The last forty years have brought about an unprecedented change in Spanish cuisine, which in this time has been updated and has gone through one of its most brilliant historical stages. These are some of the books that help to understand this phenomenon and to have a historical perspective to understand where we come from, but also where we are going:
In 1976, the publisher Robert Laffont launched in France a collection of books dedicated to the main authors of Nouvelle Cuisine: Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Oliver, Blanc, Vergé... The series was an unprecedented success, 28 volumes that today are sought after by gourmets and bibliophiles and which continued to appear until 1992.
In Spain they were published at the beginning of the 80s by the Grijalbo publishing house. The most successful volume was La Cocina Succulenta (1983), which together with La Cocina de la Esbeltez, presented for the first time to the Spanish public the gastronomic philosophy of Michel Guérard and was a first approach to the French gastronomic revolution for hundreds of cooks south of the Pyrenees.
Grijalbo interrupted the collection after publishing only four volumes, but some others, such as those dedicated to Girardert or Pierre Wynnants would later appear in other publishers.
In 1991 the chef Karlos Arguiñano faced the challenge of giving the television replacement to Con Las Manos en la Masa, the cooking show presented by Elena Santonja that had been a success for 7 years.
The Basque chef's space, entitled El Menú de Cada Día, was so successful that the following year the first of the more than 40 books that Arguiñano has published to date was published under the same title. The work sold more than 1,600,000 copies, becoming the second best-selling cookbook in history in Spain, only behind 1080 Cooking Recipes, by Simone Ortega.
Arguiñano's success lies in having found a close and enjoyable language to communicate cooking, but, above all, in having done so without giving up a gastronomic technique and professional rigor that, thanks to his hand, entered hundreds of thousands for the first time. of Spanish homes.
If there is a book that changed everything, surely it was this one. On the one hand, he introduced the general public to the kitchen of a restaurant that three years earlier had recovered its second Michelin star and whose chef, Ferran Adrià, had just won the National Gastronomy Award.
However, the decisive weight of this book goes much further, exposing for the first time the method of a restaurant and a team that would revolutionize the way of understanding cooking in the following decades and that they did so from a radical vindication of the mediterraneanity
El Sabor del Mediterráneo is a cookbook, but it is also a book on gastronomic philosophy and, above all, three decades later it continues to be an essential element for understanding what happened in Spanish cuisine in those years.
In 1999, five years after El Racó de Can Fabes became the first Catalan restaurant to be recognized with three stars by the Michelin Guide, Santi Santamaría published his first book, a work that, seen from the perspective of almost 25 years, it has become a valuable legacy and an open door to the way of understanding the profession of this chef.
Santamaría's was a kitchen of the territory, of culture, naturalist in a certain sense, pioneer of a line of gastronomic work whose legacy can still be traced today. All of this, the bases of a kitchen understood as an exercise in interpreting an environment and a culture, can be found in this founding book.
If 1993 meant, with La Cocina del Mediterráneo, the start of a stage, 1999 became, thanks to this book, the definitive confirmation of that movement.
For the first time there was a certain historical perspective to address what had happened in Catalan cuisine since the mid-1980s, everything that had been taking shape throughout the 1990s and which had shaped a gastronomic ecosystem that became the spearhead of contemporary cuisine.
If until now cookbooks or gastronomic essays of a more generic nature had proliferated, that of Arenós became the foundational stone of works on the history of contemporary cooking in Spain and continues to be, for a quarter of a century more late, an essential work.
In 2004 Charlie Trotter was one of the best-known cooks in the United States. With two Michelin stars, his Chicago restaurant was considered among the best in the country (it would reach 30th place on the 50 Best list at a time when American restaurants were a rarity in these international rankings).
After having published books dedicated to cooking shellfish or game, Trotter revolutionized the American culinary scene with this book, Raw, dedicated not only to vegetable cooking, but to vegetable cooking without fire; to the kitchen without a kitchen, according to some.
With this work, Trotter, who died prematurely in 2013, was ahead of his time by putting on the table debates that two decades later are central to gastronomic discourse and proposing an exercise in style that had much more depth than was imagined at the time.
Michael Pollan is one of the great thinkers of contemporary gastronomy and his 2006 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is perhaps his most influential work to date.
Published in Spain in 2011 by IXO (responsible for other little jewels such as the Botanical Dictionary for Cooks or La Botánica del Deseo) it is, perhaps, the first work published in our country that had a certain depth when it came to raising questions about sustainability, meat consumption, production conditions or daily diet.
With an interesting prologue by Andoni Luis Aduriz, the book raises uncomfortable questions that affect the restaurant, but above all it anticipates the concerns, doubts and discomforts of contemporary diners.
Insiders of the world of wine, hunters of snapshots for social networks, supposedly deep speeches and all kinds of snobbery related to gastronomy are analyzed with a bit of bad temper, a good sense of humor and a lot of knowledge of the sector by the journalist David Remartínez.
La Puta Gastronomía is, perhaps, the dose of demystification that we needed, the mirror that gives us back the complete image, including the details that we don't always like to admit; a work capable of analyzing the development of Spanish cuisine in recent years without forgetting everything around it, including collateral damage.
