experience. He also speaks directly of the postwar context. At one point he writes: “In these postwar times, any cook with good taste and imagination is forced to create a thousand little surprises in the kitchen.”

Many of the words in the first part of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) reflect the author’s profound pain. Doménech makes this clear in his own description of the book:

“Los imposibles anhelos de un cocinero que, en tiempos de guerra, ante las realidades del hambre que ya mascábamos y, sin poderlo remediar, soñaba a todas horas con los más suculentos manjares”

“The impossible longings of a cook who, during times of war, facing the reality of the hunger between our teeth, could not help but dream constantly of the most succulent dishes.”

His words carry a quiet defiance—a resistance not only to the hunger itself but also to the circumstances that produced it, the war, and his life in the postwar period. Remarkably, however, the cookbook made it past Franco’s censorship without obstruction. This was largely due to the subtlety of Doménech’s approach. Censorship at the time focused on direct attacks against the regime’s dogma, moral standards, the Church, or the state. His resistance, by contrast, was indirect, anticipating the tone and strategy that many later writers and journalists would adopt in their own quiet opposition.

In Cocina de recursos, both subtext and shifts in verb tense become tools of critique. Doménech also makes use of irony—especially when discussing the absurdities of rationing. For example, he writes:

“Todo es cuestión de tíquets, carnets, cartas de trabajo, cartas de racionamiento para asegurar algo de víveres en crudo o en guisados. De modo que por esto digo que debían racionarse también las ganas de comer, ya que unos individuos, por su sobriedad de toda su vida o por su constitución física, comen mucho menos que otros individuos que tienen mucho más apetito, con justicia la ración no puede ser igual”.

“Everything depends on tickets, cards, work papers, and ration cards to get some food, either raw or cooked. That’s why I say even hunger should be rationed — some people, because of their habits or their body type, eat much less than others who are much hungrier. So it wouldn’t be fair to give everyone the same amount.”

In the second part of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida), Doménech shifts his focus from recipes to food criticism, presenting a series of restaurant reviews written in the form of narrative chronicles. These accounts, dating from 1937 and 1938, are filled with anecdotes, encounters, conversations, and commentary—and unlike in the first part, here Doménech exclusively uses the past tense.

Yet one anecdote stands out as oddly contemporary, more reflective of the author’s present reality than of the period he’s supposedly describing. He recounts a conversation with a wealthy, titled gentleman who proposes a business venture: opening a restaurant that would traffic in black-market goods. During the postwar years, black market trading—or estraperlo—was rampant in Spain, making this episode feel particularly timely.[iii]

These and other insights show that Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) is far more than a simple cookbook. It is a testament of suffering and an act of resistance. In a postwar Spain plagued by food shortages even harsher than those of the Civil War, Doménech’s work was a quiet but powerful protest, expressed through the language of cuisine.

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[i] Scholars like Susan Leonardi, Janet Floyd, Laurel Forster, Janet Theophano, Cara de Silva, Anne L. Bower, María Paz Moreno, Rebecca Ingram, and Lara Anderson have convincingly shown this. See Acosta, 2024.

[ii] Simón Palmer, 2012.

[iii]  This observation is echoed by Miguel I. Arrieta Gallastegui, editor of the most recent edition of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida), published by Editorial Trea.

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References

Acosta, Yanet. “Cocina y crítica gastronómica de guerra y posguerra por Ignacio Doménech.” The Foodie Studies Magazine, nº 1 (2016): 4-19.

Acosta, Yanet. “Investigación contemporánea de las recetas manuscritas. El repositorio on- line de los recetarios domésticos históricos de Canarias.” Acosta &Ingram, Food Studies en español. Fragua, 2024.

Domenech, Ignacio. Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida). Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2011.

Moreno, María Paz, De la página al plato. El libro de cocina en España. Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2012.

Simón Palmer, María del Carmen, “Ignacio Doménech, autor y editor culinario,” Cincinnati Romance Review, volumen 33 (2012), University of Cincinnati, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.


Yanet Acosta, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain and research affiliate with the Cátedra UNESCO for Communication, is also Director of the Masters in Communication and Food Journalism, The Foodie Studies. Awarded the Spanish Royal Academy’s Álvaro Cunqueiro Prize for Journalism in 2021, she is co-editor of Periodismo Gastronómico, Investigación y Comunicación Intercultural (2021) and Food Studies en español: Investigación actual en gastronomía y comunicación, with Rebecca Ingram (2024, Fragua). Current projects include the Digital Humanities recipe website and database, Recetarios domésticos históricos de Canarias (2021-present) and “#TetuánFoodie,” a collaboration with Laboratorios Ciudadanos, Madrid. A gastronomical journalist for more than two decades, she is also the author of the novels El chef ha muerto (2011) and Matar al padre (2017).

Curry Goes to War: Indian Army Field Rations in World War Two

By Pradeep Barua

The Indian Army participated in both  world wars in the twentieth century. During the First World War (1914-1918,) 1.3 million Indian soldiers fought for the British Empire. Another two million men joined the Indian Army and fought for the allies in World War Two (1939-1945).[i] In the latter case, feeding this massive army in various theatres of war, ranging from the jungles of Burma (Myanmar) to the deserts of North Africa to the frozen Apennines of Italy, proved to be a major challenge for the Army.

