In two years, chef Maria Nicolau (La Garriga, 41 years old) has become an essential voice of gastronomy in Spain. After working in numerous restaurants in Spain and France, she has left the kitchen to focus on gastronomic communication—radio, television and her weekly column. At ease, in El PAÍS—, and lives in a town of 300 inhabitants in the Catalan region of Osona. “I get nourishment from the bookmobile that arrives every 15 days, from used bookstores, and I read a lot of international press,” she says in a video call from the room full of books where he writes.
After the success of his first book, Kitchen or Barbarismin 2022, now presenting his autobiography Burn!, the memoirs of a girl who decides to learn the profession of cook in the 2000s, while Spain is experiencing its gastronomic revolution. A brave text that takes place in restaurants of all kinds, sprinkled with popular recipes, humor, criticism, reflection and that humanity that so characterizes Nicolau.
Ask. In your profession, have you burned more on the outside or on the inside?
Answer. Cooking has given me the best and the worst, but above all economic independence and an opportunity for wild growth. I had a good time and I felt like a rag thrown onto an infected soil. My soul is sewn up with machetes, but having this job means I can earn a salary wherever I go. It gives me peace of mind to know that I will never lack for anything because tomorrow I can work in a bar making loin sandwiches with cheese.
Q. There have been times in her life when one day she was a luxury private chef and the next morning she was handing out sandwiches at a fairground.
R. This is the job and it is a wonderful truth that deserves to be loved and shared with enthusiasm: cooking at banquets, pushing carts into trucks for a catering, going out to smoke through the back door… I had a great time! And we have to tell young people about it because we need talent to come to this restoration that needs a push.
Q. For that, references are needed.
R. Yes, successful examples of mid-range artisan chefs. In the backroom of haute cuisine there is a mantra that if by the age of 40 you don't have your own restaurant or are a chef at a renowned place, you are condemned for life to not being valued just to be able to continue paying the mortgage. It's cruel and terribly offensive. The menu-of-the-day bars where they serve meals at 12 euros for 200 diners with homemade fries are an achievement to be claimed, and we had forgotten them.
Q. You opted for traditional cuisine while the spotlight shone on the avant-garde.
R. I couldn't afford to go to elBulli. In the nineties, while the gastronomic revolution and spherifications were happening, many of us were amazed by the arrival of Chinese restaurants and the birth of the big-hitting Cheetos. There is a class issue that we have been ignoring for 20 years and that is that 90% of potential diners in this country have never been able to go to DiverXO, El Celler de Can Roca or Arzak.
Q. But they are the great examples.
R. Yes, and I don't criticize them. But low-end gastronomy, that of the workers, that of the majority, received the input that, to “do it well”, you had to imitate what those who cost more than 150 euros a cover did. When they made that jump, almost everyone fell into the abyss with battered spheres, plates soiled with weeds to decorate or meaninglessly crunchy.
Q. She sought to train with artisans, but having to raise a young daughter alone, she discarded gastronomic restaurants for reasons of conciliation.
R. If I had gone to a so-called “author” site, I would have had a split shift and I couldn't. In all this time, in the hospitality sector we have had collective agreements that include 40 hours per week, which say that every worker must have one weekend off per month and that, between shift and shift, there must be 12 hours Rest. In the last 30 years they have not been fulfilled. Where was the union applauding the stars and looking the other way when 90% of the hospitality workforce in this country was ignored by the law on their side? If the law on our part has served no purpose, what can we aspire to.
Q. What is the first thing you would change about hospitality if you had the power to do so?
R. Apply the law and anyone who cannot function like this should close it. Enough of feeling sorry for the union. We must also return to giving public vocational training the honor and funds it deserves.
Q. Is it true that they taught you how to use the Opus Dei numerary knives?
R. Yes. People are going to freak out when they read things like that, that I have met the Pope or that I won Opus Dei cooking conferences.
Q. Of the visit to the Pope he only says that the room smelled of brown cokescakes that were made in Catalan pastry shops to take advantage of leftovers from the bakery.
R. This is how I live gastronomy. A recipe itself isn't interesting because it's like a mathematical formula, but what's exciting about mathematics is how Feynman tells it, relating sunlight to the growth of plants and atoms. I try to do it that way.
Q. In their case, recipes are an excuse to talk about life.
R. I wanted to have a job. I could have been a cabinet maker or a car mechanic, and then I would also talk about people and that life is about sharing. Any discipline is a language to put humanity at the center.
Q. It also vindicates the importance of town festivals.
R. Good parties always have food, fire, songs and dances at their center. When it is our tradition we do not value it, but we see it in Studio Ghibli films and we are amazed. In any culture there is the act of going out with the grill to conquer the public space, celebrating that we break the rules, that we are partying and that the police will come later to dismantle us. We must recover the playful and revolutionary spirit. Union and sharing is what makes strength.
Q. Hence one of the recipes Burn! be a rice for 150 people.
R. For 150 or 400, in the middle of the field and with a gas stove, it was the only way that made sense for me to give a rice recipe. In a rave, At two in the morning, when you're high, someone gives you a small bowl of freshly cooked rice and the sky opens up for you. I have never felt so loved by my diners as on that one. rave.
Q. What is the strangest thing you have been asked to do in the kitchen?
R. A steak tartare very done when there was a hamburger on the menu, tomato salad without tomato, they asked me if the wild boar was organic or they asked me for some tripe with Cacaolat.
Q. And were they good?
R. I didn't try the mixture. I put the plate of tripe next to the Cacaolat and let him deal with his stomach. But I'm no one to judge because there are nights, when I write, that I alternate fuet with pork rinds and milk chocolate.
Q. Is there anything you have refused to do?
R. Beer and broth advertisements. I've spen
t half my life convincing people to make broth at home with leftover Sunday chicken and now I'm not going to announce a tetrabrick no matter how good it is. It is easy to get lost in the tangle of media exposure, but you have to always remember where you are from and I come from the yogurt maker and the recipes from magazines that our mothers cut out, who were like a headless chicken trying to do it right.
Q. You dreamed of becoming a Renaissance artisan living in the mountains, have you achieved it?
R. I'm still far away, but I have been making decisions focused on that. When they tell me how lucky I am to live in the mountains, I respond that I have paid dearly for it. I took a risk, I left everything and it didn't turn out well. I had to find a life in a town bar where they served steak with frozen potatoes and I pulled the blanket over my head to change it knowing that they could get tired of me and throw me out after 15 days.
Q. In the end you were the one who got tired of the bar to dedicate yourself to communication. Don't you feel like riding one?
R. Right now I can't live, but sooner or later I will. Now I like to cook paragraphs with care. I feel like I have a lot left to communicate, to tell people that this is not a dress rehearsal, but that it is life and that the most important meal is your dinner today. A friend tells me that I am worth more for what I put out of my mouth than for what I put in the pot.
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