“Grandmas' cooking is magical and it was so delicious because they put love into it, because they made it with love.”
There are few expressions in the world of gastronomy and traditional cuisine that are more boring and full of poison than this one.
I have no idea if your grandmothers loved each of you more or less, nor do I know if they were the kind who did tricks with casseroles or if they were rather clumsy with stews —yes, the unicorn of the grandmother who cooks
so-so
exists—, what I do know is that mastery of the technique is achieved with practice and that, if their grandmothers had some kind of skill with frying pans, this was due more to their quality as old women than to the amount of love they felt.
I don't know people drier and harsher than my grandmothers.
They cooked like angels, but both María and Juanita were abrupt women—hard, cold, tailored to the size of a work uniform called an apron or a lady's gown and a life in the kitchen as a job—more than soft beings of light. filled with love.
They, like the vast majority of women of their generation, were tired of having to cook every holy day.
Look them straight in the eye, whether in their corporeal or spectral form, and ask them about their love for cooking.
I can hear the laughter.
More information
Against grandma's kitchen
The division of labor that occurred by default in the type of commercial company that is the classic marriage—a company that is founded by the union of two family clans with the objective of ensuring procreation as a means of keeping the heritage alive by linking it to a last name—assigned to man everything related to property, money, and the world beyond the portal.
To the woman, the care, the fertility and all the tasks that remained behind closed doors.
Of all of them, the kitchen was queen.
I think we forget that we call them grandmothers because we all knew them as grandchildren, after their category of kitchen workers gave way to that of retirees.
We never saw them cooking when they were twenty years old.
We have never seen them fill a soufflé
with love
without knowing how to whip egg whites until stiff.
We didn't try their first croquettes, but rather their last ones.
They loved us as and as much as they could and wanted.
They demonstrated it in the best way they knew how, that before, emotional education was not as much on the agenda as it is today.
When they cooked our favorite dishes for us, they did it (perhaps) with love: but what turned those pickled anchovies or those gargantuan trays of cannelloni into works of art was not that love, but the years they had been practicing daily.
Between their croquettes or their onion pulpitos and ours there is not a great recipe far away, but rather a lifetime of work;
the mastery achieved based on daily hours of practice, the same ten thousand hours that sociologists and neuroscientists, from Richard Sennett to Daniel Levitin, maintain are necessary to achieve excellence in any craft, be it that of a cabinetmaker, that of a composer, that of a basketball player, that of a fiction writer, that of an ice skater, that of a stock market investor or that of a legendary bank robber.
Observe their raptor's claws sculpted from years of wringing chicken necks, passing cloths swollen with lye over the marble, or preparing firewood for the economical kitchen;
Look at those hands with powerful thumbs like chicken thighs muscled by the repetitive gesture of peeling potatoes with a small knife.
Hands that are bundles of fingers twisted by arthritis, armored with calluses and calluses.
Hands of workers.
Do you know what a callus is?
The calluses and calluses that form on the hands of those who use them professionally are a technological advance in the body, a technical improvement resulting from specialization.
Intuition can lead us to think that the thickening of the skin reduces sensitivity to touch, when in reality the opposite is true.
Calluses protect the nerve endings in the hand from pain, making manipulation safer.
At the same time, they increase the sensitivity of the fingertips, making them better able to detect small grooves, crevices and reliefs: the function of the callus on the hand is comparable to that of the
zoom
on a camera.
The laurels of merit due to the cooking of our grandmothers are not those of the capacity for dedication, devotion or the amount of added affection, but rather those of recognition of the skill of the great craftsman.
It's time to say enough to so much corniness, which is nothing more than disguised contempt.
Yes, today is also the day of those working women.
Honor and glory.
You can follow EL PAÍS Gastro
on
and
X.