Alongside the challenges of the battlefield and terrain, the Indian Army was also a multi-faith army comprised of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. In addition to religious differences, Hindu and Sikh soldiers were subject to caste considerations. Food and rations had to be prepared along strict guidelines to adhere to caste and religious sensitivities. Two cooks or Langris were assigned to a company of soldiers (about 100 men). Depending on the company’s composition, the cooks would be Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, and of a particular caste as needed. The presence of the Langris ensured that food for the different religions and castes was provided for in the right way. The Indian Army also supplied stackable cooking pots, so soldiers could prepare their own meals in the field. This was especially important to high caste Brahmin Hindu soldiers who had to prepare and eat their own food in order to preserve their caste status.[ii]

Frontline British soldiers had access to 24-hour ration packs that included tinned bully beef, spam, steak, kidney pudding and sausages. These were not acceptable to Indian soldiers, and it was subsequently a challenge to keep them fed on the frontlines. To aid in this, dehydrated lentils, fish, vegetables, and fruit were provided to Indian soldiers engaged in combat.[iii] Indian soldiers, like their British counterparts, also foraged for fresh eggs, fish, and poultry as the situation allowed.

Whether it was lentils, fish, or meat, the favorite form of preparation was a curry. It was slow cooked in a pot and served on an enameled metal plate roughly 12 inches across.[iv] The slow cooking tenderized hard dehydrated lentils, dry fish, and even tough cuts of meat. Crucial to the curry was the addition of a blend of powdered spices that each Indian soldier carefully hoarded and carried into the frontlines. A base curry spice blend included turmeric, cumin, and coriander. To this, people added other spices such as chili, black pepper, cinnamon, or nutmeg depending on regional preferences. The curry was usually eaten with a flat wheat bread called the chapatti, which was made every day by the Langris. The curry and the chapattis became synonymous with Indian troops in various theatres of conflict. Many civilians in the combat zones, who were assisted by Indian troops, fondly recall the food that the Indian soldiers shared with them. In Italy, for example, villagers today remember with gratitude the curries and chapattis that Indian soldiers distributed among them to relieve starvation during the Italian campaign in World War Two.[v]

Food traditions of the Indian Army developed at the regimental level. The regimental messes evolved and enshrined curry recipes over periods of up to a century.[vi] This knowledge was passed on to the regiment’s battalion cooks. On festive occasions these dishes were cooked in the rear areas and transported to soldiers in forward positions.

What follows is a small representation of curry recipes unique to Indian Army Regiments:

Assam Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment fought mainly in Assam and Burma during the Second World War. An iconic dish is Machoor Tenga Jhool or Fish Sour Curry.

A bowl of red curry with seafood.
Fig. 1. Machoor Tenga Jhool or Fish Sour Curry. Image courtesy of author.

Jammu & Kashmir Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment also fought in Burma during the Second World War. Its iconic dish is Rogan Josh or Mutton Curry.

A bowl of brown curry with mutton.
Fig. 2. Rogan Josh or Mutton Curry. Image courtesy of the author.

Sikh Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment fought in all the major theatres of war that the Indian Army participated in during the Second World War. Its iconic dish is Sarson ki Saag aur Makki ka Roti or Mustard Greens Curry and corn flat bread.

A plate of green curry with a flatbread.
Fig. 3. Sarson ki Saag aur Makki ka Roti or mustard greens curry and corn flat bread. Image courtesy of the author.

Ultimately, the Indian Army regiments enshrined regional customs and traditions. Food served an essential purpose in maintaining these regional identities. The Indian soldiers’ curry rations played a vital role in ensuring that the Indian Army’s morale and well-being was in the best condition during the Second World War.

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[i] See Pradeep Barua, The Late Colonial Indian Army: From the Afghan Wars to the Second World War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021).

[ii] “An Army Marches on its Stomach,” National Army Museum, UK, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/army-marches-its-stomach

[iii] Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, “Dehydrated Rations for Indian Soldiers in the Second World War,” H-Nutrition, 22 June 2017, https://networks.h-net.org/node/134048/discussions/182894/dehydrated-rations-indian-soldiers-second-world-war

[iv] “Tales From the Supply Depot: Indian Army Enameled Plate,” 18 May 2015, https://hatchfive.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/indian-army-enamelled-plate/

[v] War and Chapati: The Role of Indian Soldiers in Italy during WWII, documentary produced by Assocoiazione Universarte and directed by Harvinder Singh, https://globalhistorydialogues.org/projects/war-and-chapati/

[vi] Regimental Zaikas: Indian Army Regimental Dishes (Bangalore: ASC Centre and College, 2019).


Pradeep Barua is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of several books on South Asia and military history including Gentlemen of the Raj, The State at War in South Asia, The Military Effectiveness of Post-Colonial States, and The Late Colonial Indian Army.

Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.

