Tag Archives: Spain

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).

Building Community Through Recipe Sharing

By Sara de Blas Hernández

All of the famous cookbooks emerging in early modern Spain were written by men who worked for the royal court: Libro de guisados (1529) was written by Roberto de Nola, Arte de cocina, pasteleria, vizcocheria, y conserveria (1611) by Francisco Martínez Montiño, and Arte de repostería (1747) by Juan de la Mata. Outside of the palace walls, however, it was generally women —and not men—who were in charge of feeding the family. Even though there is no record of edited cookbooks by female authors during the period, there are some manuscripts authored by nuns and by literate noblewomen that made possible the preservation of knowledge shared through oral traditions. One of these recipe books is Libro de apuntaciones de guisos y dulces written by María Rosa Calvillo de Teruel around 1740.

Original Libro de Apuntaciones de guisos y dulces at the Real Academia Española in Madrid. Image Credit: The author

At first sight, one might consider recipe books to be straightforward texts with instructions, but they can provide the attentive reader with more information than what initially meets the eye. This is the case with Libro de apuntaciones de guisos y dulces. The only biographical information contained in the book is the name of the author, which, interestingly enough, is written by a different hand than the one that writes the recipes in the book. Is María Rosa the author? Was the book passed down to a relative who signed her name to claim it as hers? Even though these questions remain unanswered, a careful reading of this recipe book has allowed me to reconstruct, to a certain extent, the details of María Rosa’s life, the social context in which she lived, and the cooking practices used at the time.

In Libro de apuntaciones, the titles of some recipes —“How to prepare quails as it is done in Seville” or “How to make Utreras’ pastries”[i]— locate the author in Andalusia, the southernmost region of mainland Spain. The ingredients, meanwhile, disclose María Rosa’s social class, or at least the one she interacted with, which was the lower nobility. The book calls for spices such as clove, paprika, cinnamon, and saffron. These are a constant in most of the recipes and were very expensive but essential ingredients in the preparation of most dishes at the time. There is a recipe that even calls for Flemish butter, a special kind of butter mixed with potassium nitrate that kept the product fresh. This butter was imported from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Ireland and was a luxurious and expensive ingredient not available to all.

Map of Spain with the Andalusia region highlighted. Image Credit: Wikicommons

An exploration of the handwritten recipes in Libro de apuntaciones reveals yet another key detail. Out of the 100 recipes contained in the book, six of them are attributed to other women: Antonia, Mari-quita, tía Felipa, doña Joaquina, María Teresa, and María Manuela. These recipes are considerably longer and more accurate than María Rosa’s recipes. By including these recipes in the book, the author recognizes other members of the food-making community and also acknowledges their skills, abilities, and knowledge. This resonates with Janet Theopano’s concept of “cookbook as community,” which understands recipe books as spaces where women created networks of support and spaces that promoted social interaction and exchange of ideas.

In these six recipes, María Rosa’s own voice gets intertwined with the voices of the six other women. She suggests improvements and variations to the original recipes proposed by her peers and evaluates the quality of the food being prepared. This is proof of experimentation. María Rosa tests and tastes the recipes herself, which is the kind of experimental knowledge and sensorial methodology necessary in the kitchen.

Food making relies on what Sutton defines as the “lower senses.” Take as an example the recipe for “Huevos moles” in which the sense of sight — “both things are whisked until they are very white and they make little bubbles”— and the sense of smell— “ cook until it smells done”— are the ones that determine when the eggs and the sugar are done. In “How to make pork blood sausage,” the sense of touch, and more specifically the hand and its parts, become the unit of measurement: “[add] a handful [of aniseed] with the whole hand,” “as much [cumin as] can be fitted in three fingers,” or “as much [ginger as] can be fitted in four fingers”.

The examples above position María Rosa and her peers as a community of practice that boasts a unique set of knowledge and skills rooted in experimental methodologies and the senses. In turn, this is conducive to the validity and recognition of a field —food-making— and a group of people—women— undervalued and undermined by society. My work helps unveil the potential of a text which, although not very promising at first sight, proves to be a rich source of avenues of inquiry and a way to rescue women’s voices and their knowledge from an unrecognizing past.

[i] Utrera is a town south-east of Seville

 

References

Calvillo de Teruel, María Rosa. Libro de apuntaciones de guisos y dulces, 1740.

Sutton, Davis. “Cooking Skill, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge.”  Sensible Objects ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006.

Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. Palgrave, 2002.


