Maria Rosa's noodle casserole with fish, without time, without measurements, and with a lot of love

Maria Rosa welcomes us to her home in Tossa de Mar, which is full of tourists, accompanied by her family, children, and grandchildren, who will stay to enjoy her meal. “I'll make you some noodles, because they are my grandchildren's favorite dish. They are not noodles in a casserole, they are noodles with fish”. noodles in a casserole, they are noodles with fish”.

With what fish? Whatever is in the fridge or what we have in the freezer. All the wise women in this series, all of them, have the “knack” to improvise a meal. They are foresightful. “My mother used to say that if there are potatoes and eggs in a house, no one has to go without dinner,” says Maria Rosa. Like all of them, she is welcoming, happy and scared to go on ARA explaining something she does naturally and, above all, with a desire to care. We go into the kitchen, and a little imp passes by behind. One of her grandchildren, who came to open the fridge and see “what's cooking”.

“My grandchildren are called Gal·la, Quim, Aritz, then comes... Llibert, then comes Nakor, and then, Blai”. She smiles. "My daughter is called Amaya, and when I baptized her, which was in the cathedral, they didn't let me name her that and they named her Maria. They told me: “Man, being Basque...!” It's been forty-nine years since then..."

The recipe for noodles with fish explained by Maria Rosa:

• Cuttlefish. Or squid, whatever you have. Don't have any? Don't add any.
• Shrimp, prawns... Same thing. Don't have any? Don't add any.
• Saffron.
• Pimentón de la Vera. In other words, paprika, the kind they sell in those little tin pots that we all adore, and that gives it that smoky flavor.
• Oil, salt.
• 800 grams of hollow-less noodles.
• Grated tomato, not much, with garlic and parsley.
• Broth. In this case, of hen.

Let's start:

“I bought the squid yesterday, but I've frozen it for safety. Let's see if I can get these from ARA!” We all laugh when she says it. “Think we'd make the front page, huh? «Lethal poisoning with Cuina sÀvia»”.

“Let's heat the oil. And the first thing we'll throw in are the prawns, the langoustines... Whatever you have, because if you only have squid, you can also do it with squid. I'll add the cuttlefish later, because sometimes it splashes.

The fish stock is made with hen, because the shopkeeper told me: «The hen is very good». And he sold me two or three. I froze it. And one day I took it out. I'm one of those who, when I'm alone, I cook. I make croquettes, I freeze... And I said: «You know what? I'll make a stock to have it. And then I made croquettes, yes, fish croquettes. I also make them from the leftovers of the stock».

We'll have made this broth starting from a sofrito. We'll have added a tomato, two or three cloves of garlic, saffron, a little parsley, some pepper lost in the fridge to the pot, with oil. And then we add water and boil the fish. Whatever we have”.

But, of course, at this point, all of us who do Cuina sÀvia ask her which team she's on: whether she's on the team of the creamiest, runniest croquettes, or the team of the most consistent croquettes. She's clear about it: “I make Anna Maria Calera’s croquettes”. She's referring to the author of the very famous book Cuina catalana, published in '82.

“At home there were many men, my mother worked at the market, and the first one who arrived cooked for those who came after. Whatever it was. The first one who arrived had to make even just a boiled potato, because they were coming back from El Born and needed to cook. From a very young age I was accustomed to cooking on a stool. My mother was «a good cook of the post-war period», with anything she made a dish. And I adopted this type of cooking. Stew with artichokes... Rabbit rice, because my mother raised four rabbits and on the day it was a holiday... because in my house, on Saint Stephen's Day, we had rice. My mother did it as a wink to her place of birth, Castelló de la Plana”.

To our wise woman, raised in l'Hospitalet, I also leave, as a very sweet wink, this “place”, which very well explains the history of this generation that lived in the cities near Barcelona and saw the need and moral obligation to learn Catalan, use it, and pass it on.

“My mother... came here to survive and she got married in Barcelona. Now I'm throwing the cuttlefish”.

There is nothing like listening to someone cook to see how they unravel now the vegetables, now life.

“My mother is one of those who left walking to France when the war broke out. With three children. She didn't talk much. She, two sisters, and all the children went. My mother with one who had just been born in April, and two more. When they returned they went to live in L'Hospitalet, where the rest of us children were born. And what happened in France? The husband of one of the sisters, whom I never knew, was from the sometent, and had to flee in a hurry. He was waiting for them there”.

As we brown the fish, we clarify that the sometent was a civil self-protection organization, not military, which aimed to defend the town in case of conflict. In the face of danger, citizens had to shout “Via fora!” to alert the sometent. All men older than sixteen and younger than sixty had to report.

