Pepa Aymamí: "I have given the Catalan Cuisine brand to the Generalitat for free, but they are not giving it content"
The Catalan Institute of Cuisine has just published a fourth edition of the Corpus of Catalan Cuisine and is already thinking about the fifth
BarcelonaIf two years ago the Corpus of Catalan Cuisine included the recipe for gazpacho, which caused a great stir, the new edition brings grilled fish. "We don't understand how we hadn't included it yet [in the Corpus]; now it's there and also another novelty, fish 'romesco' instead of meat 'romesco'," states Pepa Aymamí (Vallmoll, 1945), who also adds that in the new edition they have included exhaustive files for all ingredients.
“With this edition, which is the fourth, our work will not end; we have already started preparing the next one, which will include annexes dedicated to pastry-making”, explains Aymamí, promoter of the Institut Català de la Cuina and owner until a few months ago of the Cuina Catalana brand, which she registered herself so that it would be linked to the corpus project and appear on the door of restaurants in the country that follow the recipes from the work. “Now I have ceded the brand to the Generalitat, but I see that they are not giving it content, as we used to do with the Corpus”, says Aymamí at her home [where we photographed her] the day after the presentation of the Corpus at the University of Barcelona.
Aymamí, as well as the chef Xavier Mestres (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1944), has dedicated a large part of her life to the Corpus. It is her passion. In her case, even an obsession. She works on it daily and has managed to bring together top-category specialists who support her. “In the Corpus we have just published, the biology professor Joan Vallès has coordinated the food files for the most part; he has done all of them except those for fish, plants, fungi, and land animals”. The marine biologist Jordi Lleonard has done the one for fish.
Beside them we have many other specialists: Alicia Aguilar, professor of nutrition; Pere Castells, president of the Science & Cooking World Congress Foundation; Jesús Contreras, emeritus professor of social anthropology at the UB; Ugo d’Ambrosio, doctor in ethnobiology. And many others. “The Corpus has a scientific methodology, accepted by the Sorbonne University of Paris and by UNESCO; dishes become part of our heritage when people have been making them in their homes for more than fifty years,” says Aymamí, who with this statement explains again why gazpacho was introduced in 2023. It is back again this year, of course, because “the Corpus, after all, is based on home cooking, which is also done in traditional restaurants”. They have the concept traditional defined with this figure: fifty years. “In our cuisine we did not have tomatoes, peppers, or potatoes, therefore, we would not have romesco now if these ingredients had not come from America”.
An extension of more than 700 pages
Regarding the Corpus book, those who acquired it two years ago will not have the product sheets that have been introduced in the new edition. “We have enriched them, we have put the characteristic names of each part of the territory, and we have also updated the prologues”. The book has an extension of 707 pages and a price of 29.50 euros.
Regarding the Cocina Catalana brand, Aymamí reveals that he has ceded it free of charge to the Generalitat. “The fact that they do not have a Corpus of Catalan Cuisine like ours, which was how we gave content to the brand, makes me say that they will not move it forward”. And he adds: “Now they have invented another one, ImpliCAT, so they have more than one brand, and in the Catalan cuisine one, for a year now, they do nothing”.
With the Catalan Cuisine brand that Aymamí had registered, he also had a logo, white in color, that one hundred and seventy restaurants in the country have at their door, with which they make it clear that traditional Corpus dishes are cooked. “The black logo indicates that they make evolved traditional cuisine”. The fact that the Generalitat has the Catalan Cuisine brand should be linked, according to Aymamí, “with a team of people who work to give it substance, as we have been doing since 2000, the year we started working on the Corpus”.
For Pepa Aymamí, the book is a good gift for Sant Jordi. "You acquire heritage; you have the history of our recipes". For foreigners it will be published in Spanish and English. “It has also been translated into Russian”. And the author also highlights another novelty: boiled cuttlefish with mayonnaise has been transformed into cuttlefish with potatoes and alioli.