Interrogating Authenticity: Catalan Cuisine

Often specific to regions, ethnic groups, and social classes, food habits and preferences nonetheless respond to broader cultural and political currents as well as local and global forces structuring the parameters of supply and demand.  These considerations inevitably problematize contemporary efforts to denote particular foods, recipes, and beverages as inherently more desirable because of their ‘authentic,’ ‘typical,’ or ‘historic’ nature.  Colman Andrews, English language expert on –and promoter of— Catalan cuisine, asserts that no other European culinary repertoire is as close to its medieval roots.  Yet what drives the stream of gastrotourists to Barcelona and its environs is mostly the demand for fine dining experiences shaped by the last four decades of wildly innovative star-chef culinary experimentation.  In their now decade-old campaign selling Catalonia to a global tourist market through the quality of its gustatory offerings, government agencies and institutions tend to blur the lines between the ‘traditional’ and the trendy, focusing instead on a form of essentialism and exceptionalism defining its most desirable alimentary fare.  This paper explores changes and continuities in Catalan cuisine since the early twentieth century in order to interrogate the concept of culinary authenticity.  Oral testimonies, cookbooks, trade publications, fiction, travel writing, press accounts, and political discourses, elucidate a range of factors contributing to the transformation of Catalan eating habits before and after the Spanish Civil War, in response to the intensification of consumerism since the late 1950s, and as a consequence of Barcelona’s emergence as a premier tourist destination in the wake of the 1992 Olympic games.  Outlining a series of ironic juxtapositions in the articulation of an ‘authentic’ Catalan cuisine, we can see that in Catalonia, as elsewhere, foodways intersect with the politics of identity in complex ways.  Consumers have both embraced and rejected prescriptive narratives setting forth appropriate food practices and rituals.