Casas de Comidas

Participate in a performative meal, revealing and celebrating food histories and their legacies.

Join Politics of Food resident Marta Fernández Calvo for a collaborative performative meal offering guests access to Casas de Comidas, an intriguing phenomenon of power seized by women through food and recipe-sharing during the dictatorship in Spain. The dinner will examine the historical context of this as well as the current situation, in which social changes are precipitating the decline of the tradition whilst the recipes it produced continue to echo through family dinners and kitchens of many of the country’s most renowned chefs.

The dinner will follow a ‘music script’ inspired by the repetitions of folklore and interviews with some of Casas de Comidas founders in La Rioja. The dinner will be cooked by María Royo, the ‘missing link’ in what could have been the fourth generation of the recently extinct Casa de Comidas Buenos Aires in Logroño (La Rioja-Spain).

Please note: The meal will be meat and fish-based.

This meal is part of a series of public events in Delfina Foundation’s fourth season of the thematic programme The Politics of Food. Subtitled Adapting, this latest iteration investigates ideas responding to the changing environment of food production.

Participant Biographies

María Royo was born in La Rioja to a family of renowned cooks from one of Logroño’s famous Casa de Comidas. Her great-grandmother Justa, her grandmother Pilar and her aunt Pitu fostered her culinary interest through family meals prepared without hurry, with seasonal products and a lot of care. It was amongst these women her interest in ancestral recipes began. Every time she cooks she celebrates life and pays tribute, not only to the women of her family, but to all those brave women who started the Casas de Comidas in the emblematic Laurel Street in Logroño and without whom, María would not be who she is.

Event supporters

Acción Cultural Española, Art Council England and Espacio Valverde

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