Isabel's recipe for coca de llardons, Empar Moliner's mother-in-law: a proud Catalan who came from Andalusia

Today's SÀvia kitchen recipe is a coca de llardons, the coca for Saint John's Eve, that any good-for-nothing like myself can make. It's a "dish" from my mother-in-law, Malagan by birth, Catalan by adoption, who cooks very interesting dishes based on both worlds: the "cod salad with orange", "sardines on a skewer", "salmorejo" from her native Andalusia, but also fricandó, meatballs with cuttlefish, or this coca de llardons from her adult life in Catalonia. My mother-in-law was one of the grandmothers who never missed an independence demonstration. She always says she "misses those years" and that "now we are like asleep".

I get a little boastful saying that I like people who cook with love for others. Cooking is nothing more than that. Cooking is only that. "I like being told that a dish turned out well, but I suppose everyone does," she says.

Isabel is the only grandmother we have in the family and she has always loved to cook. She has managed to pass on her passion to her children. Anyone, whoever they may be, will always remember some "special" meals from their childhood (those festive cannelloni...) but above all, above all, they will remember the "normal" weekday meals. That omelette in the evenings, that thyme soup... Isabel's children have a funny memory of their informal Sunday night dinners: their mother used to make them bikinis (that sandwich with its own name in Catalonia) which she cut into multiple triangles. Both siblings would eat them, already in their pajamas, accompanied by lemon Fanta. They often talk, too, about "sick rice". That rice that the grown-ups at home make you when "your stomach is upset".

Despite being an "independentista", Isabel, linguistically, is a curious case. She speaks Catalan to the pets she has. She has two cats and with them (and with a parrot she had, now deceased) she uses the language of Verdaguer. The verb "passa!", which in Catalan we use to scold pets at their home, is of normative use. With her only granddaughter, when she was little, she also spoke to her in Catalan. Now that she has grown up, she no longer does. She arrived in Catalonia at eighteen years old and found work at the Montesa motorcycle factory. She got married. Her mother-in-law, who lived in the apartment below theirs, in Barcelona, and who was known as "la yaya de abajo", says she cooked very badly.

Coca de llardons, like most Catalan dishes, is about making the most of ingredients. The puff pastry we use now, bought at the supermarket, is a fairly modern invention. The coca was made with bread that "hadn't risen". The pork cracklings were leftovers from the slaughter. Isabel, for Saint John's Day, always makes this coca or the fruit one, which needs more time, because it's made with brioche and has to be done a day in advance.

Recipe for coca de llardons made by Isabel, explained by herself.

Ingredients

• A puff pastry bought at the shop, which also comes with baking paper included. We keep it in the fridge until it's time to take it out.
• 80 grams of Catalan pine nuts, “which are better”. It will be the most expensive part of the recipe.
• 150 grams of lardons. You can buy them loose in any shop in the square or market. They are also sold packaged in supermarkets.
• One hour.
• Sugar.

Let's start the recipe

• We put the pine nuts in water “So they don't burn when I put them on the fire”.
• Some people make puff pastry "double". They put pine nuts on top and cover them with another puff pastry. Our cake will be "uncovered".
• We chop the bacon with the mini-chopper. Isabel does it in two batches.
• We turn on the oven. But first... We take out the pots we always keep in there. We set it to 200, "top and bottom". "In principle, we will put the fan on, if our oven has one, and we will leave it for ten or twelve minutes on the bottom rack. And then we will move it up one shelf, so the pine nuts toast. Then we will take off the fan".
• Let's leave the egg.
• We take the puff pastry out of the fridge. It has to stay there until the last minute, because it is made with butter and would melt “and could not be worked well”.
• We unroll it. We leave the paper underneath. We prick it with a fork, because we don't want it to rise. We don't miss a single spot to prick. “This is the most important job we have to do”.
• We paint it with egg. The more it is painted, the more it will shine and the more beautiful it will be. It will have "lustre".
• With a spoon we add the bacon bits. All over, at the tips too, so that everyone gets some. “In some shops they don’t always put so many bacon bits. Nowhere like home”.
• We drain the pine nuts. We use the water to water a plant. We dry them.
• And Isabel's touch. We add four candied almonds. “It's not in the recipe, but I really like it this way”.
• Here we add the sugar. But first, at the tips, we make a small ornament, like a little wrinkle, so it doesn't look so "prepared". "A lot of sugar, huh? Because the dough doesn't have sugar. It will be like caramel".
• We put it down ten minutes. To not get distracted, we will set the clock.
• After ten minutes, we check if it's browned underneath. If necessary, we wait a few more minutes.

