The history of Spanish cuisine

Since many years two great writers and gourmets, Néstor Luján and Joan Perucho, wrote the book history of Spanish cuisine. In a review they gave to the history of our country's cuisine, not only attending the gastronomic evolution, but making reference to literary texts of different periods of our history.

Here is a brief summary, based on what has this book, the evolution of the kitchen from the Roman era to the modern era.

Little is known about how it guisaba in the Spain prior to the Roman occupation. With the legions of Scipio penetrated in her culinary concepts of Rome and two really fundamental material contributions: garlic and olive oil.

The Romans liked them heavy meals, violent (and the hispanoromanos it is likely that also), and they especiaban without ton nor are their stews.

The Roman cuisine remained, in part, after the invasions; barbarians settled habits and tastes of the romanized country, but wetting of rusticity and Primitivism.

The Arab invasion brought to Spain, not only new ways of cooking, but seasonings from Persia and the India, which were unknown here: sweet orange, saffron, nutmeg, black pepper, sugar cane or sugar. Even the Arab poets were, apparently, gourmets. Ben Al - carving and sang to the artichoke:

Daughter of the water and the land, their abundance is offered, who wait, locked up in a castle of greed.

It seems, by its whiteness and inaccessible refuge, a hidden Greek Virgin among a veil of Spears.

In the same way that the kitchen of "Al - Andalus" must have been influenced and changed by the Mozarabs, it is evident that the Christians of the North suffered with equal intensity the influence of Arab and Mudejar.

In regards to the late Middle Ages, we will say that it was a strange, rough and, at the same time, time sensitive. With regard to the way of eating, Jorge Rubió said that the tables were removable, thing explained since the large banquets were in rooms not intended solely for this purpose. In domestic life ate many times in the kitchen, but also describes dining rooms of bourgeois houses, near the kitchen on the ground floor. The fork was not used during the middle ages and was known only as a curiosity; We usually ate with your fingers.

With the discovery of America, Spanish cuisine is enriched with the potato, tomato, pepper and cocoa.

The enlightened spirit resulted in Spain a desire for renewal. French cuisine triumphed throughout the world, the chefs from the neighboring country had managed to impose his worship art, elaborate, mysterious and, above all, digestive system; they had created a kitchen to the beat of the advances in medical science. Against French cuisine could only resist our cuisine popular, humble and neglected, but fragrant.

The spirit of 'modern' had infiltrated already had long and increasingly took on greater today.

We finally reached the modern cuisine where tradition and imagination go hand in hand in the most renowned kitchens.