Every month the challenge of the MTC becomes bigger and bigger. And, in April, Mai challenged us proposing us the fideuà, a Spanish dish (Catalan, to be precise, because I learned that Castilian and Catalan aren’t the same thing), a sea dish, a complex dish, but simple at the same time, because it was born on a fishing vessel, so you’ll need few ingredients and tools (believe me, cooking on a boat is not easy at all).
In addition, this dish helped me to recall a very far past (even if it was only 2009) and a trip to Barcelona in the middle of winter, and in that moment I didn’t give to that city the possibility to amaze me, to capture me with its eccentricity, his sinuous shapes , its pulsating life. It was such a different period of my life, in which the beauty of the eccentricity, of the peculiarity had a lesser power on me, a period in which I wasn’t ready to see the essence of Barcelona. Therefore, I believe I have an offset memory of this city: in my mind I see it as a city that has the color of the sand, where nothing seemed to me finished or definitive (but, while now this appears to me as a sign of hope and constant evolution, once it seemed to me as a simple lack of something). I can’t see its colors in my head, I can’t smell it or taste it, and remember it as a cold city (and it was cold, indeed, at least its weather conditions) and so far from Barcelona seen through the eyes of Pepe Carvalho, who describes it as a hot, pulsating city.
It’s amazing how moods or stages in life can change so much our own perception, so that an entire city can change with it. And I am a sea lover, so I usually love seaside town no matter what: even in the most banal or awful seaside town I can find something to love. However, I never felt anything for Barcelona (and -how strange?!-some time ago I lost all the pictures I took there and that were stored in my laptop), every memory is blurry, fuzzy, muffled.
But now I have something to start with, before I come back to Barcelona, I hope with my eyes changed: I have this seafood dish, a dish that I tried to transform, but without transfiguration, adding some artichokes (also available in a 1915 vessel that docks in a Spanish harbour – oh, yes, Spain produces artichokes) and using almost exclusively black squid (but also some prawns) with their ink black (my mom’s idea, I recognize that).
A sort of black and white picture of the original fideuà, something like my black and white picture of Barcelona. Who knows, maybe sooner or later I’ll go and add the necessary colors.
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