Sara de Blas Hernández is a Ph.D. student specializing in Spanish Linguistics at UC Davis. Even though her main field of research is Second Language Acquisition, she has a keen interest in Food Studies. She is currently working on creating and testing pedagogical materials that develop students’ communicative competence and critical thinking skills while boosting motivation and engagement through multisensory and experiential learning methodologies.

Beating Dough for Sponge Biscuits: a Gendered Skill?

By Marta Manzanares Mileo

In 1611’s Arte de cozina, pastelería, bizcochería y conservería (The Art of Cooking, Pastry Making, Bakery and Preserving), Francisco Martínez Montiño, Philip III’s and Philip IV’s personal cook, provides a series of recipes for bizcochos or long sponge biscuits made of flour, sugar, and eggs, which were one of the favourites desserts in early modern Spain. In one of these recipes, Montiño instructs the reader how to whip the biscuit dough, warning “that you must not whip any biscuits with two hands, as the nuns do, but with one hand as when you beat eggs to make egg omelette.”[i]

 

A painted image shows a basket overflowing with breads and cakes.
Figure 1. Detail of bizcochos and other small cakes in Juan Van der Hamen y León, Still Life with Basket of Sweets. s. XVII. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

 

Montiño was not the only commentator to criticize nuns’ culinary techniques. In Los quatro libros del arte de la confitería (Four Volumes on the Art of Confectionery), published in 1592, the confectioner Miguel de Baeza asserted that “sponge biscuits were of good quality in Toledo and produced in large quantities in monasteries; although these biscuits were not as good as those made in the confectionery shops”[ii] (I’ve briefly discussed Baeza’s book in an earlier post, in which I examined the circulation of manuscript confectionery books among guild confectioners, some of them based on Baeza’s print work).

As scholars of early modern culinary literature have noted, professional author-cooks added personal comments and recipe corrections to demonstrate their professional expertise via their cookbooks. Baeza and Montiño used their privileged position to claim their culinary authority, in this instance by comparing and diminishing nuns’ baking skills. Their remarks clearly reflect the gendered division of culinary labour in early modern Europe between “male-professional-skilled” and “female-domestic-unskilled.” What is striking about their criticism is that nuns were (and still are) well-known for their prowess in the preparation of sweets.

As part of a larger research project on the gendering of sweet foods in early modern Spain, I examine how cultural associations between women and sugar might have translated into gendered modes of cooking and eating sweet food.[iii] I have shown that women of various social backgrounds, including nuns, played a crucial role in shaping a growing taste for sugary food in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain.  Indeed, cultural images of industrious nuns making delicious sweet treats in convent kitchens prevailed across the early modern Catholic world. To honour ecclesiastical officials and families, nuns prepared a wealth of fruit preserves, small cakes, and biscuits, including bizcochos.

A written manuscript describes an early modern Spanish recipe.
Figure 2. Recipes for bizcochos by Sister Clara María Suay. Arxiu del Regne de València, Clero, caja 788, nº54. Appearing with permission of Arxiu del Regne de València.

 

Did Spanish nuns have their own technique for making bizcochos? In an attempt to answer this question, I faced a series of methodological problems, partly as a result of the scarcity of surviving manuscript recipes written by women in this period. One exception is a manuscript collection of short recipes scattered through the personal papers of Sister Clara María Suay, a professed nun in the Royal Monastery of La Puridad in Valencia. Although Clara María Suay annotated two different recipes for sponge biscuits, she included only brief notes about ingredients and instructions.

It is unclear whether nuns possessed their own unique techniques to prepare their well-known sponge biscuits. Can we consider it a culinary “secret” kept behind convent walls? In any case, Montiño and Baeza’s recipes offer a compelling example of the gendered dimensions of cooking, which were often distorted and biased, and some of the methodological issues that historians face when seeking to uncover women’s culinary practices in the context of early modern Spain.

 

Acknowledgements

This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement Nº 891543.

[i] Francisco Martínez Montiño, Arte de cozina, pastelería, bizcochería y conservería (Madrid: 1611), p.  274.

[ii] Miguel de Baeza, Los quatro libros del arte de la confitería (Alcalá de Henares: 1592), p. 76.

[iii] For a more extensive account on this research, see my forthcoming article “Sweet Femininities: Women and the Confectionery Trade in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona” in Gender & History.

Christmas Recipes in Early Modern Barcelona

Marta Manzanares Mileo

In 1786, Rafael d’Amat i de Cortada, a member of Catalan nobility known as Baron of Maldà, described the Christmas holiday in his memoirs, noting that: “All sorts of torrons are sold in confectionery shops at Christmas, and eaten as dessert at the table of gentlemen as well as many artisans and other people”[1]. 


