Reviews
Here are a selection of reviews for the book, as published in England, the United States, Spain and Denmark.
I find Hispanist Vicky Hayward’s analysis of Franciscan Juan Altamiras’s cookbook (1745) a monumental achievement. Popular cookery with a refined modernity from over 270 years ago. Forgotten creativity. Highly recommended. Great prologue by Aduriz of Mugaritz.”
(@JCCapel) Twitter
I had heard about Juan Altamiras and his cookbook when I was working on my own book on the food of Spain and was thrilled to find that one of the best writers on the Spanish restaurant scene and its innovative chefs was doing an in-depth research about the 18th century’s Franciscan friar’s life and times as well as his cooking. Vicky Hayward’s own journey in bringing to light the mysteries behind this little known culinary classic makes fascinating reading while she offers us a taste of Altamiras’s kitchen with delicious modern versions of his recipes. The book chimes perfectly with the popular desire today to understand the story behind what we eat.»
Author of «The Book of Jewish Food» and «The Food Of Spain»
The book does not just list his recipes, with a few explanatory comments. It’s a whole new book….With the context to Altamiras’s life that Vicky Hayward provides so eruditely, food becomes part of social history. This hardback book is produced with full references to satisfy any student of cooking history and is also highly accesible….”
“Cooking Revolution. Reliving the tastes of the 18th century.” Catalonia Today
[…] Vicky Hayward analyses the work of Raimundo Gómez, our protagonist’s real name, and she peels back the various layers around the original core of the book, analysing and exploring in-depth details below the surface, latent messages, and social, political and cultural aspects…. ‘She modernises it [the book] , restoring its considerable value, interweaving her roles as writer and essayist, and her thesis within the original work: the commitment to preserve knowledge, plurality and the cultural legacy of earlier times…. The instructions for the modern kitchen are designed to settle points raised by the text, whether within the recipes or as part of Altamiras’s way of seeing the world and his approach to cooking. Highly recommended.”
Madrid / Barcelona, LeCool.com
… magnificent …”.”
“Proemio”, La Colección Gastronómica Sebastián Damunt, Eduardo Mazas
Altamiras captured the essence of Spanish cooking, its signs of identity and depth. By contextualising the recipes of his small but brilliant book, this edition allows us to enter his kitchen, see through his eyes, and think how cookery may be a reflection on the landscape around us.”
CHEF-PROPRIETOR AT MICHELIN-STARRED RESTAURANT L’ESCALETA (ALICANTE).
This complete new edition lets us understand the detail of how Altamiras polished recipes, flavours and techniques, and is a timely reminder that today’s Spanish gastronomy is rooted in the wealth and subleties of popular cuisine.”
Chef-Proprietor at Michelin-starred restaurant El Bohío (Toledo), and judge of Spanish Masterchef
Most books on cookery in Spain are little more than a mish-mash cobbled-together collection of other people’s recipes. Vicky Hayward’s visit to the 18thC via this Spanish friar’s collection of recipes is an astonishing work of anthropology [or history] whose modernity and relevance to Spanish cooking today is extraordinarily prophetic. If you want to see the future of Spanish cooking. the world’s most celebrated cuisine – go back to the past. To its roots.”
Juan Altamiras was just a pen-name on a title page until Hayward brought him to life and now, after years of research… she introduces us to a quirky and warm-hearted individual and his inspired cookery…. It takes the skills of an investigative journalist, the insights of a novelist and the intuitions of a good cook to unravel the narrative and explain the gastronomy …. Wiser heads than mine suggested that Vicky go straight to primary sources and also talk to Franciscan friars. The result is a brilliant breakthrough in understanding the background to Altamiras’s cooking as his approach to food… The awesome bibliography and footnotes reveal a fascinating range of sources and contacts.”
