Today—in the middle of 2023—it may seem so easy, cheap and obvious to us to have a carton of eggs and a few potatoes in the pantry that it is ridiculous for us to conceive of a world without potato omelette.
We are no longer entering into war – since the topic we will talk about today is more severe – childish with onion or without onion, but rather with a reality that a little more than 80 years ago was documented by the gastronome Ignasi Doménech when publishing the book Souvenir kitchen (I wish my food) in which he glossed how the Spanish, immersed in the Civil War, had to get by with what they had to eat.
Those were the times when pea flour was converted into an all-terrain element; to replace coffee with roasted chicory; of juggling ration cards; cheat with the black market and the black market, and, as we will see below, not to give up the potato omelet even without having eggs or potatoes.
We insist on the apparently grotesque nature of a situation that Doménech, one of the most prolific gourmets and kitchen editors in Spaindocumented between 1937 and 1938, publishing in 1941 this fundamental work to understand what and how that starving Spain ate that seems so remote to us today and that the Trea publishing house was pleased to republish in 2011, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the publication of the original .
There he realizes that the Spanish They did not seem to have the task of doing without the potato omeletteeven though its two main ingredients are missing, resorting to ingenuity as a fundamental tool to, to the extent possible, falsify an atrocious and carpantian reality.
Resource Kitchen (I wish my food)
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Instead of potatoes; orange peels Instead of egg; a kind of paste with oil, flour, baking soda and water. This is how they managed to turn the tables—and never better said—with a recipe of pure use that would make us pale today when we think of our tupperware.
How to make ‘war omelet with mock potatoes’
In this case, what Doménech cites as “war omelette with simulated potatoes” It is provided with an elementary recipe that, surely, seems laborious to us today. For three people, use three thick-crusted oranges, one onion, salt, 1 clove of garlic, olive oil, 4 tablespoons of wheat flour, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, white pepper powder and water.
To start it up, he comments, you have to “grate the orange peel until the white part appears.” Then the bark will have to be cut into fine pieces and soaked in water for two or three hours.
After that time, it is drained, salted and fried in a pan with a little of the onion, as if it were a regular potato. Once ready, the ‘egg’ would be made.
To do this, rub the bottom of a soup plate with a clove of garlic, add three or four drops of oil, salt, flour, baking soda, pepper and between eight and ten tablespoons of water, mixing everything until there are no lumps left.
Then the orange is mixed with the ‘egg’, poured into a frying pan with a little olive oil and kitchen from both sides as if it were a real tortilla.
Bra Dupla Premiere Double omelette pan 20 cm made of cast aluminum with non-stick coating, suitable for all types of cookers including induction, Black and Red [Amazon Exclusive]
*Some prices may have changed since the last review
A real gastronomic multiplication prodigy to get by and that shows, luckily, that not all times in the past were better and how lucky we are now going to the supermarket and protesting how the price of olive oil is rising.
Images | iStock
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