María Nicolau, the savior of the culinary homeland: "Put the pot back in the center"

• Report The haute cuisine that shines in empty Spain: "We flee from the neon lights"

"We forget that if we don't eat we die."

With such a simple approach,

(La Garriga, 1982) launched the presentation in Madrid (A Punto bookstore) of the long-awaited Spanish translation of her

(Ediciones Península), a book whose Catalan version has become less than a year in publishing phenomenon.

"It's been so long since we starved to death...", he continues, making it clear that it's not hard for him to provoke.

The book is born from this personal stupefaction, although she is not a writer but a

(Vilanova de Sau, Barcelona), in addition to doing her thing at Catalunya Ràdio.

Soon, this petite, bony girl ("It's just that I spend a lot"), in a bow tie and cowboy boots, reveals herself to be an impassioned speaker.

Among her skills as a monologist, mixing belligerence with daydreaming, pleading with tenderness.

María knows how to portray: how many can feel reflected in the image of someone who stands in front of her pantry unable to solve the hieroglyph without precise instructions.

Less recipe book and more inventory, she comes to say.

.

She doesn't have a TV, she's a voracious reader: "MFK Fisher is the great unfinished business in Spain because gastronomy has been considered a minor genre for housewives, but she has a total and universal work. She was a contemporary of Faulkner and Hemingway and gives them a thousand kicks. That lady should have the Nobel."

Kitchen or barbarism

operates as a polyhedral reflection, as introduced by Jorge Guitián, gastronomic promoter in charge of the presentation.

We have become accustomed to focusing on the culinary act as something exceptional, playful, aspirational and we forget its deepest base: serving as daily food.

Together with sexuality, it is the physiological function that we have been filling with content.

Cooking is a civilizing factor, it makes us free.

However, when everything seems to be connected to food, we cook poorly or, at all, we don't cook at all.

"I couldn't shut up anymore," declares María, faced with the need for this relief.

"You guys are so much smarter. I'm just asking to raise your head a bit."

Maria NicolauBernardo Diaz

As she raises her fist clutching a wooden spoon (cover image), she points her finger at gastronomic illiteracy.

"

. How we eat shapes the world we live in. We can't feel proud or decide not to influence. That's the revolution, changing things. Cooking has power."

It is worth asking if we are perhaps excessively complacent with the current gastro phenomenon.

"Restaurant cooking and home cooking are two different disciplines, it's not the same hunger," he points out.

"What have been our references in the kitchen for the last twenty years?

."

Disconnection with home and too much production are part of the complaint.

Faced with feeling machine-gunned by perfection, demand and beauty, María advocates relaxing the heroic.

The fact that her speech is not

is not the same as anti-system dissidence: she is showered with praise from critics as the

, and she is blessed by her more media-star and star-studded colleagues such as Joan Roca or, prologue included, almost impossible, David Muñoz.

He does question fashions precooked by the food industry: "Who sponsors our trades? Us or nobody. It hurts you that fishing is lost, what heritage, what traditions, but then you go to the supermarket to buy salmon. Who has seen a salmon going up the rivers of Spain? And you are willing to pay for it!", he bellows about the fish farms.

She is not against cosmopolitanism but against seguidism.

Put the pot back in the center

The shopping list sparks another reprimand:

. "

It has to do with a laziness that, according to the chef, enslaves us and makes us barbaric to the point of

as long as it contains enough sugar.

The excuse of not having time, disassembled in the passage of the soaking beans: "Take ten minutes and put the pot back in the center so that everything makes sense again. The kitchen takes time. She, not you. And if you don't have something, don't put it, that's where creativity begins".

Unstoppable, María envisions a combative future: "There will be more books. For now, it is about spreading the word, passing it by word of mouth. A leader is nobody if nobody follows him. The revolution belongs to the people, not mine, brag about doing cream of zucchini".

As a sniper, she is not afraid of making enemies in a wild world: “No one has ever met me, I have spent half my life eating potatoes and rice, and I got here thanks to my work. I am not afraid and if I stop being me, who will? Is it going to be? When I grow up I want a little house in the country, an orchard and chickens".

The response to 'Kitchen or barbarism' explains that there are those who expect other leaderships.

A society engrossed in

and avocados may also be ripe for alternative messages to take hold.

"If you plant a seed in soil that isn't fertile, it won't take root.

, that can be read skipped like stories, followed like a novel, and with a useful analytical index. When you get to the last page my intention was to say: I know how to cook, I feel capable but I don't know how it happened!"

The first chapter was dedicated to zarzuela, a sentimental homage to the women with whom this cheerful and popular dish will disappear.

One day, some kids went to the restaurant and demanded the presence of the cook.

They wanted to show him the zarzuela that they had all prepared.

"That's winning."

His revolution underway.

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