Abstract
Reviewed by: Jodi Campbell, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Joining books on New Orleans, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities featured in the Big City Food Biographies series, this history of the gastronomic culture of Madrid is told from the perspective of a poet and food studies scholar who grew up in Spain. The books in this series seek to convey a sense of the unique food culture of each city through its history and its best-known dishes and eateries.
Moreno begins her historical tour with the legacy of Carthage, Rome and the Visigoths in Spain, dwelling with greater attention on the Muslim and Jewish cultures of the medieval period and their contributions of ingredients such as rice, eggplant, almonds, lamb, saffron and citrus fruits. (She does not, however, discuss the impact of the Catholic Church and the role of feasting and fasting in the liturgical calendar.) Once Madrid came into its own as a city in the sixteenth century, Moreno captures its particular culinary personality in the rough fare of taverns, the bean and meat stews of ordinary households, and the multi-course feasts in the palace. The acquisition of an overseas empire meant an influx of previously unknown foods and spices, and Moreno explains how corn, potatoes, cocoa, tomatoes, chilies and paprika were gradually incorporated into Spanish cuisine. The shift from the Habsburg to the Bourbon dynasty was accompanied by a transition from heavy spices and strong flavours towards greater simplicity and gentler seasonings, as well as from prodigious banquets to an emphasis on quality and sophistication. The city’s gastronomic culture in the nineteenth century was shaped by simultaneous yet conflicting desires to follow the modernizing influence of the French and to develop a ‘true Spanish cuisine’ (61).
Food culture is always part of a broader social and political context, and Moreno’s descriptions of Madrid cafés as cultural centres of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the Spanish Civil War told through the lens of the food shortages suffered by a city under siege, are particularly compelling. The Franco regime emphasized women’s duties in the kitchen, particularly during the economically dire years of the 1940s and 1950s, when rationing and food shortages were the norm. The rise of tourism in the 1960s led to developments such as the menú del día, meant to give foreigners an easy set of traditional meal choices at a fixed price, and now a staple of restaurants across the country.
This historical overview is followed by chapters on particular themes in Madrid’s culinary history. One covers the history of markets and retail, from medieval marketplaces and street vendors to the arrival of supermarkets in the 1990s. The convenience of supermarket shopping came at a high price for the traditional market, though Moreno notes the city’s recent efforts to rehabilitate the municipal markets of the 1870s, in the hope of attracting both local shoppers and tourists with fresh ingredients and prepared foods alongside community meetings and art exhibits.
The chapter on historic cookbooks is particularly illuminating (logically so, since this is one of the author’s particular scholarly interests). Moreno shows how recipe collections reveal shifts in flavour preferences, the ritual and ceremony of food preparation, details of court etiquette, the frugal elements of monastic cuisine, and the changing roles of men and women as authors of cookbooks and preparers of food. The chapters on restaurants and cafés and on the traditional dishes of Madrid sometimes repeat material from earlier parts of the book, but they include mouth-watering descriptions of dishes such as garlic shrimp, ox tails and rice pudding, along with recipes to let the reader reproduce these at home.
While her focus is on Madrid, Moreno frequently incorporates descriptions of food culture from other parts of Spain. These include the early cookbooks produced in Catalonia and the new food movement of the twenty-first century featuring molecular gastronomy and fusion cuisine, more characteristic of Catalonia and the Basque country than Madrid. She could perhaps have given greater attention to the role of international immigration, which has transformed the city and its culinary offerings over the past two decades.
This book (and indeed the series) occupies a curious position between guidebook and academic study. Scholars of Spain and food historians will not find any new or groundbreaking arguments, but all readers will enjoy its thorough and well-balanced history and engaging anecdotes. The book seems principally oriented towards a popular audience, with its moments of breathless enthusiasm – the phrases ‘incredibly tasty’, ‘heavenly bites’, ‘intensely flavorful’ and ‘wonderfully bonding experience’ all occur within a single paragraph about tapas (2). However, the physical presentation is rather at odds with this goal, with its hard cover and murky black-and-white photographs. The photographs of historic restaurants, marketplaces and dishes would have been better served by colour reproductions, and a softcover edition would be better suited to stuffing the book in one’s travel bag or dog-earing favourite recipes for the kitchen.