TO David de Jorge Eceizabarrena (Hondarribia, 1970) it was not difficult for him to bury Robin Food, that television Pantagruel that between ETB2 and Telecinco aired more than 1,500 television programs. More sporadic, the Basque chef now ‘cooks’ on the modulated frequency with Carlos Alsina on Onda Cero. However, modulation may not be the word that defines David de Jorge, an old-school cook who believes in funds rather than spherifications.
Precisely that is his charm, always being a cook more in substance than in form and where noise should not let his message – studded with tacos – get into the marrow. He releases a book with the Debate publishing house, but It is not a recipe book nor is it an autobiography..
Define The Amazon fits in a Paraguayan It is a complicated task. As a guide to get to know the character, the book has its shades of biographical realitybut then he is filled with gastronomic memories, recommendations for tapas, wines and places and also, as is evident, he surrenders to the world of relativization about what he, now, considers hospitality should be.
Verbose, generous, very intelligent, an avid reader and, although he often denies it, a tireless worker, sharing a chat with David de Jorge is like opening a gastronomic book where there is knowledge, common sense and few pretensions. Just, possibly, what is not popular now in the kitchen or in the hospitality industry. This is what a face-to-face meeting with David de Jorge gives.
What is it like to tell recipes on the radio, which, currently in the image world we live in, seems like the anti-medium for telling recipes?
I have always been a fabulist and the recipes were already told on the radio before. Having to imagine how the cheek pads are looking is amazing to me. People are obsessed with the recipe and “pass me the recipe”, but then not even Bartolo cooks. We are worried about hoarding recipes, but then we don’t cook.
The Amazon fits in a Paraguayan: Guide to places, foods and drinks to enjoy like a pig (Cooking)
*Some prices may have changed since the last review
Now we are also immersed in a cackling about how expensive everything is, thinking that they are deceiving us with the price of oil, talking about prices…
You know what happens, I think that all of us who write or make a living from this have ended up turning our backs on agriculture and the countryside and have pitted the countryside against the city. We have always had access to a raw material and a product at home relatively cheap and in abundance. Suddenly, for some time now, that has changed and it seems that farmers, ranchers or fishermen are to blame. The big problem is that we don’t put ourselves in each other’s shoes. Yesterday I was driving in the car and I was thinking that we have turned “townie” into an insult and if we all lived more town-like or with a more town-like attitude we would surely live better.
“We have turned ‘small-town’ into an insult and if we all lived more small-town or with a more small-town attitude we would surely live better”
Now 53 years old and with this entire career already built. Would David de Jorge choose the same path if he restarted the game? Would you have been something else?
Yes of course. I would also have liked to be Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Miles Davis or Albrecht Dürer, of course, but I was a bad student and from a very young age I wanted to be a cook and I am 53 years old and I am still a cook and delighted with life because I continue dedicating myself to What I want to dedicate my whole life to and make a living like that seems like a blast to me.
Although from time to time you have things that, for work, you have to do.
Well, as will happen to you as a journalist, what happens to her (points to Eli, his wife, present in the interview) or will happen to Pedro Sánchez. The last thing I want to do is put up with the annoying and rude people.
Including journalists?
No no, cachis, for a niche that I could enter. Do you know what happens? I’m very glancing at you because I haven’t listened to the radio for many years, I read the newspaper and I avoid TV a lot because I try not to get upset, but in the end you are transmitters of what happens on the street.
Speaking of David de Jorge’s frankness and that direct tone that characterizes you. Do you think that in 2023 you would have been canceled for saying tacos or for recipes like the one in the whore chicken?
I am lucky that never, neither in ETB2 nor in Telecinco, has anyone called me from an office to say “don’t say this or don’t say the other.” Could going forward have played tricks on me? Yes, but if I take a general balance, it has been worth it. I’m not wrong, but it’s true that I always avoid doing real damage or gratuitous damage. What happens with the whore chicken thing is that it was misinterpreted because the tribute was to the whores, who have enough with their lives and it was the way to honor them, not the whores.
“It touches my balls that in my work now every God wants to transcend. It seems glorious to me that a doctor wants to transcend, but a cook?”
Do you think that hospitality or cooking has been perverted with certain messages of sustainability or the social importance that the chef now has? Is it a habitual sin now?
It touches my balls that in my work now everyone wants to transcend God. It seems glorious to me that a doctor wants to transcend, or that he wants a therapist, but a cook? A psychologist, a writer who knows how to grasp the human condition, but do we cooks also have to transcend now? The cook who wants to transcend becomes a pathological asshole. Nobody remembers Escoffier or Carême, or Ruperto de Nola because they made I don’t know what recipes, but because of the historical situations in which they lived.
You think we also have an overdose of content and wanting everything and wanting it now.
Yes, all that has changed, but it happens to the kitchen and anything. Look at the access to things that existed 30 or 40 years ago. Now every relationship with music, literature, cooking… Has changed. There is no more waiting, everything is immediate and everything being very easy all the time does not have to be good. We live physically and mentally stuffed because we have everything and all the time. Before, you looked forward to Christmas because it was time for nougat. Now you have them four months early. Or the prawns, which made you really excited, and now they are there every day.
Returning to the kitchen, you are an example of the old school and it is good for us to reinforce a phrase that Albert Adrià said, explaining that you cannot achieve excellence in cooking by working eight hours a day. Do you agree?
I have great respect for the Adriàs, Ferran and Albert, although my gastronomic culture is different, but I do belong to a culture that understands that to achieve things we have had to dedicate many hours. I belong to a culture of effort where my parents were shopkeepers and worked like true savages to have a car to take our four children on vacation to a town 25 kilometers from our house. And cooking is effort and spending hours doing physical things. Effort is inseparable from being clear that it is necessary, but it seems like a sham to tell people who want to do our job that they can achieve it without spending hours, but to sell to the crowd that with the culture of no effort you can achieve things in kitchen is a scoundrel. Be careful, that does not mean that we have to live like in the Roman Colosseum.
“Selling to the people that with the culture of no effort you can achieve things in the kitchen is a scam”
You think that work in the kitchen has been relativized with series, documentaries or programs and they dress it in pink.
People think you press a button and the food already tastes like that. Or they watch a film or a gastronomy documentary, which are very fashionable now, and they are all the same with a moral at the end, or they watch Masterchef and think that that is what the job is and that is not it. The job is not Masterchef or what I do, nor what Chicote does or the Netflix documentaries. The job is that of a snack bar owner or that of a guy who makes sandwiches.
Finally, speaking again about cooking and reality, what would have happened to David de Jorge without Martín Berasategui and what does he represent in your life? Do you think that his figure has not been valued enough in Spain?
Martin is my family. We are not aware, sometimes, of how he is alive and how he is fighting and how he is still there, but it is a very national disease. I think that Martín is a very loved person in Spain and inside and outside the union he falls like a motherfucker. Martín is a very good person, but also very smart and very professional. He connects with all of God and people go crazy with him. Wherever you go, they greet you and stop you. And the most frightening thing are the tentacles of pupils and students that are scattered. That only happens to him and Ferran Adrià. Neither Arzak, nor Subijana, nor Aduriz… Only Martín and Ferran.
Images | Penguin Random House
In DAP | David de Jorge: “From time to time I let out the fat man inside me, but I try to tame it in the best way possible”
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