Meet Spain’s Queens of Comfort Food
One of the country’s most beloved culinary societies, the guisanderas of Asturias are preserving the region’s traditional cooking one stew pot at a time.
Elvira Fernández García strides out to the vegetable patch, a basket under her arm, while a train rattles along the valley in the distance. She cuts a handful of collard leaves for pote de berzas, a mixed-meat, bean-and-vegetable stew that hinges on the Spanish variety of this leafy green. Back in her kitchen, several large stew pots bubble gently on the stove.
Born and raised in Asturias, the lush region on Spain’s northern coast, Elvira, or “Viri,” runs a small restaurant in San Román, where acres of farmland sit beside the river Nalón. El Llar de Viri, or Viri’s Hearth, occupies the ground floor of the house where Elvira’s parents once had their farmstead, grain mill, and butchery. Over the course of a quarter-century, together with her daughter-in-law María José “Majo” Miranda, she has transformed the restaurant into a sanctuary of traditional Asturian cuisine: stuffed cabbage; cornmeal fritters called tortos; creamy arroz con leche; and fabada, the iconic pork and bean stew. While most of modern-minded Spain has tended to ignore these powerfully flavored, calorific dishes, here, at least, they have stood the test of time.
A good-humored woman of small stature with cotton-candy-pink hair, Elvira is not merely a restaurateur. She’s also a member of an exclusive socio-culinary circle of Asturian chefs: the guisanderas. Historically, a guisandera was a semi-professional cook, often an independent woman, widowed or unmarried. She cooked in private homes and could also be tasked with catering weddings and other events. Before the Spanish Civil War, when communication between the deep valleys of Asturias was difficult, the local guisandera—wise to herbal potions and poultices—was also often called upon to contend with matters of health. The term eludes easy translation; “stew-maker” may be as close as English gets, but to a Spaniard, the verb “guisar,” from which the word derives, evokes comforting notions of long-simmered casseroles in cozy domestic kitchens.
It was this kind of cooking, and this kind of cook, that brought me to Asturias in the first place. While for 34 years I have lived elsewhere in Spain, I’ve long felt the draw of a region that fosters its culinary heritage with a protective sense of pride. For too long, front-page Spanish food stories have been paeans to the zeal of modernizing chefs wielding gels and foams over their global-inspired ssams and ceviches. The country’s traditional cuisines, meanwhile, have long been ignored—something the guisanderas hope to change.
El Llar de Viri looks and feels like a country home with its rabbit warren of nooks and crannies and its cheerfully mismatched furniture and memorabilia cramming the walls. Back in the kitchen, Elvira brings me up to speed on the Club de Guisanderas de Asturias, an association founded in 1997 with the mission of giving greater visibility to women cooks whose important role in the region’s restaurant scene had been insufficiently recognized. The club meets monthly to discuss recipes, offer advice, and debate the thorny question of additions to its 40-strong membership. Strict criteria apply, Elvira tells me: Members must either own or co-own their own restaurant, and must have specialized in traditional Asturian cooking for at least eight years.
On a table by the entrance, I find a cookbook, recently published in celebration of the club’s 25th anniversary. Its pages contain a trove of traditional recipes: beef tongue casserole; an Asturian seafood stew called caldereta; pig’s trotters simmered with fabes, the thumb-size local beans—each dish paired with a photograph of the proud chef who prepared it. With the book as my guide, I set off on a tour into a food culture little known even to many Spaniards.
Contrary to assumptions, guisandera cooking doesn’t belong exclusively to the rural interior and is not solely meat based. The trail leads me from village to village and from the mountains to the coast, in what becomes a tantalizing blur of rib-sticking stews and substantial desserts.
At Casa Eutimio in Llastres, a picturesque village stuck like a limpet to the steep Asturian coastline, I sit at a table overlooking boats plying the steel blue Cantabrian Sea. María Busta Rosales, daughter of founders Eutimio Busta and Aida Rosales, serves me a plate of battered monkfish, pan-fried so gently that the fish retains all of its juicy freshness. The true guisandera is unafraid of simplicity. My main course, a turbot that landed in the port of Llastres that afternoon, is finished with a simple sauce of vinegar and toasted garlic. It’s so perfectly cooked that I wonder if I’ve ever eaten a more sensational piece of fish.