“For me, cooking is like a hobby,” she says. “I put on the radio or I put on music and I make things. The other day I made some sweets from Granada, which are called Piononos. They have that name because of Pope Pius IX.” It’s like the gypsy arm [a type of rolled cake] from here, but in miniature,” she explains to us. And she’s right. A pastry chef, named Ceferino, created them to honor this pope, who was known in Italian as Pio Nono. I don’t know if any of the wise women of ARA [a Catalan newspaper] feel up to making a cake for Leo XIV, which should be called Mogolló, in honor of the rhyme that has become famous these days of the papal visit. In any case, my mother-in-law has an idea for a cake (not in honor of the Pope, but of her granddaughter): “I would like to make one, which I have in mind, that would be puff pastry, with a strip that goes around it. Punctured in the middle, so it wouldn't rise, and the border, as if making an edge. Filled with cream and with red fruits. My granddaughter would love that. I haven’t seen it anywhere. And I’m not saying it doesn’t exist”.

And here we are, while we wait for the cake to bake, she receives a notification. “Ooh! This is a group I’m in. I’ll mute it now!”. And as she does so, she explains to us that it’s a friendship chat, and that she’s made many friends there. We say hello for an hour a day, and that’s it, we’re busy. We talk about recipes, about dinners... And there are also those who hook up. Not me! When one is missing, when they leave, I say: “Ooh... They’ve fallen in love!’ But I also say: “It won’t take long, because here, in the chat, love has an expiry date, like yogurts. The other day, one tells me: “I’ve broken up with so-and-so”. And I tell her: “See, it has an expiry date?” I don’t allow private conversations!”

And she laughs and is interrupted, because her granddaughter has arrived, who is coming from university, and she’s here to watch the recording.

“All mothers start with sweets,” she reflects. “They make muffins... With my children, we used to do the multiplication tables and sing them while we made muffins. All three of us singing the tables, while we made flans, pudding...”

In the family, we have a joke based on her and her way of cooking. When we were recommended to have a survival kit, we said we didn’t need one, because she has food in the fridge and pantry for six years. “Yes, yes. I’ve calculated that I could stay here for a month without leaving the house,” she says, quite pleased.

And here we are, the cake is ready.

• We take the cake out, turn off the oven, being careful not to burn ourselves. It’s time to taste.

While Isabel goes to get a bottle of rosé cava, which she has in the fridge, I ask her how old she is. “I don't remember!”, she exclaims, jokingly. “I'll take a couple off, not that many”.

She smiles as she offers a slice of cake to the whole team that has come to film. “My mother had six siblings, and only the father worked. My mother used to tell me that during the post-war period they would take cauliflower leaves and make soups from those leaves. I don't throw anything away, from stale bread I make 'pan de Calatrava', as they call it, or milk soups”.

She lived, for family reasons, one of the episodes that most impresses me about the Civil War. We have heard many horrible episodes of the Spanish Civil War told (the Badajoz massacre, with civilians shot in the bullring, the concentration camps, the Battle of the Ebro...), but when someone tells it to you from so far down, in the first person, with the purity of the witness's words, you are moved. Of the episode she tells me about, Andalusians call it the Desbandá.

“My grandparents, with six children... during the war... ‘Come on, we’re going to Almeria,’ they said. Because everyone did it, for no known reason.”

150,000 civilians, like her grandparents and their six children, left, walking, from Malaga towards Almeria, fleeing from something and looking for something else, with no destination, no plan. “As if there were no war in Almeria...”, murmurs Isabel. During this exodus, in 1937, they were bombed from the sea and air by Franco’s allies. “My uncle Antonio, who was the eldest of the six siblings, and must have been about ten years old, got lost on the way... And he appeared at 14, after the war, in France. He had been given up for dead and one day someone came to the house asking for Antonio’s parents.”

I imagine these parents, leaving with six children, arriving at a place, equally unsafe, with nothing and with five. Mourning the lost child. And suddenly recovering him years later. “They had taken him in, he explained that he had parents and this family, who had taken him in, returned him home.”

I ask Isabel what we can learn from those years, from that experience.

“The best thing is that nothing like this ever happens again. Because now I’m talking to you about the father’s family, but the mother’s... They lived in Alaurín el Grande, they had a butcher shop, they were well-off. And during the war, one night they came to look for a son, they took him away and killed him. And the next night, the other son. And they killed him too. And these are the ones we now say are on the roadside. And I don’t know if young people, the youth, are very interested in that war. I remember my mother, after the war had passed. My mother used to buy oil — I close my eyes and I can still see the shop — and she would buy a peseta’s worth. And it was a tiny bit of oil, nothing. And she would say, ‘Give me three slices of mortadella for my daughter.’ And she wouldn’t eat any. I ate mortadella and my parents had coffee, which was malt, and with soaked bread. That was their dinner. But now, we’ll toast with cava and taste the cake. I hope you make it.”