Tsunami, 18. Famine Food.

Yesterday, scrolling through Facebook, an article caught my eye, La hambruna española que fue borrada de la historia. It talked about what we remember in Spain as the "years of hunger" which happened in the 1940's, after the Civil War, during the Second World War. 

According to the article, it was more than just scarcity of food, but an actual famine comparable to the famine of the Netherlands of 1944, or of Greece during the Occupation, or even the Irish Potato Famine. Between 200,000 and 600,000 Spaniards are thought to have died during it, either directly of hunger, or of hunger-related diseases, such as typhus. The origins were not just because of the overwhelming disaster of our war, but also because of attempted state planning by Franco which failed miserably. Here, in Galicia, it didn't hit as hard because we didn't (and don't) have great tracts of land given over to commercial farming, but, rather, small plots that feed family farms, which excedent was then sold. 

In Galicia, it was the cities that were the hardest hit. Only those in rural areas with little land, or little luck, went hungry. There usually was always something to eat, if not of great quality, or in great quantity. My mother went hungry, but because her family had to sell crops because they had less money coming in. My father was hungry, too, but because they also didn't have as much land, and his single mother was a mid-wife who couldn't attend to the fields as much. My mother-in-law didn't go hungry. In her family there was plenty of land, and they had good crops. But her grandmother advised her to eat her bread in the house, and not in front of the neighbors, because the neighbors would beg her to give it to them.

Some of the products on the shelves in supermarkets today still stem from those times. Flan, or egg custard, has been a popular dessert since the end of the nineteenth century. But during the famine there were no eggs to be had unless you had chickens that you hadn't eaten. So, various companies devised a mix that, with the sole addition of milk, stirring over a flame, and then chilling, would produce an edible custard. These mixes still exist, Flanín and Flanes Mandarín. I remember my mother bought some packets one year we came on vacation, and I then ate Spanish flan a few times in Boston. 

Other ersatz products were coffee and sugar. Sugar was substituted by saccharine, and coffee was either substituted by malted cereal, or the little coffee that there was had chicory added to it, and burnt sugar. Even today, there is still on sale jars of instant cereal as if they were instant coffee. My mother used to drink it shortly after we moved here; I hated it. It tasted nothing whatever like coffee. Coffee with chicory is also still sold, called mezcla here. If regular coffee can be bitter, with chicory it's undrinkable. Yet there are people who still like it.  

One recipe from those times is bolicos. These are pancakes that can be made from flour, water, and salt. Sometimes, rashers of salt pork would be fried, and then the dough spread over them. It would be flipped to cook on the other side, and then it would be ready for the table. My mother used to make them by adding eggs to the dough, and usually without salt pork, dropping it by the spoonful into hot oil, and later scattering sugar over them. But, by the time I had been born, eggs were common. When she was young, her family had to sell the eggs their chickens laid. Other recipes from other parts of the country reflect starvation rations, such as migas from La Mancha. This consists of old bread, ripped up into small pieces, wet, and fried in oil along with pork fat, and sometimes bacon. Now, sliced sausages are also added.

Bread was one of the most basic foods. By hook or by crook, everyone found a way to acquire it or make it. The famine created a black market for food acquired outside the ration card. Some city people, whose servants regularly made trips to their villages, acquired flour this way. There's a story about a family in Santiago whose servant would bring milled flour from her village in a basket carried on her head, under the wash. One day, she was coming back to the city with the basket on her head, piled high with the clean wash, a sack of flour underneath. A Guardia Civil stopped her, told her to put down the basket, and started to riffle through the clothes. The woman set on him, beating at him, calling him a pervert for pawing through her clothes. He backed away quickly and let her continue on her way. She was never stopped again.

Our famed shellfish is mostly a product of famine, especially along the poor north coast. Percebes, goose barnacles, are now a delicacy commanding prices that are yet not enough reward for the dangers some of the gatherers face. Lapas, or limpets, are still eaten in some coastal communities. Sea urchins have become part of high gastronomy, as well. Even the common cockle, once available by the thousands on sandy beaches, which once helped keep alive entire families, is now too expensive for the common folk. 

We often consider the Chinese cuisines to be a product of lean times and famine, yet, if we scratch beneath the surface, we can find that most national dishes, or popular dishes, have their origin in hunger. Caldo Gallego now has so many ingredients that it tends to be cooked in different pots. But the original recipe was potatoes, whatever greens were available, and a little bit of salt pork, along with enough water to have both soup and main course. The sauce was hunger, and to my mother and father, this was the height of gastronomical perfection in their childhood. Yet, so many Spaniards didn't have even that. Someone whose wife was from Andalucía once told me years ago, that his father-in-law, who grew up in those years, was always hungry. He would sometimes go days without eating. Others, all he ate was a piece of rock-hard, old bread. He survived. Many didn't. 

The famine, played down by calling it simply hunger, is part of our lost history. The victors, Franco in this case, ignored it, and centered on the glory of the deliverance from communism, and, later, on the economic miracle that was Francoist Spain. Left behind were the years in which Franco's National Catholicism couldn't organize the agriculture of the country to feed its people, depending instead, on outside help from Perón's Argentina, and the Red Cross. That disaster was laid at the doors of the communists and the simple fact that there had been a war, even though most of the fighting hadn't affected most of the farmland. We had ration cards in Spain for years.

Hopefully, such times will never return.

Life continues.