Behind Casa Eutimio, I find a saga of family, community, and sheer hard work. Aida, who, at 80, is the most senior member of the club, comes from a farming family and learned to cook as a teenager, helping out around the house of her brother, a priest. Since opening the restaurant in 1964, she and her husband Eutimio have rarely taken a day off from running their restaurant, the boutique hotel above it, and the anchovy conservera down in the basement. The pair also managed to bring up seven children, of whom María, 36, is the youngest. “If I have the capacity for self-sacrifice,” she tells me, “it’s thanks to them.”
The guisanderas are a broad church, and each member has her own story. Mother-daughter teams are relatively common in the club, as are mother-in-law-daughter-in-law combos. There’s at least one instance (at Casa Lula in Tineo) of three generations successively occupying the role. And while some of these women were born into culinary dynasties, others have learned on the job, including María Antonia Fernández of Mesón El Centro, a self-taught cook who pieced together her take on cocina marinera, or seafood cooking, through recipe books and her own memories of life in the small fishing town of Puerto de Vega.
Teresa Camacho had been working in a law office in Barcelona before she took over Bar Camacho, a tiny one-story house in the mining town of Anieves. I fell hard for her cebollas rellenas (stuffed onions) and beef tripe slow-cooked with cow’s feet, serrano ham, and pork loin—dishes her mother once served to hungry workers from the nearby cement factory and coal mine. Teresa has sensibly maintained these platos de cuchara, or “spoon dishes,” that first brought the punters to her family’s restaurant 40 years ago. “Traditional cooking is easy,” she tells me with a smile and a shrug. “All you need are good raw materials, which we’re lucky enough to have around here. That—and plenty of time.”
This is a story about continuity, and yet the figure of the guisandera continues to evolve. If, until recently, most were strict upholders of tradition, the region’s latest wave is not nearly so hidebound. Take, for example, Casa Chuchu in Turón: The restaurant, which opened as a neighborhood bar in 1931, looks from the street like an old-fashioned cider house—one of hundreds found all over Asturias. It turns out to be something rather more novel. At 3 p.m., the place is buzzing. The local crowd settles in for a Spanish lunch stretching long into the afternoon. And Rafael Rodríguez, grandson of the original owners, swings by the tables, dispensing natural wines, cult sherries, and new-wave ciders.
Meanwhile, chef Natalia Menéndez, married to Rafael since 1996, delivers a menu that elegantly bridges the gap between tradition and today. A salpicón de marisco, made with big chunks of langoustine and monkfish, and an escabeche of roasted beets and anchovy precede unimpeachable Asturian classics: fabada, bonito-stuffed onions, and cream-filled pastry milhojas. “I learned from my mother, who was a wonderful cook, that the base of tradition should never be lost,” Natalia explains. “If something works, it doesn’t need fixing.”
After three days of talking and eating in the down-home restaurants of Asturias, I start to realize that tradition, while sometimes a straitjacket, can also be a far looser-fitting garment. The basic repertoire of the guisanderas is seldom subject to the vicissitudes of culinary fashion.
Just ask Joaquina Rodríguez, whose legendary eating house Casa Chema sits in the hills outside Oviedo, the Asturian capital. Joaquina began her career at age 14 as an apprentice with Dorina García Valle at Casa Ovidio in Corvera. Dorina passed away in 2010 at the age of 84, after running her restaurant for nearly half a century. “She was my maestro,” Joaquina recalls, standing by my table on my last day in Asturias. “Chefs nowadays are always trying to do modern riffs on our old things.” Joaquina raises her hands to heaven in the Spanish gesture of exasperation. “But I ask: How are you going to make a fabada foam if you can’t make a fabada?”
A cow moos in the field next door; from the city below comes the distant hum of traffic. I sit back in my chair and ponder Joaquina’s menu—a catalog of “old things” such as fabes with clams, rollo de bonito (tuna roulade) with homemade tomato sauce, and a casserole of pitu de caleya—the Asturian term for a rooster that has spent his life pecking along the country paths. For years, the Spanish food scene, dizzy with the excitement of spherification and deconstruction, has had little time for its own honest-to-goodness regional fare. But more than elaborate displays of ego-driven artistry, what local diners now crave is tradition, simplicity, and respect for ingredients, which just so happen to be the pillars of Asturian cooking. And so a new generation has begun to discover the often unassuming—but always recommendable—places where guisanderas like Joaquina, Aida, and Elvira are in the kitchen, standing guard over their bubbling pots.
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