Winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Award 2017 and the Aragonese Academy of Gastronomy’s 2017 Prize for Research

New Art of Cookery, Drawn from the School of Economic Experience, was an influential recipe book published in 1745 by Spanish friary cook Juan Altamiras. In it, he wrote up over 200 recipes for meat, poultry, game, salted and fresh fish, vegetables and sweet things in a chatty style aimed at readers who cooked on a modest budget. He showed that economic cookery could be delicious if flavors and aromas were blended with an appreciation for all sorts of ingredients, however humble, and for diverse food cultures, ranging from that of Aragon, his home region, to those of Iberian court and New World kitchens. This first English translation gives guidelines for today’s cooks alongside the original text, and interweaves a new narrative portraying 18th-century Spain, its everyday life, and food culture. The author traces links between New Art’s dishes and modern Spanish cookery, tells the story of her search to identify the book’s author and understand the popularity of his book for over 150 years, and takes travelers, cooks, historians, and students of Spanish language, culture, and gastronomy on a fascinating journey to the world of Altamiras and, most important of all, his kitchen.

Vicky Hayward is a British writer and editor specializing in Spanish food history. After studying history at the University of Cambridge, she worked in London and Vanuatu. In 1990 her travel writing and journalism took her to Madrid. Her articles and essays on Spanish food and cuisine, culture, travel, flamenco and social issues have been widely published in travel guides, books, magazines, blogs, newspapers and books ranging from the Oxford Companion to Food to The Guardian.

PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: THE FRIAR’S TALE
PROLOGUE
New Art of Cookery, Drawn from the School of Economic Practice
BOOK IDISHES FOR MEAT DAYS
THE SHEPHERDS’ TRACK
CHAPTER I On Meat
CHAPTER II More Meat Dishes
CHAPTER III Continuing, On the Previous Subject
CHAPTER IV On Fowl
BOOK IILEAN DAY AND FASTING DISHES:
FISH, EGGS, VEGETABLES, PULSES 109
THE FRIARS’ SPRING
CHAPTER I On Salt Cod
CHAPTER II On Fish and Eggs
CHAPTER III More Dishes for Lean Days
CHAPTER IV On Vegetables, Pulses, and Other Dishes
AN ADDITION: Iced Drinks and Other Advice
AFTERWORD
COOKING WITH ALTAMIRAS: GUIDELINES AND GLOSSARY

Gourmets and Spanish food historians have long known about the eighteenth-century Franciscan friar, Juan Altamiras, who published a cookbook documenting the then-current state of Spanish cooking. Immediately popular, it ran through several editions even before Altamiras’ death. Hayward has performed an estimable service to the Anglophone world by translating and annotating the original text, making available this seminal work at a time when today’s innovative Spanish chefs have brought their native cuisine to the world stage. Altamiras renders his recipes more as general techniques, assuming readers skilled in kitchen traditions and ready to cope with the absence of precise measures and temperatures offered by today’s kitchen technologies. Hayward’s notes make these antique recipes a bit more accessible. She notes that Altamiras was concerned that his recipes not only tasted good but also succored the sick and infirm. Such insightful glosses bring to life this remarkable and talented friar’s achievement.
— Booklist

Vicky Hayward, an independent researcher, has done a remarkably good job at not only introducing Altamiras to an English-speaking audience but in providing a thorough and erudite commentary on Altamiras, his cooking, and the times in which he lived.The format Hayward has chosen ... works perfectly in contemplating the difficulty of translating 18th century culinary Spanish into not only the translation of the recipe as originally written, but in transforming it into a modern recipe that could be cooked in today’s kitchens, and, most importantly, providing a commentary to better understand Altamiras’s original intent and the historical connections and milieu of his writing. This is an admirable achievement.... Hayward’s impressive and important achievement is so not only because of the historical importance of this work but for a deeper understanding of Spain’s culinary patrimony. It is a contribution to culinary history in general, and like all such historical cookbooks, a delicious way to taste history. This book is highly recommended.
— New York Journal of Books