Author of «The Oxford Companion to Italian Food» and «Food in Art from Prehistory to the Renaissance»
Vicky Hayward, an independent researcher, has done a remarkably good job at not only introducing Altamiras to an English-speaking audience, but in providing a thorough and erudite commentary on Altamiras, his cooking, and the times in which he lived. The format Hayward has chosen … works perfectly in contemplating the difficulty of translating 18th-century culinary Spanish into not only the translation of the recipe as originally written, but in transforming it into a modern recipe that could be cooked in today’s kitchens, and, most importantly, providing a commentary to better understand Altamiras’s original intent and the historical connections and milieu of his writing. This is an admirable achievement. Hayward’s commentary notes include references to as varied sources as Don Quixote, Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, and the ninth-century Cordoban Spanish-Arab epicure Ziryab, and to many more as well. Although not a professional historian, Hayward was guided in her historical approach by two distinguished historians, Carlo Ginzburg and Marcelin Defourneaux, and this influence shows in her approach to Altamiras. Hayward’s is an impressive and prodigious achievement…. many, almost all, of Altamiras’s recipes have a close affinity, perhaps not unsurprisingly, with contemporary Aragonese and Catalan cooking. Hayward remarks on this numerous times in her many conversations with contemporary Spanish chefs …. [She] also has an extensive section of notes and bibliography that will be appreciated by any reader whose interest has been piqued and scholars who would like to delve further. Hayward’s impressive and important achievement is so not only because of the historical importance of this work but for a deeper understanding of Spain’s culinary patrimony. It is a contribution to culinary history in general, and like all such historical cookbooks, a delicious way to taste history. This book is highly recommended.”
(WINNER “JAMES BEARD COOKBOOK DEL AÑO”, 2000), New York Journal of Books, July 2017.
Gourmets and Spanish food historians have long known about the eighteenth-century Franciscan friar, Juan Altamiras, who published a cookbook documenting the then-current state of Spanish cooking…. Hayward has performed an estimable service to the Anglophone world by … making available this seminal work at a time when today’s innovative Spanish chefs have brought their native cuisine to the world stage. Altamiras renders his recipes more as general techniques, assuming readers skilled in kitchen traditions and ready to cope with the absence of precise measures and temperatures offered by today’s kitchen technologies. Hayward’s notes make these antique recipes … more accessible. She notes that Altamiras was concerned that his recipes not only tasted good but also succored the sick and infirm. Such insightful glosses bring to life this remarkable and talented friar’s achievement.”
Booklist.
What Hayward finds most surprising about Altamiras’s writing is its familiar tone. He begins the book with a friendly confidence…. And then he continues with completely contemporary advice…. Hayward means for the dishes to be cooked in contemporary kitchens…. Her headnotes offer cooking advice and historical context and so they toggle between Altamiras’s original versions and Hayward’s updated versions for contemporary cooks…. Altamiras is an engaging kitchen companion … he is clearly proud of a well-cooked dish.”
CHoW News, Culinary Historians of Washington D.C. & Appetite For Books blogspot.
This new edition published by Ariel, with a prologue by Andoni Aduriz, includes the original text by Raimundo Gómez (Juan Altamiras’s real name) and Vicky’s modernised recipes, some reinterpreted by chefs (Kiko Moya, Diego Gallegos …) – as well as her detailed and magnificent study …. An edition like this should have existed long ago, but neither academics nor Aragonese experts had brought such rigour or passion to their readings of New Art.”
15 gastronomic trends for 2018: “… hispanist Vicky Hayward revindicates the insulting modernity of Juan Altamiras’s New Art of Cookery and adapts his dishes to home kitchens. All the recipes work!”
Gastroactitud blog
Juan Altamiras’s recipes reveal how Franciscan food grew around simplicity, food alms, healthy eating, and the idea of food without frontiers. What makes this edition of his book special is Vicky Hayward’s exhaustive multidisciplinary research, which allows us to appreciate the original in full.”
Order of Franciscan Friars, Historian and archivist of Franciscan life in Spain and the Far East
And herein also lies an underlying message from Vicky… a desire to avoid loss of knowledge, pluralism and cultural wealth from times gone by…. Yes, the avantgarde is demanding, or disturbing, it can make you uncomfortable. And it’s spirit can lie in an old bottle or book until somebody comes along and wakes up the genius inside.”
FROM HIS PROLOGUE TO “NUEVO ARTE DE LA COCINA ESPAÑOLA” (FACEBOOK)
Et af de kontroversielle pukter var, af bogen harde mange opskifter for de fattige. Det var i en tid, hvor bøger var for de riger, og det overdoldige franske køkken gek sin sejrsgang blandt de mere velstillede spaniere, men Juan Altamras tog også de mes simple ingredienser med, og som Vicky Hayward skriver, sa var der også en staerk indfygdelce fra såvel det jødiske som det muslimske køkken.”
Kristelit Dagblad
Not only is this book fascinating, but it contains recipes you really will want to cook – the descriptions alone are enough to make your mouth water.”
Comfortably Hungry
[…] What the British hispanist handles and defines very well is the innovation and culinary talent revealed by the work of this ’18th-century Ferran Adrià’, as she calls the friary writer….”
