Claudia Roden exclusive on the Food of Spain

Claudia Roden reveals the memories and emotions that were unlocked by her latest cookbook
Every dish has a story behind it. Together they form the story of Spain. Photograph: Yadid Levy/Alamy

My grandmother, Eugénie Alphandary, spoke an old Judeo-Spanish language called Ladino with her friends and relatives in Egypt. They were descended from Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Their names – Toledano, Cuenca, Carmona, Leon, Burgos – were a record of the cities their ancestors had come from. Their songs about lovers in Seville and proverbs about meat stews and almond cakes were for me, as I was growing up in Cairo, a mysterious lost paradise, a world of romance and glorious chivalry.
When I travelled to research The Food of Spain, traces of the old Muslim presence – Arabesque carvings, blue and white tiles, a fountain spouting cool water in a scented garden – evoked memories of the Arab and Jewish world I was born in. At the sight of an old minaret I imagined hearing the call to prayer. The way people cooked, the ingredients they put together, their little tricks, their turn of hand, were mysteriously familiar. A word, a taste, a smell, triggered memories I never knew I had.
It took me five years to finish the book. I loved dipping into people's lives and listening to their stories. I understood everything they said and they understood my mix of Italian, French, Ladino and Spanish. It was pure joy to eat seafood paella on the Valencia coast, cocido in a little restaurant in Madrid, suckling pig in Segovia, cuttlefish in their ink in the Basque country, and duck with pears in Barcelona, and to drive through extraordinary landscapes dotted with castles, monasteries and churches.
It was a good time to be researching traditional home cooking. While the Spanish restaurant trade was transforming itself into the world's great centre of gastronomic creativity, there was throughout the country a sense of nostalgia for the old rural life, too quickly swept away by the booming tourist and building trades. During the Franco regime, regional cultures had been suppressed and artisan products discouraged in favour of industrial ones that could feed the population cheaply. When the autonomous communities gained recognition in 1978, people felt free to celebrate their regional heritage and began valuing their local cuisines and products that were sometimes almost lost.
Organisations were formed to preserve their culinary heritage by recording recipes from home cooks and professionals. They toured fishing villages and mountain hamlets. Nine hundred recipes were collected in Catalonia, 600 in the Balearic Islands of Mallorca and Menorca, 900 in Galicia. Producers rushed to obtain Denominaciónes de Origen (DOs) for their wines, their olive oils, their hams, their charcuterie and their cheeses, their beans and honeys, their cows, their pigs, their capons. And a wine-making revolution turned the country into the most promising and exciting place for high-quality wines.
Even avant-garde chefs in the different regions who deconstruct traditional dishes, creating mousses, foams and vapours, told me that they were inspired by their roots and their history, and talked of rescuing old rural traditions and local ingredients.
I asked everyone I met for their favourite recipes, what their parents and grandparents cooked, how they lived and what region they were from. Their recipes mostly belonged to a rural world. Until the middle of the 20th century, 80% of the population lived on the land. Now 80% live in cities. Their parents or grandparents had been small farmers, peasants or landowners. They ate what they grew, kept goats for cheese, chickens for their eggs, and pigs to make jamón and chorizos. They had cooked in the fireplace and in outdoor stone ovens, made chickpea stews and dishes with breadcrumbs and with salt cod. They had caught game birds and rabbits.
Manolo el Sereno, president of the Gastronomic Association of Jaén in Andalusia, with whom I once stayed, told me about life on an estate where he worked from the age of seven. His job was with the mules and he slept with the mules. I helped him make cold almond soup with almonds from his trees. Old men with guitars played and people got up to sing of the pain and joys of working on the land. Now it is immigrant labourers who work the land.
There was never a Spanish haute cuisine. The aristocracy ate French food and the landed nobility who lived in the countryside simply ate a lot of meat: suckling pig, baby lamb, veal and game. They despised vegetables as the food of the peasantry. In the last decades, star chefs of the innovative nueva cocina elevated vegetables to a rank equal to that of foie gras and caviar.
The Catalan writer Josep Pla wrote that cooking is "the landscape in a saucepan". In this land of enormous geographic differences, every region and village has its own special dishes or version of a dish. But the main reason for the great culinary diversity is that the regions were born out of the old medieval kingdoms and each has its own history, cuisine and culture.
The Spanish past is a gripping story. It is also a sensitive subject that arouses strong emotions because, like cooking, it touches on identity. Every dish has a story behind it. Together, they form the story of Spain. The great drama was the invasion by Muslims and the almost 800-year struggle to reconquer the land. For centuries Christians, Muslims and Jews coexisted. The rich variety, the sensual character and complexity of Spanish cooking is in part the result of the intermingling of cultures.
The glorious part of Spain's history is its discovery of the New World, when it was the supreme imperial power. Columbus brought back a whole new set of ingredients, including tomatoes and chilli peppers which, dried and pulverised as pimentón, are the ubiquitous flavourings of Spain.
Andoni Luis Aduriz, the brilliant young chef at Mugaritz in the Basque country (his cuisine has been described as techno-emotional), told me that although he uses science and technology to create his dishes, he wants them to evoke memories and provoke emotions – even bad ones. I wondered what bad ones he meant – poverty, hunger, the Spanish civil war, Franco's regime. "Memories and emotions" is the new mantra of innovative chefs.
I went in search of those memories and emotions that dishes evoke in Spaniards, and on the way I discovered what they meant to me. It is surprising how dishes can appeal directly to the emotions. They say that with gastronomy, as with music, you can touch people and make them cry. When I cook at home in London it is the people who gave me recipes and those with whom I shared meals that I think of. It is images of the flamenco concert in Córdoba, the convent where I stayed in Seville, and the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela that I conjure up. They represent an old civilisation with a fabulous cuisine – delicious and exciting.

Origen información: The Guardian