"The political situation may lead us to renewed poverty, and we may have to go back to soup because we have no other choice."

BarcelonaCooking cannot be declared dead. Although it's declining at home, partly due to the avalanche of ready-made meals marketed as the antidote to lack of time, cooking is an eternal act that cannot simply disappear. This is the prediction of veteran cook, culinary scholar, and writer Rosa Tovar, who remains optimistic despite seeing the global outlook as "very bleak." She reminds us that "human life is impossible without food," that there's no need to resort to outlandish dishes—lentils or broth can be "a marvel"—and she has faith that cooking will endure.

Tovar (Salamanca, 1947) has just published the book Round (Col&Col, 2025), in which he delves into the evolution of cooking and its utensils in various parts of the world—an evolution that has occurred in parallel even in places where there has been no contact—and into some unique legacies resulting from exchanges between peoples, especially the profound and still largely unknown ones. Today, reading and interviewing Tovar is one of the best ways to inspire cooking. "Since childhood, cooking has been fundamental to my life, and I try to share that enthusiasm with everyone," Tovar explains to ARA.

That's even though the times don't seem very conducive to firing up the stoves. However, uncertainty reigns and nothing can be taken for granted. "New rules of coexistence are being created, because at the moment there aren't any, not even between countries," says Tovar, and illustrates this with the US military attack on Venezuela and the capture of MaduroHowever, he fears that some dramatic event might erupt that, as has happened before in history, would force them to return to traditional cooking methods. "The political situation may lead us to renewed poverty, and we may have to go back to our ancestral ways because we have no other choice," he warns.

In his opinion, sooner or later we'll have to forget about television series, "the most powerful form of general distraction in our world," and we'll return to the stove to make stews or lentils with vegetables because perhaps there isn't even any chorizo: "People will stop watching series and wasting time on these things and they won't have anything else to do." Furthermore, he argues that humanity's experience over millennia supports this: "If we've spent at least 5,000 years trying not to starve or 10,000 years worrying about having something to eat and we're still cooking, that means we'll go back to cooking."

How to learn to cook today

The way we learn to cook is unlikely to ever return. Tovar includes in her book a prime example of the opportunities that existed a few decades ago: Ferran Adrià, for whom learning to cook during his military service in Cartagena proved crucial. "Now in the 21st century, there's hardly a trace left of apprentice chefs or grandmothers and mothers in the kitchen, whether professional or home kitchens," the scholar emphasizes. Like her, many women left the home to pursue a profession, so nowadays, cookbooks are the primary resource for learning.

For Tovar, the value of recipes lies in demonstrating the use of the most appropriate techniques and utensils for preparing a particular type of dish, thus allowing one to grasp the general principles of cooking. "The utensils needed to execute culinary techniques are the smartest and most practical option for a cookbook to serve someone who wants to learn to cook on their own," Tovar argues. Utensils also demonstrate that "the cuisines of all the world's cultures are interconnected in some way." Although some manuals present them as separate compartments, he assures that they have "more similarities than differences."

The "irrefutable proof," Tovar continues, is that the peoples of continents that did not maintain significant contact with each other until the modern age—Asia, Europe, and Africa, on the one hand, and America, on the other—designed, in much earlier stages and with exactly the same proportions, the utensil for making soup, which is its very foundation. Once exchanges between cultures intensified, Tovar focuses especially on the legacy of the Moriscos in America, which he says "is little studied or not at all, and its importance, which is enormous, is not given due consideration."

The milk syrup was not Argentinian

Most of the cooks and farmers who came to America with the colonizers were Moriscos. Hence, "American cheeses are, or until recently were, always fresh, just as the Hispano-Arabs liked them." Milk syrup (caramel sauceIt also comes from them: "The inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula consider milk syrup to be genuinely Argentinian, but almost no one stops to think that, when the Spanish arrived on the American continent, its inhabitants did not include animal milk or cane sugar in their diet." The first American, made in Mexico – where it is called box either tile basin—, it was made with goat's milk, the preferred milk in Al-Andalus. In America they also have the meat parade, the offal and the cattle, another legacy of the Moriscos, who in the Peninsula ended up being a modest class.

At home, you can relive this legacy with the recipes Tovar includes in the book. Among his favorites, because they are dishes from his youth that touch his heart, is the tamale de fuente Bolivian style, which is a crest that proposes to prepare with a meat filling inspired by the Creole cake from northern Argentina, the country where he lived. The filling also includes pear, another Moorish legacy. Another is the Moorish girl Filipina, who in her case has transformed it into a Spanish-style fried rice, keeping in mind that "when a cuisine arrives in a home or country, it evolves." Incidentally, she asserts that everything from rice to sofrito can be made in the microwave: "Although it may seem like heresy, it isn't."

The design should be useful.

He believes architects and kitchen designers probably don't even know how to fry an egg, so he urges them to study cooking as well, given that, for example, "a cook wouldn't dare design a building." Furthermore, he emphasizes that beauty and utility don't have to be mutually exclusive. Regarding the rise of open-plan kitchens and dining rooms, he warns that if you make broth with leeks, "everyone in the house will have to run to the nearest park to escape the leek stench," and that's not even mentioning cooking sardines, for which "you have to flee the house and replace the upholstery and cuts." So, he has no doubt that the open-plan kitchen "is very pretty, but it doesn't make sense in a house where people cook."

Tovar's unwavering faith in the power of cooking permeates the entire book. "The eternal and universal kitchen, which is both singular and a thousand, allows us to share food, friendship, knowledge, and even love with family and friends in the ritual inherited from our ancestors of sitting down at the table each day," emphasizes the cook and scholar, who reiterates her wish: "May it never be lost." During the interview, Tovar suggests that she may not live to see the eventual return to the kitchen, but her wise words will endure, and, should her prediction come true, they will be accompanied by the eternal kitchen.