Crónicas, El Mundo
[…] This is a new edition of Altamiras’s original text, but at the same time a private journey back to his life and times, and one full of emotions…. Vicky breathes life into the book and she makes you dream, takes you travelling with her. She seats you at the refectory table with the friars who left nothing on their plates as a question of principle. ‘They ate in silence, their sleeves rolled up, their napkins unfolded….’ She takes you to the markets on Saturdays …. And to his friary at Christmas when turkey with cardoon might make a feast, if there was one. If not then there might be only salted sardines. Eel, cooked in a hazelnut sauce reminiscent of all-i-pebre, appears in the original book and in the author’s reflections…. There are references to Bunuel and the church bells of Calanda, to Miguel Delibes and hunting in the monastic kitchen…. a past that becomes the present through stories that are dishes. Dishes that, as Aduriz puts it in his prologue, let you eat stories. And stories which, in the end, are live history in the hands of a hispanist who fell in love with a friar who captured life in an old recipe book, now once again as live as it was before.”
‘Palabras’ (suplemento), Las Provincias
Research projects, some beyond kitchens, like Chef BNE or historian Vicky Hayward’s brilliant reedition of Juan Altamiras’s Nuevo arte de cocina, will encourage others to follow similar paths of historic research ….”
El Correo (Jantour gastronomic supplement)
With 210 recipes, Nuevo arte de la cocina española de Juan Altamiras shows an 18th-century Spanish chef’s creativity channelled by the friars’ precarious economy. ‘The Franciscans didn’t have large farm estates, or fishing rights, nor did their cooks receive orders about what to cook since their subsistence relied on local ingredients and food alms, sometimes given by visitors…[says Hayward], ‘Altamiras explored different ingredients’ possibilities with a really surprising modernity and freedom.’”
Madrid Fusión (blog)
[…] author Vicky Hayward has added considerable value to her translation [of Altamiras’s original text] by giving guidelines for today’s cooks (from experienced chefs) and interweaving the story of eighteenth-century Spanish life…. It’s well done, retaining the spirit and style of the original and making it accesible for the modern cook …. one of the great points about Altamiras and probably one of the reasons his book ran to twenty editions – he’s not prescriptive about ingredients and you can adjust the recipes to take account of what’s in season or – more importantly – what’s in the larder…. The book was a good read and I got far more from it than I expected.” Rating 4/5
The Bookbag
And so [Vicky] … decided to study the book in depth: for a decade she cooked the recipes, researched … the gastronomic, social, historical and cultural context; and she developed modern recreations of the recipes as well as her annotations, commentaries and bibliography designed to help those who want to prepare any of these dishes as well as historians who want to follow up her references for their own research…”
¡La leche! (young adults’ cultural magazine)
I was eating pan con tomate for breakfast before I learned how to walk….’ [says Vicky]. Now she is an expert in our food culture, the wealth of which and its many influnces and diversity are little studied. Her latest contribution: restoring friar Juan Altamiras, a pioneering 18th-century cook ahead of his time to his place in culinary history. She was given his book at the beginning of the 1990s. ‘Discovering his work was a slow process because I had to learn to read between the lines of the recipes and do a lot of work in the kitchen.‘ ”
“Ghostbusters”, Infolibre
At a time when aristocratic French cuisine was the only Spanish gastronomy – everyone else simply cooked – Altamiras turned popular dishes into alta cocina as a realisation of Franciscan ideas: careful use of produce and the improvement of everyday cookery.”
Información de Alicante
This year the Three Kings left me a magnificent present: the book written by Vicky Hayward… This edition, commented and reworked for modern readers, is the fruit of more than ten years of research by the prestigious hispanist …. it is also a book about social history.”
(Academía Aragonesa de Gastronomía), journalist and editor, Lugares Con Estrella, blog
For this Franciscan friary cook [Ángel Serrano] the recovery of «Altamiras’s» culinary art thanks to Vicky Hayward’s work is more necessary than ever …. In her book, based on ten years of research and writing, she sets all of the original recipes from New Art in the context of eighteenth-century cooking and the foods of that period, helping to explain why it was the most frequently republished cookery manual of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
Levante EMV
In this pre-Christmas season recipe books are coming hot off the press …. my pick among ‘those that have reached me… is Nuevo arte de la cocina española, a mid-eighteenth century cookbook … written by Aragonese friar…’ Juan Altamiras, now published in a new edition by award-winning hispanist Vicky Hayward. Austere but printed in two colours, the book gives a substantial and very accessible collection of contextualised recipes. This is a cookbook that will be relished by gourmets who are tired of gastronomic trickery, excess and minimalism ….”
