If we take a walk through any town in the Rías Baixas, along the coast between A Coruña and Ferrol or along the Costa da Morte, we may be struck by the proliferation of surnames of Catalan origin. It is not unusual to find businesses that have a Ferrer, a Gispert, a Molins or a Pou in their name.
If we pay a little more attention, perhaps we will discover a Barrio dos Cataláns in A Pobra do Caramiñal, a Ensenada de Barceló in Bueu, a Fonte do Catalán in Esteiro or some Casas de Massó in Cangas do Morrazo; names that call for attention, but that have a historical explanation.
Starting in 1750, a series of Catalan families began to settle on the Galician coast. They did so in at least three waves that extended until the end of the 19th century and that led them to settle first between A Coruña and Ferrol, to expand in the following decades towards the south.
This phenomenon was due to the sum of a series of circumstances: the entry into force of the so-called Sea Registration, which obliged young people dedicated to the sea business to be available between the ages of 16 and 60 for the various wars in the that the crown was immersed and for which one of the few defenses was being settled more than 1,000 kilometers from the place of origin.
Catalan industrial growth only strengthened this trend: the families of an incipient industrial bourgeoisie no longer only saw the need to send their children away to avoid war, but they could do so by exploring a business path that would solve in an efficient and economical way the growing demand for food from the workers of the new factories, greatly affected by the tariffs that were imposed in those years on the cod trade.
The demographic growth of the main Catalan cities, added to a series of years with a significant fishing shortage in the area, did the rest. This is how thousands of Catalans, 14,000 between 1755 and 1820, according to some studies, ended up building their factories and homes on the Atlantic coast.
In Galicia this was a shock and a trauma. On the one hand, it marked the beginning of the modernization of a fishing activity anchored, in many aspects, still in ancestral techniques and processes; On the other hand, however, it gave rise to the myth of the Catalan promoters, businessmen who came to plunder the resources of the estuaries and take the economic benefits, relegating the native population to the most ungrateful and poorly paid jobs.
All this was true only in part, since there were also Galician businessmen in the sector, who developed the same practices as those who arrived from the Mediterranean. On the other hand, without this migratory wave and without the economic movement that was generated around it, it would be difficult to understand the modernization process that large areas of Galicia experienced in those decades. The birth of Banco Pastor, the main Galician bank until 2012, founded in A Coruña in 1776 under the name of Jaime Dalmau y Cia. is only one of the many possible examples.
In any case, this phenomenon had important consequences in other areas, including gastronomy. In many cases, these businessmen came to Galicia together with their families to settle in places that were, at that time, small villages. Sometimes, not even that, as happened with Aguiño, a town in the Ría de Arousa that today has about 3,000 inhabitants and that arose, to a large extent, around the factories that families like the Villochs, the Barreras or the Ferrers Casellas settled in what was then little more than a rocky cape a few kilometers from Santa Uxía de Ribeira.
These family sagas, arriving from cities such as Barcelona, ??Blanes, Reus or Vilanova i la Geltrú, gave shape to their own society within the society of the area, in which they maintained, at least in the first generations, their customs, their language and also its recipes.
The descendants of these families returned, in many cases, to study in Barcelona and then return to their towns to take charge of the family businesses. In this way, these second and third generation Catalans became, in addition to businessmen, lawyers, notaries, judges and politicians in many localities that grew, in part, under the impulse of the industries that their families established.
Bueu, in the Ría de Pontevedra, has had at least 10 mayors of Catalan origin, Marín, a few kilometers away, six. Towns such as Vigo, Sada, Corcubión, Fisterra or Vilagarcía de Arousa experienced similar dynamics throughout the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Even today, there are some surnames that are associated with specific locations on the coast. In Galicia, the Portals usually have to do with the town of Esteiro, the Massó with Bueu and Cangas, the Casellas with Portosín, the Ferrer with A Pobra, the Colomer with Ribeira, the Crusat with Palmeira…
Gastronomically this had some clear consequences. The first of these was the expansion of the consumption of pressed fish. Even today it is easy to find pressed sardines in supermarkets in towns like Cee, on the Costa da Morte, a rare product in any other area of ??Galicia.
On the other hand, it is easy to identify Catalan traces in the native bourgeois recipe book that was forged in those decades. The recipe book of the Mendoza sisters from Pontevedra, published in 2021 by the historian Ángel Arcay (Las 1001 Recipes from the Palacete de las Mendoza. Ed. Lugami) includes, for example, a Cake Pujol that leaves no room for doubt.
Practical Cooking (1905), written by Manuel María Puga y Parga “Picadillo” and considered the founding recipe book of modern cuisine in Galicia, includes recipes such as turnip fricandó, mongetes amb salpiquet, remenats eggs or lobster to the Catalan one that are equally explicit.
My family recipe book – although I do not keep the surnames, in my family tree there are surnames from Blanes, Reus or Vilanova such as Ferrer, Gelpí or Carreró – includes some carquignols that, even with the adaptation of the name, undoubtedly due to oral transmission from generation to generation, continue to be clear in this sense. When I tried Carles Gaig’s macaroni timbale in Barcelona, ??I couldn’t help but be amazed because they were, in essence, the same as my great-grandmother Maruja del Río Ferrer’s macaroni timbale, who wrote her recipe in A Pobra do Caramiñal at the beginning of the 20th century. .
There is another layer of influence, in a more popular cuisine, equally expressive of its origins, although more difficult to trace. One of the most common empanadas in the Rías Baixas is cod with raisins, a curious dish, considering that in Galicia there has never been a production of raisins and that these do not appear as an ingredient in any other dish outside of this area, which is Precisely, the settlement of the Catalan sagas.
Something similar could have happened with that duck with turnips that Álvaro Cunqueiro identified with some port in northern Galicia and that today we can almost consider a disappeared recipe.
At the same time, this coming and going of people and goods between the Galician and Catalan ports gave rise to what we can understand as secondary effects: the ships, which left Galicia loaded with pressed sardines, returned stocking up on wines in the ports of Tarragona, wines and raisins in Malaga, oil and sherry wines in Cádiz and Port wines in this Portuguese city, giving rise to a certain unexpected gastronomic cosmopolitanism in small ports in the Galician estuaries.
A final influence of these sagas on the gastronomic imagination of the Galician coast is still much more alive, although it is less evident. It has to do with the installation of the first modern canning factories, such as the one Juan Goday Gual set up in A Illa de Arousa in 1879 or those installed by the Massó family in Bueu and Cangas.
As time went by, starting in 1880, these sagas became diluted: some probably returned to their places of origin; Others moved to the south of Portugal or to the western coast of Andalusia, where they expanded the canning business that their parents had created in Galicia and some more stayed, establishing relationships with local society that led to marriages and offspring in which, little Little by little, the surnames are becoming diluted.
Their memory, however, is still very much alive in those ports that welcomed them three centuries ago. And in a gastronomy that, on many occasions unconsciously, continues to be the repository of a legacy that came from the Mediterranean to stay, intermingle with the native pantry and become another sign of identity of the cuisine of the estuaries.