Tomás Hiepes, Sweetmeats and Dried Fruit on a Table, ca.1600–1635, Prado Museum. Image Bank ©Museo Nacional del Prado.

During Christmas time, professional confectioners fully engaged in the making of the quintessential Christmas dessert: the torró or turrón. The traditional Torró is a confection made of honey and/or sugar syrup, beaten egg whites, roasted nuts — mainly almonds or hazelnuts — covered with wafer paper and cut into rectangular bars. This combination of ingredients brought together Arab confectionery methods with Iberian ingredients, which shows the intercultural culinary traditions in early modern Spain.

 

One of the earliest recipes of torró written in Catalan is the recipe for Torrons d’avelanes, or a hazelnut nougat, which is located in the 14th century manuscript recipe book titled Llibre de totes maneres de confits (Book of the methods of making confections) in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at University of Barcelona. According to the preface of this book, all these recipes were provided by many “notable especiers”, the medieval sellers of spices and sugary food. [2]

Recipes for turrón can be also found in the book Los quarto libros del arte de la confitería (Four Volumes on the Art of Confectionery) by the Toledan confectioner Miguel de Baeza (Alcalá de Henares, 1592), the earliest print confectioner book in early modern Spain. Baeza offers two different recipes for turrón: turrón fino (Fine Nougat), a ground roasted almond nougat, and the recipe for turrón entrefino (Common Nougat) made of roasted pine nuts.

Unlike other food recipes, confectionery formulas clearly specify the amount of ingredients as well as the ‘degree’ or temperature of sugar or honey syrup, as being fundamental criteria to obtain good results. Confectioners recognized the correct degree for each confection by the visual and tactile signs given by the boiling honey or sugar syrups. In the recipe Del turrón fino (Of Fine Nougat), Baeza instructed to test the degree of honey syrup as follows:

Take a bowl or a casserole pot and a bit of cool, clear water, and you will dip your finger into the water; and then you will dip your finger into the honey, and look it crumbles and then it is good.

The numerous references to the confectioner’s workshop and journeymen suggest that the Arte de confitería would have been intended for professional confectioners. Only two original copies are known to date, located in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and in the library of the monastery of El Escorial (Madrid). Strikingly, a third handwritten copy of Baeza’s work can be found as part of the manuscript notebook of Melcior Palau, a Catalan confectioner who lived and worked in Barcelona during the early seventeenth century.

Front page of the manuscript copy of Los cuatro libros de arte de confitería by Miguel de Baeza. Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona (BUB), ms. 62, f. 53r. Biblioteca Patrimonial Digital de la Universitat de Barcelona.

 

From 1562, the members of the College of Druggists and Confectioners of Barcelona (Col·legi de droguers i confiters de Barcelona) were the main suppliers of torrons in the city. They were entitled to exercise as druggists, dispensing drugs, spices and other colonial commodities, as well as confectioners, making and selling sweets. The rich archives of Catalonia have revealed an unusually high number of confectionery books belonged to professional confectioners, in which they collected and recorded a wide range of sweets recipes. 

As regards Melcior Palau’s handbook, it contains an additional recipe for torró titled Per fer torons de amella (To make almond nougat). The annotations following this last recipe make clear that it was added by another reader, specifically Gaspar Arnau, the apprentice of the confectioner Melcior Palau. Here, the apprentice Arnau limited himself to indicate the quantities of honey and nuts.

BUB, ms. 62, f. 43v. Biblioteca Patrimonial Digital de la Universitat de Barcelona.

Palau’s confectionery book suggests handwritten copies of the print Arte de confitería could have encouraged a larger spread among professional confectioners during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the multiple handwritings and annotations contained in this handbook show a wide circulation across generations of guild members. The exceptionality of Catalan confectioner books raises some questions about the extent to which similar manuscript recipe collections might be used in the acquisition and transmission of craft knowledge in other European urban contexts, alternative to oral transmission and print culture.

Bon Nadal! Merry Christmas!

Footnotes:

[1] AMAT i de CORTADA, Rafel d´, Baró de Maldà, Calaix de Sastre (Barcelona: Curial, 1987), vol. I.

[2] FARAUDO de Saint-Germain, Luís, “Libre de totes maneres de confits. Un tratado cuatrocentista de arte de dulcería”, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, XIX (1946), p.106.