The chef María Nicolau (La Garriga, 1982) presents this Thursday at the Ignacio Aldecoa House of Culture in Vitoria-Gasteiz her new book «Quemo!» (Península), a cross between personal memories and recipe books where the chef reviews her life and professional career in the world of cooking over the last two decades.
Following the success of his literary debut, “Cocina o barbarie” (Cocina or barbarie) (2022), Nicolau returns with a volume in which he reviews his life since he left the Faculty of Sociology to enter a cooking school, at a time when in Spain “the gastronomic revolution of the century is breaking out.”
The leap that the protagonist herself makes, from the inn to the avant-garde cuisine, passing through decaying hotels or restaurants with pretentiousness, is the same one that, in a few years, as reported by the Península publishing house, “made Spanish cuisine in general, leaving many behind, elevating others to altars and forgetting, in some cases, the essential values of a gastronomy that was already rich beforehand.
The expression that gives the book its title is “the warning voice that is shouted in professional kitchens when you walk past a colleague with a boiling pot or a hot frying pan.”
The book, which wanders between memoirs and recipe books, “shares some of that fiery energy that a kitchen is imbued with in the middle of service, since Maria Nicolau writes like a stew, with pulse, demand and rhythm,” her publisher highlights.
Maria Nicolau has worked for more than twenty years in numerous restaurants in Spain and France, and currently lives, writes and cooks in a town of three hundred inhabitants.
After writing “Cocina o barbarie”, Nicolau became a regular contributor to radio and television and is the author of a column on gastronomy in the written press.
The author claims to follow a maxim: «When in doubt, I make cookies. It always works for me. When I finish I feel better and, if not, at least I have had a snack. I have always made the big decisions in life following this logic,” she jokes.
In the book, Nicolau reviews the moment when he decided to abandon his Sociology studies. “From a certain distance and in black and white, I saw myself as a graduate, fifty years old and tired-eyed, sitting in front of a computer at a veneered chipboard desk, typing, from nine to seven,” she reflects.
“cookies!”
At that moment, she remembers “inwardly screaming ‘Cookies!’, horrified!” »I picked up my junk, put my backpack on my back, left the university and never came back. “This is how the path that would lead me to becoming a chef began,” she adds.
From that decision, and after a summer of personal reflection, Nicolau set the culinary field as his goal. “Not because cooking was something that had ever particularly interested me,” he admits, since “I had not inherited any hospitality legacy that should last.”
Simply put, he continues in the book, “I saw cooking as a form of craftsmanship, work done with the hands, so I stood at the reception of the most beautiful hotel in town and told them that if they needed any kitchen help “They could count on me from that precise moment.”
The presentation of the book will take place at the Ignacio Aldecoa House of Culture starting at 7:00 p.m. with the presence of the author herself. The event, sponsored by the Álava Provincial Council, is free to enter until capacity is reached and will be led by the journalist and gastronomic disseminator Ana Vega.
