—How do you do it, grandmother?
—So how am I going to do it?
As usual!
—And what is it like, “as always”?
—Oh, daughter, and what do I know.
Yes, every time I do it differently.
Since I started studying at hospitality school and dove headfirst into the profession of cook, one of my obsessions was learning how to cook fricandó like my grandmother did.
Fricandó is a typical recipe from Catalan cuisine that is based on flouring and frying thin beef steaks and then, in that same pot and on that same fat with remains of toasted flour and meat juices, making a very caramelized onion sauté. cut very thinly, washed down with a small glass of stale wine or cognac destined to evaporate.
The addition of one or two grated ripe tomatoes is optional, and is decided in the heat of the moment, depending on whether the onion asks for a little extra moisture that day to continue caramelizing without burning, or not.
To that brown paste is added a handful of dehydrated senderuelas, which will have soaked for an hour in warm water.
This set, well stirred, will finally house the meat and the soaking water of the mushrooms, now transmuted into broth with the aroma of oaks and holm oaks, to make chup-chup in the casserole, on the fire or in the oven, the time It takes time for the meat to be tender and for the juice to be bound by the flour.
That's a fricandó.
Little more and little less.
More information
The magic of grandmothers' cooking was not love but work
But that fricandó that I just explained does not exist;
It is real only in the intellectual sphere, in the world of ideas.
No one has ever cooked it exactly as written.
No one has ever put it in their mouth.
No one can know what it tastes like.
The only thing we have proven, in any case, are the concrete embodiments of that idea of fricandó which, even though they reflect the same written formula, are all different.
In each doorway, in the hands of each cook, according to each mood, according to the result of each visit to the market, they take on a different brightness and nuances.
Every time my grandmother started cooking fricandó, she did it with a different cut of beef, based on what was on sale or good looking on the butcher counter that day.
Sometimes she would add a little chopped garlic to the sauce, at the last minute, because she felt like it or for no apparent reason.
If there was no stale wine, she could add a culin of vermouth or a splash of sweet dessert wine.
Sometimes she didn't add wine of any kind because she would get out of her head and forget it.
When her fricandó became a legendary symphonic rock opera, it was when she made it in the clay pot in which she had just prepared bitter orange jam, without having washed it.
That fricandó was a spear to the heart.
And I never, ever saw her cook it according to written instructions.
It is likely that, at some point, years ago, she did ask her friends for advice and take notes or use other people's notes as a starting point.
These friends could be corporeal—neighbors, relatives, friends—or ethereal voices that emanated from the ink lines of the recipe books that accompanied the women of her generation in the transition from the maternal home to the family home.
Simone Ortega was there with her
1,080 cooking recipes
of hers, or Victoria Serra, with her
Sabores
De ella.
These women ousted the publications of the Women's Section of the Falange in homes and, instead of being speakers of the regime, as the vast majority of domestic cookbooks had been until then, for the first time, their voice of culinary authority was the from another married woman who shared recipes after having executed them in her own home.
With that voice, the reader could feel in tune: with the authors of those books, our grandmothers established an intimate relationship.
It was a conversation between equals.
These recipes served as a solid starting point, but at some point, the reader abandoned the activity of repeating verbatim, understood the substance and mechanisms of the issue, incorporated them, and the book left the shelf or the first drawer. from the kitchen and went to the living room shelf.
The fricandó virus—now I return to my grandmother—had transformed her body and her mind, the recipe was no longer outside, but inside her, ready to manifest itself freely through the personality of the hostess who hosted her, of the products that she got that day, the tastes and preferences of her diners, and the time she had available.
A recipe, like a virus, is an entity at the limit of what can be considered a living being;
a mass of loose pieces of genetic material that need a host to join to survive and infect, to expand.
Right now I type the word “fricandó” into Google and I get 242,000 results in 0.27 seconds.
Every year, dozens of new recipe books are published in this country.
I wonder if so many recipes are necessary, and if we are giving any of them enough time to become infected, get sick, transform and become useful to our specific circumstances: a tool of freedom, not guidelines to follow.
A good recipe not only makes a good dish.
If we allow it, if we give it time to sink in and settle, it will completely transform our way of cooking and seeing the world, it will make us grow as cooks, and then its possible ramifications and variants will be created by us.
A good recipe makes you more capable of saying “enough” rather than continuing to obey other people's instructions.
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