Born, San Sebastian, Spain, 1931
Mother Tongue, Spanish
Grandchildren, Coro, Carla, Mariana, Mariano, Enrique, Pedro, Juan, Jonás, tomas, mercedes, Ana, isabela, Paloma
They call her, Abuela
My family comes from the north of Spain, which is where this recipe comes from. In my hometown of San Sebastian, the ladies of the house were supposed to cook very well, otherwise they were completely disgraced. If you didn’t know how to cook very well, you were a pariah, so I had to learn not just to cook, but to do it well.
In my grandmother’s house, which was really a temple of culinary knowledge, I learned absolutely everything I know now about cooking.They did everything at home, including slaughtering the animals we would eat. I remember watching bloody massacres of a chicken being placed between the cook’s legs before being decapitated. Then it would run around the kitchen headless. I would then have to suffer seeing the entrails of the chicken being pulled out.
I thought it was the cabinet of horrors in my grandmother’s kitchen. They’d put live lobsters on to boil and I would feel so awful about it, watching their claws being axed off. It was like torture. I hated it. I much preferred when I began to learn to cook in France during my summers in the Basque country. It was less traumatic. When we would cook meat and fish there, it was already dead!
