“The kitchen was at the heart of our lives, the center of interest and the main budget of the household”

“Good food has always been at the end of my fork. I was born in Paris to Spanish parents, a Basque, and an Asturian. The kitchen was at the heart of our lives, the center of interest and the main budget of the household. When we were little, my brother and I, my father used to repeat to us: “We don’t go skiing because we prefer to eat well all year round.”

My mother is a good cook and my father excels in stews, stews and stews. The tastes of childhood, for me, are lentils with bacon and chorizo, chickpeas in broth with blood sausage, fabada (a sort of cassoulet from Asturias) and especially my father’s black rice with seafood.

It is a Valencian variation of paella which, historically, is more of a peasant dish with beans, poultry or rabbit – before seafood was added for folklore. I particularly like this glossy rice, cooked in fish stock and squid ink, full of marine flavors. It’s a dish that tells the story of Sunday meals, where we cook together, in the small fishing village in Asturias where my parents always have a pied-à-terre – the squid sold in the port, the broth prepared with the carcasses, swimming in the Atlantic…

Slightly biting humor

There is family history: my maternal grandmother, Basque, was a remarkable cook who, for a time, ran an inn with her husband, a wine merchant. Traders and hunters brought her game and other foodstuffs, which she cooked for them as a service and only charged for the wine. My grandfather died young and my grandmother closed the inn, but she continued to cook and her restaurant remained a family myth.

My parents settled in France in the 1970s. They both worked at the Maison d’Espagne, she as a librarian, he as a projectionist and factotum. Later, they were propelled into less fun jobs, at the embassy. But they never wanted to be naturalized. They wanted to maintain this feeling of a Spanish enclave and we only speak Spanish among ourselves. We lived at Place de Clichy, then in Maisons-Alfort where I spent my adolescence. I was a good student, very literary. I opted for prep school, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the history of the Golden Age and the Spanish aggregation.

Writing is about the only thing I really learned during my studies. I was a teacher very early on and little by little I devoted the rest of my time to food. I followed the chefs, went to the Omnivore festival in Deauville in 2011, made friends with some. I wrote for Fooding, Time Out, Le Figaro, American Express…

Omnivore asked me to lead the big chef scene this year, I hosted the world fry championship and today I am publishing an illustrated collection of gastronomy stories which brings together quite a few of my passions: food, history, comics, biting humor… It’s my jack-of-all-trades side, who writes (and eats) in every way. »