Taste of Barcelona

H. Rosi Song is Professor of Spanish at Bryn Mawr College and author of Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain (2016), and co-editor of the volumes Traces of Contamination: Unearthing Francoist Legacy in Contemporary Spanish Discourse (2005) and Towards a Cultural Archive of la Movida: Back to the Future (2013). She has published widely on contemporary Spanish culture, film and literature. Her frequent travels to Barcelona over almost two decades has have shaped her appreciation and knowledge of Catalan culture and its gastronomic traditions. Anna Riera teaches Food Studies at Universitat Abat Oliba CEU, where she started the graduate program in Gastronomic and Oenological Communication, the first of its kind in Spain. She lectures on Food & Communication at the Universitat de Barcelona. Informed by her travels in South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, she has examined the close relationship between landscape and local food culture. She shared these experiences in her radio program Cuina'm in Onda Cero Catalunya (2006-08). A frequent speaker at gastronomy conferences in Spain, she is a writer for and member of the management staff of the magazine supplement Gourmets published by El Periódico de Catalunya.

Barcelona is one of Spain’s most visited cities. With a culture and language unique from the rest of the country, the metropolis attracts many who are involved in some type of culinary pursuit. Song and Riera richly document the origins of Catalan cooking in this book, delving as far back as the Middle Ages up to the present. They also focus on the rise of such celebrated chefs as Ferran Adrià of the restaurant elBulli, soon to reopen as elBulli 1846. Digging deep into the history of medieval Spain, they examine Muslim influence on both Spanish food and culture, and also how French gastronomy shaped Spanish cuisine. A section on Barcelona's restaurants is included, with a glimpse at their histories and how they contribute to the overall gastronomic landscape of the city. A final chapter provides a sample of traditional Catalan dishes, along with building blocks of this style of cooking, such as allioli or garlic-olive oil sauce. Recipes include rabbit with chocolate sauce, rice with artichokes, and panellets, or Catalan marzipan sweets.

• Big City Food Biographies—Series ForewordAcknowledgments IntroductionChapter 1 At the Top of the Gastronomic World: Nature,Science, FoamChapter 2 Medieval Cooking in CataloniaChapter 3 Cooking Up a NationChapter 4 The Greatest Fresh Markets in the World Chapter 5 Detecting Catalan Cuisine: Following the Trailof Pepe Carvalho Chapter 6 Traditional Catalan Dishes Today NotesBibliography Index