Recover grandmothers' cuisine

As we find ourselves at the gates of a new tourist season, once again we must report that it is worrying, and it is not the first time we have done so, that the cuisine that our mothers and grandmothers prepared is being lost as most of the dishes are no longer available. traditional dishes on restaurant menus, giving way to elaborations that have nothing to do with our traditional Menorcan cuisine.

Perhaps it is time to start an intense and fruitful debate about the worrying lack of Menorcan cuisine dishes on the menus of the island's restaurants, with the exception of those of seafood cuisine, which do have a discreet participation, in any case. superior to meat and vegetable dishes, and let's not talk about pastries, which deserve another chapter of their own.

Our traditional cuisine, that which disappeared from the menus, menus or minutes of restaurants and inns in the 60s, should be recovered, and for now it is not an easy job if there is no will from the restaurateurs on the one hand, and of the Administrations on the other.

In the 60s and 70s we made the mistake of offering tourists international cuisine, where entrecôtes with pepper and Roquefort, sole a la meuniére, sea bream and sea bass in salt became fashionable (in those times were not yet fish farms), the voulavants stuffed with fish and seafood, and other dishes that remain in the memory of the old menus that did a lot of damage to our cuisine, just as other innovations or fashions that come to us from outside are damaging it. or fruit of gastronomic globalization.

Unfortunately, many of our own preparations are forgotten or are considered home cooking, with no right to leave the kitchens of housewives. There are dishes that are very much ours, such as rabbit with tomato sauce, rabbit with onions and capers, macaroni with rabbit, rice with rabbit and lobster, if we only use this product as an example, rabbit, which was very common in homes and also in restaurants in the 60s and 70s and which was part of our diet.

As for red veal, we will not find restaurants that offer preparations such as veal tongue with capers or tongue with peas, or there are still the majority of restaurants that offer a Roquefort beef entrecôte and do not present it with Menorcan cheese, when Here we have one of the best cheeses in the world.

From Pime and Caeb Menorca, very positive campaigns have been carried out to recover traditional dishes such as oliagua, stew or the Menorcan cuisine days, but the response is scarce if we compare the number of restaurants that have been added to the days with the that exist in Menorca, or that these dishes have become part of the daily menus and then are not incorporated into the usual menus.

One thing, also more than important, is that all those dishes to be recovered from Menorcan cuisine are cooked with products from Menorca. We must all succeed in promoting the consumption of local products, those products that the great master of gastronomic writers, Josep Pla, called “little travelled” and today we call them “km 0”.