BarcelonaGazpacho and salads have become the hallmarks of summer, culinary-wise, and are often even bought pre-made. However, traditional Catalan summer cuisine is much richer and offers its own unique refreshing recipes. Despite the heat, it also incorporates more elaborate, even sweat-inducing dishes that take advantage of the wide variety of fruits and vegetables now available in the Mediterranean countryside. With the increasing globalization of gastronomy, the culinary traditions derived from them are at risk of being forgotten.
In an effort to contribute to preserving this vast heritageWe review the most characteristic features of Catalan summer cuisine with some of its leading experts: the cook, farmer, seed collector and writer Josep Lluís Sabatés Ibáñez, known as Pep Salsetes; the gastronomic writer Vicent Marqués and Chef Jordi Vilà, from the Alkimia restaurant in Barcelona and that this year has created the Self-defense manual for Catalan cuisine.
Gazpacho or spill?
Gazpacho has become integrated into Catalan culture, to the point that the recipe has been incorporated intoThe latest edition of the Corpus of Catalan Cuisine, published in 2023, Pep Salsetes remembers.Tell me a Catalan house that doesn't make gazpacho.", challenges the chef, who proposes an alternative: "The cod spill is sensational and one of the fresh dishes most recommended to consume often." It also receives praise from Jordi Vilà: "I consider it a brutal summer dish. I find eating raw cod to be genius." Another very summery alternative is escalivada, maintains Pep Salsetes, but "since it's made all year round, it's lost its personality."
The bowl to make you sweat
In summer, there's now a tendency to prioritize cold dishes, although eating them "also produces energy in the long run," meaning they also make you sweat, according to Pep Salsetes: "The only thing that doesn't make you sweat is not eating, and people will never do that because they'd end up lying on the floor." He notes that there's "a very important change in traditions," but traditionally, many major festivals have been celebrated in summer with memorable meals, such as roasts (chicken, goose, or duck), escaldumbres (stews with small dishes), or even a more substantial bowl than the usual one, on top of the usual one, on top of the usual one, to sweat."
Nowadays, there are many people who tend to be away for local festivals or who "aren't up for doing much work" like a barbecue, but they still go out in search of unique gastronomic discoveries from who knows where. Sometimes we find them close to home, the chef recalls. "In the summer, everyone thinks about traveling, but in Catalonia, there's a lot of exoticism: eating chicken guts or crests is one of them," he claims. For dessert, Catalan cream has often been prepared on special days. Furthermore, there's the custom of eating fruit with a little sweet wine, adds Vicent Marqués, and making horchata—as a snack—is also very widespread.
Meat stews with fruit
Cooking with fruit has been essential in summer, highlights Pep Salsetes, with dishes such as duck or veal with pears. full, which are apples or pears stuffed with meat and sweet ingredients, are made in villages in the Empordà or Maresme, often for local festivals. Pep Salsetes proposes a complete menu that revives the tradition of eating meat with fruit: "Even the most inattentive person can have curva for starters – a dish made from leftover courgettes with potato, onion and garlic – and, for main course, meatballs with pears. What a meal, man!" The respective recipes are numbers 603 and 668 of the latest edition of Corpus of Catalan Cuisine.
Sardines, squid and shrimp
The sea also provides a great treat in summer. Oily fish, like sardines, are at their fattest; squid is caught, which can be stuffed with minced meat, mussels, hard-boiled eggs, and so on. It's also a good time for shrimp. Pep Salsetes points out that squid and shrimp can be "quite expensive products and aren't exactly filling," but with dishes like these, you can also prepare a first-class rice dish. Marqués emphasizes that there are restaurants that serve rice with lobster or crayfish in the summer, especially for tourists: "If they make rice with rabbit, they don't drain it completely, and if they make it with lobster, they can mess it up however they want."
The tomato is "the king"
"In summer we have a great advantage: highly prized products, such as tomatoes", celebrates Pep Salsetes, and for Vilà there is no doubt that "the tomato is king." If you have a garden and can harvest it at its perfect ripeness, "it's sensational in a salad," continues Pep Salsetes, who suggests chopping a small garlic clove on top. The garden still gives so much more: from courgettes and aubergines – in an omelet, stuffed... – to the peak of potatoes and green beans, which can be given a touch of originality by throwing them into the pan with a little minced garlic and anchovies – an alternative to ham.
It's pantry time
We're back to escalivada. Despite having lost its exclusively summer character, Pep Salsetes reminds us that peppers, eggplants, and onions are still summery. "You have to have some sensitivity: these plants speak to you and say, 'Eat me, make something.' Can you eat escalivada in winter? Yes, but it's not the same," he argues. Now that there's an abundance of vegetables and fruits, it's also time to prepare for winter: it's time to make homemade tomato preserves or chanfaina, peaches in syrup, or jams, such as plum or pear preserves.
The myth of simple cooking
It's said that summer cooking is easier, but Vilà maintains that this is "a false belief" because "simple preparations can be made all year round." Furthermore, to avoid always eating the same thing, like recurrent salads, you need to be more deliberate and structure your daily menu. "Cooking takes time," he emphasizes, and if home kitchens end up becoming a space filled with bags and packages ready to eat, it can end up harming both health and taste.
"Knowing how to appreciate good, freshly prepared chard can only be achieved by dedicating time," warns Vilà. But if everything is left to the supermarket, the standards are lower: "We'll end up finding cod with sanfaina sauce that's excellently good but isn't." In Pep Salsetes' opinion, "everything is edible and everything is nourishment," although it's important to ensure that it has a positive impact on the brain: "If food goes to the brain, you're nourishing the body and the spirit. It's a complete food; on the other hand, the other is feed, what stabled animals eat."
Teaching cooking to the offspring
"We're moving toward a society that gives less and less importance to eating," warns Pep Salsetes, something Vicent Marqués sees when he goes shopping: "People go to the market and ask themselves: 'What is this fish, what do you call it...' They have no idea." Sometimes they don't even know who's in charge of selling it, he adds, which has happened to him in the supermarket. "We're losing our sanity," warns the writer.
To reverse this, Jordi Vilà believes intergenerational transmission is key, and this August he will give a cooking class to his two 17-year-old daughters, whom he had previously kept somewhat out of the kitchen so as not to affect their future. "Let them learn to turn on the oven and the stove at the same time, and while we make a broth upstairs, we roast some peppers downstairs," explains Vilà, who will begin the course by going to the market.