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 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 a knack for improvising a meal. They are foresighted. “My mother used to say that if there are potatoes and eggs in a house, no one should go without dinner,” says Maria Rosa. Like all of them, she is welcoming, happy, and a little scared to be featured in ARA explaining something she does naturally and, above all, with a desire to care. We go into the kitchen, and a little elf walks by in the background. One of her grandchildren, who was coming 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 give her that name and they named her Maria. They told me: ‘Man, being Basque...!’ That was forty-nine years ago...”

The recipe for noodles with fish explained by Maria Rosa:

• Cuttlefish. Or squid, whatever you have. Don't have any? Don't put any in.
• Shrimp, prawns... The same. Don't have any? Don't put any in.
• Saffron.
• Pimentón de la Vera. That is to say, red pepper, the kind they sell in those little tin pots that we all adore, and which gives it that smoky flavor.
• Oil, salt.
• 800 grams of short pasta.
• Grated tomato, not much, with garlic and parsley.
• Fumet. In this case, chicken.

Let's start:

“I bought the squid yesterday, but I froze 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 do it with squid too. 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 some stock to have on hand. And then I made croquettes, yes, fish croquettes. I also make them from the leftover stock.’

We will have made this fish stock starting from a sofrito. We will have added a tomato, two or three garlic cloves, saffron, a little parsley, some pepper lost in the fridge into 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 make Cuina sÀvia ask her which team she's on: the team of the creamiest, most liquid croquettes, or the team of the most consistent croquettes. She's clear: “I make Anna Maria Calera's croquettes.” She refers 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 post-war cook,’ she could make a dish out of anything. 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 Sant Esteve, 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 offer, 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 necessity and moral obligation to learn Catalan, use it, and transmit it.

“My mother... came here to survive and then got married in Barcelona. Now I'm throwing in 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 explained little. 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 the children were born. And what happened in France? The husband of one of the sisters, whom I never knew, was from the somatén, and had to flee in a hurry. He was waiting for them there”.

As we brown the fish, we clarify that the somatén was a civil self-protection organization, not military, which aimed to defend the town in case of conflict. Faced with danger, citizens had to shout “Via fora!” to alert the somatén. 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 didn't expect 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 of pimentón from La Vera. And how should it be done 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 didn’t, but my older siblings did. I had the great luck...” She interrupts herself, because she gets 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 was very lucky. They didn’t adopt me, you know? It’s what used to be done. I ended up at my godmother’s house and 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 greengrocer. 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 everything she had gathered she made the rice. “And it was a rice to death".

We continue with the recipe. For us, the difficult part is knowing how much water to add to the pot and how long we have to let it simmer. Maria Rosa has an infallible scientific system for calculating the right point, which we will reveal shortly.

Let's 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 cut short, we have cheese”.

The fish stock is boiling in the pot next to it. We add the noodles and toast them. We stir. And since laughter is heard in the hallway, from all his family, he exclaims: "The one who signed me up for this should be here learning!"

How cheerful these clandestine laughs are, like mischievous gremlins, around an act as cultural as "asking grandma to cook."

Let's start making the broth. “Five... Don't count me out. Now I have fourteen... If it were rice, that would be two spoonfuls for every hundred grams of rice. The noodles... I have extra in case I need to add more. I've made you aioli, but just me, because if they look at 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. A grandson tastes. He says it's good. Then, the other grandson tastes it. He finds it lacks salt. Since there is no consensus, the granddaughter, Gal·la, tastes it. It lacks salt. Gal·la's mother arrives, who says she is "not relevant" because she likes everything with little salt. For her, it's fine. Then the youngest grandson of all arrives. 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 is ten minutes. If you have to turn it off, don't worry, the leftover water will be drunk by it".

Our wise woman has some friends. “Let's go for a walk, we share a love for animals... We call ourselves the golden girls. We get along very well. On the beach, we pick up cigarette butts, plastics... We did the Pelegrí de Tossa. A festival they've been holding 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 serve your hungry grandchildren now,” I say, once we've tasted. And the little one, who doesn't reach two spans of earth, says the best phrase we'll hear all day. It's 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. He says: “Grandma, I want aioli”.

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