Spanish Culture, Literature, and Cuisine: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Food Writing

If you think the following confession twee, don’t laugh. What I am going to tell you es verdad: My third book on health, The Iberian Table: Healthy Cooking Secrets From The Land Of Longevity – Introduction To The Spanish Mediterranean Diet, sprang from a love described by Pablo Neruda in “Sonnet XVll” as “The plant that doesn’t flower and carries hidden within itself the light of those flowers.”

Ernest Hemingway found the light of those flowers in Spain. Hemingway’s Spain: Imagining the Spanish World says Hemingway called Spain “the country that I loved more than any other except my own” and notes that “His forty year fascination with Spain provided setting for major works from each decade of his career.”

(How to Break Into Freelance Food Writing.)

Washington Irving went to Spain expecting to make translations of documents for a biography of Christopher Columbus but instead found his artistic spirit “in poor, wild, legendary, proud-spirited, romantic Spain where the old magnificent barbaric spirit still contends.” With the light of those flowers, Irving went on to produce his best work in four books that he had no idea he would write.

Truman Capote spent three summers in Palamós, in the Province of Girona, a simple fishing town offering foods from the Mediterranean Sea and the antediluvian forests of the Pyrenees. I imagine Capote eating the best meals of his life there. He certainly wrote the best book of his life there: In Cold Blood—a breakthrough in nonfiction novel writing.

The benefits of Spain’s Mediterranean diet, tied to her long life-span, had never been fully explored. I thought, why can’t a book about the secrets of longevity reflect the same creative spirit that lit up Capote, Hemingway, and Irving, while at the same time presenting recipes and offering breakthrough information on health?

Inspired by the creative power that embodies Spain, I knew The Iberian Table had to take a fresh form of culinary book writing. I blend literary chapters that bring to life Spanish culture with my own travels and adventures; well-researched history expositions with health and nutrition passages, and both narrative and conventional recipe presentation. My ‘hidden light’ drove a multidisciplinary approach that harkens back to the culinary writing lineage of writers like Richard Olney, Ruth Reichel, and Alice Waters (more on them later.)

On a particular trip to Spain, I had arrived in the north as Neruda described, “a plant with no flowers.” A fine artist (I paint as well as write) always lured by invention and newness, something within me was freed during this trip. On the flight home, I took my Moleskine and pen from my bag and began an outpouring that would last until this day. And beyond.

The very next morning, a manuscript that I had begun serious work on before the trip was put aside, never to be picked up again. Instead, through the next 10-plus years, there would be research into delightful subjects including anthropology, geography (food writing is geographical), culinary history, Spanish literature, and of course, the health benefits of life-extending foods such as extra virgin olive oil, including the breakthrough work of researcher Dr. Ramón Estruch, whose dramatic findings were published on the cover of the New York Times while I was writing. (Estruch’s PREDIMED research is at the core of my book.) There would be explorations into legends. My voice sometimes took on gossipy, confiding tones (I would discover that literary-minded cooks know that every recipe comes with a story, and Spain has plenty).

I was so immersed in my subject that, as I wrote, I naturally fell into magic realism. I was driven to bring the reader with me to Spain. At a particular moment, I tell my reader “Do bring your sunglasses. Barcelona can be a very sunny place.” I tour Barcelona’s Boqueria Market with them, talking about cooking and health and sharing recipes in an informal way as we ‘discuss’ the history of the market and interact with its vendors. During the experience of writing this book my sense of place was very real to me.

When I began The Iberian Table, I also started writing a collection of short stories to which I initially gave little thought. But, I had much duende (passion and inspiration). And so, as I wrote The Iberian Table, Basque to Barcelona!… and Stories Along the Way also unfurled.

Those flowers!

Writing historical fiction welcomed me to explore the idea that food and eating represents the core of our lives and our psyches. I developed characters who explore their relationships with food and thereby the world. What’s more, gastronomy becomes a code in these stories, symbolizing life and death.

After Spain, I consider food in a deeper way. I observe human nature and humankind’s relationship with food. This was the culinary writing I strove to achieve in The Iberian Table—with qualities connected to vintage cookbooks and the culinary memoir. Voice matters. My recipes had to be crafted with clarity but also sensuousness.

With the advent of The Food Network in 1993, ‘quick takes’ reshaped an entire generation’s experiences with food writing and cookbooks. YouTube and TikTok goes further. Food Porn? Whatever happened to great culinary writing where authors chose words with care, reflecting a love for English and its usage? Now we have two generations who think they need a picture for everything.

Richard Olney’s contributions as a food writer/Chef gives me more duende. Olney, an American from the Midwest, fell in love with the French countryside. In his intriguing books, which define old school cookbooks—excellent, clear, lyrical descriptions of his recipes are enough, no photos necessary. Discussions about culture and place also reign. This is geographical food writing.

I also find duende in the work of M.F. K. Fischer, Constance Gray, Colman Andrews, Paula Wolfert, Ruth Reichel, and Alice Waters. Julia Child, in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, made recipe organization and cookbook creation an art. But let us go back even earlier; this tradition of intellectual food writing was first elevated by the French philosopher Brillat-Savarin in the 1800s, but I like to acknowledge that Europe’s earliest cookbook is Catalan—Llibre de Sent Sovi (1324).

It has been meaningful to visit with you, fellow writers. I wish each of you a trip to Spain, where perhaps you, too, will find your inventive spirit. But if you ‘travel’ in your own study—through your books on literature, science, anthropology, and geography, as Emily Dickinson did right in her home in Amherst—and never step foot in Spain, my wish for you, like Dickinson, is that your journey is deep and true. Every morning, before I wrote The Iberian Table, I read an Emily Dickinson poem. I still do. 

Check out Robin Keuneke’s The Iberian Table here:

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