Artist book
Riso and screen printed
Bilingual Galician-English
71 pages, 29 copies
2023
The publication “The 5 tortillas my grandma gave birth to (and the many more yet to come)” is a tortilla-only symbolic cookbook that collects my dad and his 4 sister’s recipes of tortilla and all my attempts of cooking it myself, as a way to gather my family’s heritage and document my own tortilla learning proccess at the same time.
It is a vulnerable recipe book, almost like a diary.
Artist book, food, culture, design, archive
Antwerpen
“In 1970 Violeta, my grandmother, gave birth to her last children twin girls, my aunts. This defined her legacy as well as how it would be learned and distributed.
7 mouths to feed, 5 being her children, were the cause for what became her two full time jobs: a small-town hardware store and her house duty with all that it entailed.
My grandmother became then, as a mother, a gastronomy institution.
It is fair to say that she cooked more tortillas in those 50 years than I probably will in my entire life. From her crafted and long perfected recipe, the learning process of 5 tortilla’s was started and 5 slightly different tortilla recipes were born.
When I tasted -what I didn’t know it was- her last tortilla, I decided one day I wanted my tortilla to be as good. When she died in 2020, all I could think about was to gather as much of her essence and significant aspects of her life as possible.
It wasn’t until this year that I remembered my thoughts and goals on the topic and ignited my interest in cooking related to artistic practice.
Tortilla is something so sacred to me I have always feared doing it myself just in case I ruined the magic. After having an epiphany and the idea for this project, I decided to go on a journey to perfectionate my own recipe. The information I will gather will also act as my fishing pole, as I will be able to cook tortilla for myself whenever I crave it.
This is what I wrote before starting to collect in the shape of a recipe every time I cooked tortilla to learn from my mistakes:
“My field notebook is an ongoing project to achieve the perfect self-crafted tortilla, and then go through the process of automatizing every single little step, both as a performance and as a personal goal in life.
The field notebook documents every time I cook tortilla, generally for a crowd of friends or my family. I would like this to also act as a record of how my relationships evolve through food and recipe sharing, while observing and experimenting how to make the tortilla an icon in my social circle”.
Every recipe in this book has been transcripted respecting the language I used in the moment of collecting it, with the exception of grammar adaptations to make it more coherent to the reader.
The fact that you are able to read this is because I had the kindness of translating the full content of this book, originally in galician (my mother tongue), so that more people interested in the project could share the experience with me.
It is universally agreed in my family that the best tortilla in the world is the one my grandmother used to cook. Although, my father always says each one of her four sisters makes a really good competitor for it in their own way, and his tortilla is also one of my favorites.
That is why I decided to start this project, to collect a detailed record of their tortillas, being able to learn from them and to make my contribution to the family’s history.
“Homemade cookbooks serve as historical or genealogical records of culinary heritage. The recipes represent a facet of family history, and provide a mean to pass along family traditions to the next generation” (Davis, et al., 201)
One of the reasons I don’t have The recipe -in caps-, is that my grandmother died before my interest on the project started.
This is not only a shadow over the book and the project in general, the thought of not ever knowing from her mouth what is the recipe1, but it also leaves me with the conundrum of the projects that will come for which I progresively will have absences of information due to absences of people. Far (kinda) from depressing me, this drives me to create more in the time that I have.
Another one of the reasons, and also the reason why tortilla doesn’t have a record on cookbooks before it started to be used as an element of Spanish nation-building in the late XIX century2 for the elite to start eating what was a poor people food: anyone who wants to cook it knows how to.
Tortilla is a dish with a very high rate of generational handover, a witness and living example of oral tradition.
My grandma never wrote a recipe of her tortilla because that would be redundant; once you have the keys to your own tortilla it is something you never forget, like riding a bike.
The woman to whom I dedicate a book to is also the woman from whom I inherited the name from.
Violeta was a stubborn person, that knew everything to be known in Malpica, that knew how to haggle like anyone else, was smart as a whip, liked to be right and that things were the way she wanted, had a lot of sense of humor and a big sense of care and affection; she was, after all, the matriarch of a 20 members’ + family.
I like to think I am like her in some ways.”
1 There is an ongoing subproject to try to recreate my grandma’s tortilla from her daughters’ memories.
2 Topic that I talk extensively about in my master thesis, “We don’t talk about politics at the table”.