Las recetas del hambre

The experience of the "years of hunger" in Spain has been a matter hardly addressed. The collective memory has been determined for decades, too, to forget those times of scarcity and failure. Deny hunger for fear of shame, fear. This book aims to contribute to the rediscovery of what has been one of the most dramatic events in the recent history of our country with a perspective of pride: we endured there, we survived there. From the recovery of fragments of lives that are embedded in particular ways of cooking -the recipes of the years of hunger-, a renewed look is offered at that time when men and women decided not to give up and light the fire to cook the lack. A description of the culinary forms with which the Spanish men and women of that time faced the fact of having to feed their loved ones with few and even less varied foods is offered. Making use of ingenuity and imagination, the recipes that appear here are used not as guides for cooking, but as a means to remember and approach the daily experience of those times of hunger, fear and resistance. These pages are an invitation to sit at many of those tables and listen to what the dishes were shouting in the midst of that time of silence: the fears for the future, the efforts to feed the children, the goldsmith's skill of those who strove to get ahead in times of rationing and scarcity. With the help of the accompanying illustrations, the reader will find himself before a selection of dishes that move away from a traditional recipe book, offering something much richer: intimate, small, everyday stories of struggle. Future promises in times of deserted cupboards.