Spain's Paco-era cooking: food nostalgia versus the frying pan

Old-school Spanish cooking and the nutritional price of nostalgia

Food nostalgia has a new catalogue: the classic Spanish recipe repertoire, that collection of time-honoured dishes now circulating in video format. Somewhere between tribute and warning, this look back at those plates leaves more than a cholesterol shiver.

Ensaladilla rusa, watermelon and chufas: the menu of an eternal summer

The classic ensaladilla rusa (Spanish potato salad) still reigns as the star dish of summer, with chilled watermelon for dessert and fairground chufas (tiger nuts) as an alternative. These are the classics that never go out of style, though more than one person would quibble about the watermelon. Also on the list are the heavyweights of the Spanish bar: escalope, steak sandwich and ham-and-cheese toastie, capable of whetting the appetite just by being named.

Fried food, cholesterol and the fragile memory of the postwar years

The criticism of this repertoire is blunt: it's all fried food, impossible to eat daily without sending cholesterol soaring and earning a "beer belly". There is also a health warning: many of those recipes were never designed to sit on a bar counter for hours without refrigeration, even if nobody complained back in the day. The famous "nobody died back then" often forgets that the bill arrives with a delay.

But memory also preserves the thrift cooking of the era. From the postwar years come gems such as tender broad bean pods, which were turned into omelettes and are now savoured as a delicacy.

The stage is set: the old-school Spanish recipe repertoire charms for its familiarity and alarms for what it lacks in hygiene and balance. What nobody can quite figure out is how anyone can miss so much a cuisine that, seen through today's eyes, was a life insurance policy against cholesterol.