New Art is unlike any English cookbook I have come across from the 18th century. Not only are the recipes simple but they utilise ingredients our homegrown cooks shied away from during this time (like tomatoes and garlic). The result is flavoursome food which it is hard to conceive monks would have eaten. Hayward provides a translation of Altamiras’ original recipe which is often followed by a little commentary on how this relates to modern Spanish food (and sometimes a wine recommendation, which is always a nice touch in my opinion). Hayward then provides an adaption of Altamiras’s recipe, therefore removing the hassle of trying to decipher the archaic language, terms and vague measurements used by 18th century cooks. Not only is this book fascinating but it contains recipes you really will want to cook – the descriptions alone are enough to make your mouth water.
— Comfortably Hungry

Author Vicky Hayward has added considerable value to her translation by giving guidelines for todays cooks (from experienced chefs) and interweaving the story of eighteenth-century Spanish life, its traditions and culture. Its well done, retaining the spirit and style of the original and making it accessible for the modern cook.
— Bookbag

The pleasures and pitfalls of grappling with historic food are abundant. The worst pitfall is a pedantic word by word, phrase by phrase, rendering of a text written by an intelligent but not literate cook, by an accurate, plodding, stilted academic translator. Altamiras and Hayward do not fall into that trap; he has a skilfully crafted, naïf, teasing, friendly, accessible, punning, self-deprecating, sometimes malicious, anti-clerical, pious, tone of voice, part amiable old uncle, part wicked nephew, and Hayward has rumbled him. She gives us far more than his collection of recipes; her deep and gripping narrative uncovers the complex personality behind them, by no means an illiterate convent cook, his life in a Franciscan friary in mid-eighteenth century Aragon, with its secular enlightenment and medieval piety, caught up in the mire of European politics and the unsettling effects of Spain’s economic decline. Among the pleasures are the recipes themselves, both of their time, and surprisingly modern, and her comments on the ingredients, the cooking methods, a few lavish but more of them parsimonious, influenced by the local terroir and the gastronomy of the rich, the use of products from the New World – potatoes, tomatoes, beans – the pragmatic blend of old ways and seasonings with modern concepts of diet and healthy living. This beautifully written book is a text for us all, full of good things to cook and eat, and like a fat historical novel, evocative of old ways and new horizons, with a likeable enigmatic personality at its core.
— Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food

He is without doubt my favourite Spanish cookery writer .... The recipes in Altamirass wonderful little collection are fairly simple and represent the everyday cookery of his region of Aragon.
— Ivan Day, Food History Jottings

This complete new edition lets us understand the detail of how Altamiras polished recipes, flavours and techniques, and is a timely reminder that today’s Spanish gastronomy is rooted in the wealth and subtleties of popular cuisine.
— Pepe Rodriguez, Chef-Proprietor at El Bohío (Michelin-starred restaurants, Toledo) and judge of Spanish Masterchef

Altamiras captured the essence of Spanish cooking, its signs of identity and depth. By contextualising the recipes of his small but brilliant book, this edition allows us to enter his kitchen, see through his eyes, and think how cookery may be a reflection on the landscape around us.
— Kiko Moya, Chef-Proprietor at L’Escaleta (Michelin-starred restaurant, Alicante, Spain), “One of the great secrets of modern Spanish cuisine”, Black Ink’s World’s 100 Best Restaurants, 2014

Juan Altamiras’s recipes reveal how Franciscan food grew around simplicity, food alms, healthy eating, and the idea of food without frontiers. What makes this edition of his book special is Vicky Hayward’s exhaustive multidisciplinary research, which allows us to appreciate the original in full.
— Cayetano Sánchez Fuertes, Order of Franciscan Friars, Historian and archivist of Franciscan life in Spain and the Far East

I had heard about Juan Altamiras and his cookbook when I was working on my own book on the food of Spain and was thrilled to find that one of the best writers on the Spanish restaurant scene and its innovative chefs was doing an in-depth research about the 18th century’s Franciscan friar’s life and times as well as his cooking. Vicky Hayward’s own journey in bringing to light the mysteries behind this little known culinary classic makes fascinating reading while she offers us a taste of Altamiras’s kitchen with delicious modern versions of his recipes. The book chimes perfectly with the popular desire today to understand the story behind what we eat. I hope it will be widely read - it should be.
— Claudia Roden, food writer, author of The Food of Spain, The Food of Italy - Region by Region, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and The Book of Jewish Food