Cocinando (perdices y gatas), El País (Babelia)
For professional reasons Vicky watched Spain’s avant-garde culinary revolution from close at hand and admires its chefs, but she also learned to love ’shepherds’ dishes, the traditional home-cooked recipes, which can get lost,’ so when she came across Altamiras’s book she decided to research it in homage to popular cookery…. She says the Spanish culinary avant-garde has often initiated the recovery of such popular regional dishes, noting it as ‘an important contribution.`”
EFE / El Heraldo de Aragón
[…] This is far more than a practical cookbook; it is also about the social and gastronomic history of Spain.”
El Aderezo, blog
[…] the British expert not only recreates the book’s original 206 dishes, she has also undertaken exceptional research so she can accompany each recipe with her own commentary, the quantities of ingredients Altamiras didn’t supply, and the book’s setting in 18th-century Spain.”
El Periodico
[…] The author, Vicky Hayward – hispanist, editor and journalist – dedicated ten years to researching New Art’s significance , sampling and updating its dishes. Altamiras believed popular recipes could be gourmet delicacies. ‘He breaks radically with earlier court cooks’ recipe books,’ says Hayward. ‘His dishes were designed for modest kitchens.‘”
La Vanguardia (digital)
[…] The new edition of this gem of a cookbook, by British hispanist Vicky Hayward, not only draws out and explains its wealth of content for readers in 2017 …. It also offers modern versions of the recipes alongside the originals. These incorporate exact quantities and adapt techniques and ingredients to today’s readers, a blessing for contemporary cooks given that supermarkets don’t sell verjuice and Altamiras gave the name ‘frying’ to any cooking method in which food came into direct contact with fat – whether by sweating, tossing, sealing food till golden or making a confit, distinctions of technique unknown to eighteenth-century foodies.”
El Comidista – EL PAÍS
I bought this marvellous book a week ago and for me it has become essential reading, as it should for anyone who enjoys cooking and its history, which plays such an important part in understanding the Spanish kitchen.”
Alambique blog
LV: Describe Altamiras’s cooking.
V: Popular, ingenious, modest, rustic: dishes from villages and the countryside, set apart from courtly or French refinement, rooted in the kitchen-garden, and sometimes in Morisco and Jewish dishes. Genuine popular Spanish cookery!
LV: An example?
V: The constant use of olive oil in his recipes, a legacy of the Moriscos and Jews, who avoided pork fat. For example, Altamiras makes his deep-fried puffs without lard: he uses olive oil for the batter and frying.”
“La Contra”, La Vanguardia
I’ve had this little book in my culinary library for years and could never get past the old-fashioned spelling and typeface to actually try any of the recipes…. In the book’s prologue, top chef Andoni Luis Aduriz of Restaurante Mugaritz in the Basque Country insists on the “value added” of old recipes that, as with very old wine, add a new dimension, a sixth sense, a taste of history. ”
My Kitchen in Spain
[Altamiras] packed into the first part of New Art all his knowledge of popular meat cookery – stews, braised estofados, pot-roasts and roasts, soups, creams … game and poultry cookery … and gave a special article on the pig-killing, described here in full for the first time in a Castilian recipe book. The best and most thoroughly researched study of this work, by hispanist Vicky Hayward, is published as a modern updated edition … which incorporates her commented narrative and [in the Spanish edition a prologue by cook Andoni Luis Aduriz].”
REVISTA ORIGEN
The book does not only include classic friary dishes, but also contextualises them culturally and reconsiders them for 21st-century readers and chefs…. One comes away from reading it with the realisation, as Hayward puts it, “Franciscan food had little to do with monastic food as we think of it today ….”
Heraldo de Aragón
Food in Holy Week was meatless, but it brought with it an explosion of flavour. Following weeks of beans, leaves and roots, there would be fresh fish and blancmange in wealthy homes, salt cod and sweet dumplings in poorer ones.” So writes Vicky Hayward in New Art of Cookery A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook, a book fundamental for learning what was eaten [in past centuries]…. Over half the delicious collection of recipes are dishes for days of abstinence.”
El Comidista (El País)
[…] a text much talked about in recent weeks … is Nuevo arte de la cocina española de Juan Altamiras by Vicky Hayward, published by Ariel …. 206 original ideas which today, with the current mood for all things natural, different and healthy, are as groundbreaking as they were when they were first published.”
“Viaje a lo inimaginable”, El Correo de Andalucía
Alberto Fernández and Federico Jiménez Losantos
“Es La Mañana de Federico”, esradio