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LAND AND SEA
With a bit of luck and if you are well guided, you will still have time to eat a "niu" before you die. There are cultural "musts" that are acquired by simply having been to school, even though maybe only for a few months: such as seeing the pyramids in Egypt or the Niagara Falls. However tasting a "niu" (literally a nest), when one knows about its legendary existence is no less of a cultural obligation. It is an excellent stew that could only have occurred to the people of the Empordà, cooks who walk the fine line between genius and craziness, which has meant that they have been able to produce a dish that consists of wrasse, cuttlefish, cod, dried cod, peas, cod tripe, potato and allioli.
Some of the chefs in the Baix Empordà hold a trade fair with their cuisine in order, I suppose, to create a gastronomic incentive directed at interior tourism rather than external tourism. The Empordà is the gastronomic Covadonga of Catalonia. When almost everything had been lost and only a few isolated restaurants in a sea of snack cuisine and international dishes upheld the dignity of the language and the palate, the summer pilgrims discovered, to their great surprise, that in the Empordà they could eat in accordance with the most essential demands of human dignity. And they discovered this in the inns on the coast and inland that depended on the memory of the local chefs willing to do what they knew how to do without lying to the consumers. The fame of these places spread by word of mouth and an invisible network was set up, which the pilgrims of the palate travelled, in search of duck with pears, haricot beans with shellfish, different fish stews, stuffed apples, cuttlefish stewed with broad beans or early peas and other delights such as the "niu" and similar dishes. Dishes known as "Surf and Turf" in which you could find rabbit, snails, monkfish, cuttlefish and langoustines, to the surprise of the naturalists who uselessly tried to separate meat from fish.
When the "nouvelle cuisine" boom happened, these people experimented with traditional cuisine and converted escalivada (baked onions, peppers and aubergines) into a mousse or added Roquefort to cod. They are like that. They converted carrot into a mousse, without renouncing rabbit with vinaigrette stewed in the same way that one’s Granny Rosita used to do it. And in a world without clear objectives, in which not even the horizons are so far away, the entire Empordà smells of tempting stoves in which innocent proposals for happiness are being cooked. The Empordà is a horizon of gentle hills and nearby villages, a human landscape as Pla would say, in which the chimneys smoke the atmosphere with the smell of a well-prepared sofregit, a plentiful picada and animals from the land chosen carefully and wisely.
A village in which one of the male pastimes is going out to cook with a group of friends and inspiring gastronomic confidence. When men cook, it means that there is a deeply rooted traditional culinary culture, able to impose itself before the traditional division of male and female roles. Therefore, the traveller in search of good food almost never makes a mistake in the Empordà and only needs to evade the restaurants or inns which promise international cuisine. International cuisine does not exist. Children are not delivered by the stork. I'm sorry, but I had to mention it.
M. Vàzquez Montalbán
Collection of recipes from the first Costa Brava Centre Gastronomy Trade Fair
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