Of Rodents, Stockfish, and Win-the-War Soup: Surviving Starvation in Biafra

By Enemchukwu Nnaemeka

Wars in post-colonial Africa, like in other places across the world, were not only fought with guns, ammunitions, and bombardments but also with strategies of starvation. Starvation as a military strategy has been employed by various groups throughout history, with the primary intent of forcing an enemy to surrender or retreat. These strategies take diverse forms, especially through scorched-earth methods such as the burning of farmlands, the poisoning or contamination of food storage or drinking water, or the outright blockade or bombardment of markets, food networks, foodways, and systems, including airways, waterways, roadways, ports, and airports. While various studies have addressed starvation as a strategy of war, especially as implemented by victors,[i] the question remains:  how have victims of war, especially civilians, survived in the face of deliberate starvation? In many instances, civilians voluntarily or forcefully give up their food to soldiers as their contribution to war efforts, making them the chief casualties of war starvation.

A group of children attempt to receive food from an aid worker.
Fig. 1. Food distribution at the Swedish Red Cross Centre in Udo during the Biafran War. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the case of the Biafran War, civilians readily reinvented their nutrition in the face of scarcity. Between 1967 and 1970, the Biafra Republic defended itself from the onslaught of the British-Soviet-US backed Nigerian Army. Historian Egodi Uchendu found that children between10 and 18 hunted lizards and rats as a source of food,[ii] while various Christian and humanitarian organizations smuggled stock-fish—otherwise known as dried codfish, which is today consumed by Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria, former citizens of Biafra—to make up for their deficiency in protein.[iii] Before this, neither lizards nor codfish were commonly featured on Igbo menus. While lizards as a source of protein have largely fallen out of use, codfish has remained a national food source among the Igbo, serving as a reminder of how they survived the war.

Six workers unload wooden crates of codfish from a helicopter.
Fig. 2. A relief team unloads crates of codfish that were airlifted from the Nigerian cities of Calabar or Port Harcourt. Image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library, #7162.

As the Biafran population faced blockades that restricted access to crude oil depots in Port Harcourt—essential for powering their war machines—they turned to processing oil palm as an alternative fuel source for warplanes and armored tanks. This shift, however, further depleted the region’s food reserves, as oil palm was also a dietary staple. Consequently, survivors who depended on oil palm for preparing soups had to carefully ration its use, giving rise to what became known as “Win-the-War” soups. These soups were characteristically thin and watery, having little protein, with salt often extracted by boiling already-salted codfish, commonly referred to as stockfish. Remarkably, the legacy of “Win-the-War” soup endured among Igbo families long after the conflict’s end. Whenever a younger generation prepares a poorly made, watery soup, older family members—who lived through the war—often tease them, jokingly calling it “Win-the-War” soup. Thus, food provides a lens through which older Igbo generations recount tales of the war, weaving personal and collective memory into everyday life.

A pan of corn soya milk sits over a fire, while a hand stirs the contents.
Fig. 3. Corn soya milk (CSM) being cooked into a bread-like food during the Nigerian-Biafran war. Image courtesy of

The stories point to the fact that an exploration of how civilian populations sourced and invented new foods and reinvented the old during starvation-ravaged conflicts is long overdue. While studies on humanitarianism in war are abundant, the ingenuity of those facing systematic starvation—how they changed their diets and adapted to scarcity—remains underexplored. Indeed, the history of Biafra is not solely a narrative of bombardment and famine. It is also a story of widespread stockfish consumption, shifting gender roles in trade and breadwinning, childhood experiences tied to rodent hunting, and the broader intersections of food sourcing and culinary innovation. These elements reveal a resilient population adapting to extraordinary circumstances, crafting new recipes and survival strategies amid adversity.

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[i] George Alfred Mudge, “Starvation as a Means of Warfare,” International Lawyer 4, no. 2 (1970): 228, https://scholar.smu.edu/til/vol4/iss2/3; Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, “The Purposes of Starvation: Historical and Contemporary Uses,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (2019): 699-722.

[ii] Egodi Uchendu, “Recollections of Childhood Experiences during the Nigerian Civil War,” Africa 77, no. 3 (2007): 408. Uchendu’s is one of few studies that capture some strategies adopted by the civilian population, especially women and children, to survive economic blockades and the subsequent food shortages they create.

[iii] Robert E. Gribbin, “Two Relief Crises: Biafra and Sudan,” Africa Today 20, no. 3 (1973): 49; Fiona Bateman, “Ireland and the Nigeria-Biafra War: Local Connections to a Distant Conflict,” New Hibernia Review 16, no. 1 (2012): 48.

 


Nnaemeka Enemchukwu earned his bachelor’s degree in History and International Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He went on to complete a master’s degree in History and Strategic Studies at the University of Lagos and is currently pursuing a second master’s in History at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research interests span the economic, migration, labor, and social histories of West Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries. His scholarship has been published in notable outlets, including the Journal of Military History (Nigeria Defence Academy), the Nigerian Forum (Nigerian Institute of International Affairs), and the African Studies Review (Cambridge University Press).