That daily black bread

What the poor call hunger, the rich call appetite.

In both cases, that sensation is the best cooking recipe, the only one that serves to speed up the dish.

When you have lived for many years, as is the case with Miguel, sometimes at after-meals, comments are made about the hunger that happened in the postwar period.

Many still have in mind the image of Carpanta, that comic book character who dreamed of roast chickens.

Each diner begins to recount the miseries and pleasures of that time, and hearing how they speak makes it seem that, in fact, the Spaniards were divided into two: those who went to bed hungry every night with their stomachs full of cobwebs, and those who they had to digest with the help of bicarbonate.

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In any gastronomic biography, the deepest thing that exists is bread.

Miguel keeps in his memory the string of beggars who in those years knocked on the door of the house every day to ask for alms for the love of God, and his mother, from the pantry where she may have been sifting flour with a very fine sieve , I told him: "Go out and give him a piece of bread for charity."

When begging for alms, some beggars prayed, others sang, others wept, others were very humiliated, but some had not lost their dignity and stretched out a scrawny arm like defeated knights in a distant and unequal battle.

Miguel believed that the crust that he had in his hand was capable of unleashing all the feelings of the soul.

That is why when the bread fell to the ground, it had to be kissed, something that poor and rich people did then,

fed up and hungry;

it would be because the Church had said that the bread was the body of Christ, composed of very fine flour;

the bran was given to pigs and chickens, although today it is sold as a delicacy in bakeries.

If it is true that you are what you have eaten, Miguel has a sense of nature linked to all the wild fruits that he was picking up and put in his mouth on his marten forays through the mountains before his use of reason, prickly pears , blackberries, berries, hearts of palm, rowanberries, wild strawberries, some hearty roots, food he shared with the wild boars.

But the time came when he learned to eat civilized at the table after blessing the food that the Lord had given them, in the same way that the first Cato learned to read at his desk, whose letters resembled a forest in which he was so easy to get lost like dreaming.

The first readings overlap with the first flavors and in some cases they constitute a unique pleasure that is kept forever in the memory.

At seven years the brain is invested with the cortex.

To celebrate the arrival of the use of reason, which already makes you guilty for all intents and purposes, the Church has established the sacrament of First Communion, in which God melts on the palate with the taste of cakes and chocolate cakes. .

Seated at the banquet of guests, Miguel, dressed as a sailor, began the adventure of living in which the first books were the same substance, the obedience that the pencils had at hand when writing the first letters in the notebook and the sweets that came to the table from God with the Eucharist.

Miguel was aware a long time ago that reading and eating are two ways of eating and also of surviving.

It is a function that goes from the stomach to the brain and he couldn't say what is more organic, more intimate, more necessary on that round trip.

People change before gods than food.

The taste of food that has been tasted in childhood always remains a category of the mind and it is extremely difficult to eradicate it.

In New York's Little Italy, which sentiment is deeper, devotion to the Madonna and God Himself or spaghetti pasta or macaroni?

Perhaps those layers of different flavors that were in the pantry at home, the image of the quince jam that grandmother made, the mist of oil that came out of the cellar,

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