The kitchen of hunger, the post-war kitchen

Currently we have everything and a lot to eat, although prices are also skyrocketing and especially in some basic foods such as olive oil, sugar or seasonal fruits and vegetables, in addition to meat. pork, but all this is nothing if we compare it with the restrictions that our parents and grandparents suffered, or many of them in post-war times, where in Ciutadella, there were people who were hungry.

The kitchen of the 40s and well into the 50s was a survival kitchen, where nothing was spoiled and everything was used. Those were the years of ration cards, of blackmail and smuggling, of seasonal cooking and pantry and fattening a pig to get through the winter.

When I prepare the 75 years section of the El Iris Weekly, I get details that take us back to those years, such as the notices of the ration cards, the inspections carried out in stores that put water in the milk, the consumption or control of merchandise attached to the bastion of La Fuente, where all those carts and carts that arrived from the countryside to Ciutadella were checked so that no undeclared merchandise was passed…

Those were the years when everything was used and nothing was spoiled, with stale bread they made pancuit, or they dipped it in wine with sugar on top and it was the snack of adults and children, like bread with cream, bread with oil and sugar or bread with oil, tomato and paprika, from those kids with bald heads.

They made oliagos with asparagus, cabbage, and whatever they had available, in addition to garlic soups and, they saw very little meat.

That was why people went out to the countryside to look for asparagus, mushrooms, snails… and with that they made cokes with the flour, sometimes barley, from the ration cards, or pots of snails with herbs and potatoes, as well. that purslane and other wild herbs were collected.

The diet of those years was perhaps healthier than that of today, but people were hungry, and the dishes were made of legumes without protein other than the provision of the pig that had been slaughtered in the slaughterhouse or with the salted bones of the same. animal, the lard that was also used for cooking when there was no access to olive oil and small pieces of sobrasada.

Dishes such as local rice, broad beans with noodles, barrel sardines on embers, dead potatoes, fritters of whatever was available, fried sweet potato with sobrasada or blood sausage after the slaughter or fish, which was accessible because it was, In those years, more or less abundant and at a good price.

That was why, in addition to the figure of the hunter, there was also that of the rural guard who watched over the place and the land against poachers… Just as in every house there was a fishing rod and in the port of Ciutadella itself, pageles were caught. , some sea bass and even eels. There were oblada fishermen and they cooked with suquet; Just as groupers were also caught in the Escalera del Rey, at the mouth of the port.

They were times of scarcity, when each party was a reason for good gastronomy such as empanbadas for Easter, nougat at Christmas, chocolate and ensaimada for San Juan, cocas in summer… Perhaps because these dishes were eaten a few days a year. , they were more expected, more desired and knew better when they were eaten. It was valued, something that today we have unfortunately lost because we have almost everything within our reach and we can find cheese every day, like eating tomatoes all year round and we have become accustomed to diets that seem, but are not as healthy as those, even if he suffered, as the elders have told me more than once, hunger.