“Then, my older brother worked in a bakery in France, and he was paid in kind. And so they were until they decided to return. My aunt, the one with the husband who had fled, no, because he couldn't return. But my other aunt and my mother returned. To starve! Then my father returned from the war, and my mother said that if they hadn't gone to look for him, he wouldn't have gone to war. I was born when my mother was already forty-five years old. And they weren't expecting me to come. It was all boys... And I arrived, born on Good Friday. And my father was in the procession, singing saetas... And it seems that when they went to tell him it was a girl, they say, his drunkenness left him all at once!

Now I will add the saffron and a little bit of pimentón from La Vera. And how do you do it so it doesn't burn? You always have to have the tomato ready. You put the tomato in the middle, so it doesn't burn. You can tell by the smell. Keep asking. What else?”

I ask her what we ask, then, all these women. If she or her family has starved. The detail is extremely important and shapes a way of understanding food, and therefore, life.

“I don’t, but my older brothers do. I had the great fortune...” She trails off, getting emotional. She stirs the pot. She addresses the photographer companion and says: “Pere, don’t take pictures!” And then she explains: “No... I was given to be raised. And the person who raised me, it must be said, gave me breakfast, lunch, dinner... I had great luck. They didn’t adopt me, mind you? It was something that was done back then. I ended up at my godmother’s house with her husband, who loved me like a daughter”.

Rosa Maria thinks that now, in restaurants, if you read for example “vegetable rice”, you don’t think that back then, when she was little, the vegetable rice that now appears on menus was a “poor person’s rice”. This mother, who couldn’t raise her, worked as a delivery person. That is to say, she delivered, in this case, vegetables. And then, while she was delivering, she would take a little piece of cauliflower from here, a green bean from there, and with all that she had collected, she would make the rice. “And it was a to-die-for rice”.

to-die-forLet’s continue with the recipe. For us, the difficult part is knowing how much water to put in the pot and how long to let it simmer. Maria Rosa has an infallible scientific system for calculating the right point, which we will reveal shortly.

We add a little salt. Not too much, because the broth already has a little salt.

“They say that noodles, in theory, are one hundred grams per person. Here there are 800. If we run short, we have cheese”.

We have the broth boiling in the pot next to it. We add the noodles and toast them. We stir. And since laughter can be heard in the hallway, from all her family, she exclaims: “Whoever signed me up for this should be here learning!”

How joyful these clandestine laughs are, like mischievous gremlins, around such a cultural act as “asking grandma to cook”.

We start adding the broth. “Five... Don’t deduct any. Now I’m adding fourteen... If it were rice, it would be two ladles for every one hundred grams of rice. The noodles... I have extra in case I need to add more. I’ve made you alioli, but by myself, because if they watch you, it’ll curdle”.

In conclusion. It covers it, by eye. He stirs it so it doesn't stick. And we arrive at the scientific method. One grandson tastes it. He says it's good. Then, the other grandson tastes it. He finds it lacks salt. Since there's no consensus, the granddaughter, Gal·la, tastes it. It lacks salt. Gal·la's mother comes, who says she "is not relevant" because she likes everything with little salt. For her, it's good. Then comes the youngest grandson of all. He says it's good. They suggest I taste it. I find it good. Then, they have Gerard, in charge of the cameras, taste it, who finds it good, and Núria, the intern at ARA. Both say it's good. The son whose mother got him "into the mess" is missing. Meanwhile, it has been simmering. "I haven't calculated the time, the pasta takes ten minutes. If you have to turn it off, don't worry, the leftover water will be drunk."

Our wise woman has some friends. “Let's go for a walk, we share our love for animals... We call ourselves las chicas de oro. We get along very well. On the beach we pick up cigarette butts, plastics... We did the Pelegrí de Tossa. A festival they hold since the 15th century, when there was an outbreak of plague. We laugh a lot. I had a reason to do it. I'm not very religious, but I did it. And when I arrived in Santa Coloma... I had a beer! My friend's husband came to pick us up. Do you know who he is? One of the members of Rumba 3: Joan Capdevila!”

The noodles are delicious, and I tell him so. “You can now serve your hungry grandchildren,” I say, once we taste. And the little one, who doesn't reach two spans of earth, says the best sentence we will hear all day. It is this one, the one that proves that in his home Catalan cuisine, this cuisine that has the oldest recipe book in Europe, is passed down, thanks to women, these women who have seen it all, like Rosa Maria. It says: “Grandma, I want aioli”.

Very happy summer holidays. Enjoying cooking with the people you love is the wish of all the privileged at ARA, who, during this year, have made Cuina sÀvia.