The most desired book on Spanish gastronomy: it was published in 1993 and is priced at more than 3,700 euros

It is a collector's book. It was published in 1993. A humble edition, published by the Empúries publishing house, which at first no one suspected could become a reference. the

is a sought-after and desired book in the gastronomic environment, not only by chefs, but also by fans of good food and by romantics who long for those first years in which people began to talk about what decades later would be the restaurant. most influential in the world. “It is a legendary book because it was the first to be published on Spanish haute cuisine, which had a lot of influence among the chefs of this generation,” acknowledges its author, Ferran Adrià.

The work collects in a visionary way not only the recipes that were cooked in the restaurant, opened in 1961 by the German couple, Hans Schilling and Marketta Schilling, but also includes an analysis of what was beginning to be cooked in the remote Cala Montjoi, in Rosas (Girona). Because it was in the eighties when, after the entry in 1981 of Juli Soler as director and three years later of Adrià as cook, the restaurant began to lay the foundations for the gastronomic revolution that was experienced in Spain in the following decades.

Recipe books and books with personal conceptions about cooking in general, there were many works on the market, says the author, but “there were few that focused on the analysis of styles, techniques, or creation methods, and this work is important because it represented a desire to codify our cuisine from a theoretical point of view.” He opened a path and represented a line of work that later led elBulli to organize, classify and share what was done there in different works.

Over the years, and despite the numerous works written about the chef and everything that happened in this remote place on the Costa Brava,

has become a sought-after piece. There is a single volume, in the Catalan edition,

second-hand, available on Amazon, of course, after paying 3,750 euros. “It has become a collector's book, difficult to find, which is why it has skyrocketing prices. The same thing happens to the first book that the Noma restaurant published — it was also, like elBulli, chosen five times as the best restaurant in the world, according to The World's 50 Best Restaurants list —, which cannot be found,” explains Adriá, who confesses that he still has in his possession about four volumes of that out-of-print and desired edition.

The added value of the book, he insists, is that its 224 pages cover the restaurant's most radical moment: the years 1990 and 1991. In addition to recipes, such as the green bean nest with lobster claws, the tender almond terrine and truffles with mushroom skewers, or the Gaudí mullet —in homage to the architect and greatest representative of Catalan modernism, whose ceramic mosaics served as a reference for Adrià when composing dishes—, the starting point is narrated, when they did not handle references. It is, as stated in its pages, a triple somersault, born from euphoria and materialized in perseverance. “There are many chefs who were inspired by this work to make their cuisine, and it could serve as a rediscovery for people who are now 40 years old, who did not know what was done there.” Among other discoveries, he continues, the long and narrow menu was born at elBulli, as well as the use of medical tongs to handle food in the kitchen and which now hang from the jackets of all the cooks, or the use of plastic pipettes, that were used in laboratories.

What the chef regrets is that no one has “recognized what Spanish gastronomy did in those and subsequent years, and has not given it a name, just as was done with

.”

For those who cannot shell out the more than 3,000 euros that

costs , Adriá suggests a more complete and extensive book than the previous one,

, on sale for 130 euros. The volume covers the first years of joint work of Juli Soler, Ferran Adrià and Albert Adrià, in a period in which, after a search for their own style of cooking, the style of Mediterranean flavor was established, and the first traces of a more contemporary style that emerged in 1994. It brings together in 608 pages, in addition to 226 dishes, the entire history of the restaurant until 1983, as well as an evolutionary analysis from then until 1994.

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