Yes, you’ve surely heard that cannelloni are prepared in Sant Esteve to take advantage of the leftovers of the carn d’olla and escudella from the day before. And although this is true, have you ever wondered why on the most Catalan day of all (Sant Esteve is only celebrated in Catalonia) we eat an Italian dish covered with a French béchamel sauce?
The truth is that the history of cannelloni is recent and was born from the feminist struggle of Barcelona in the early twentieth century, when a visionary woman created in Barcelona the first women’s bookstore in the world and brought to the working women novelties from other parts of the world that, as a butterfly effect, ended up creating one of the most iconic dishes of Catalan cuisine.
La Bonne, the first women’s bookstore in the world.
Francesca Bonnemaison was a revolutionary pedagogue from Barcelona. Born at the end of the 19th century in a bourgeois family, she started in 1909 running a humble parish women’s library in the cloister of Santa Anna. The project, which allowed women to meet for the first time among books outside the supervision of their husbands, gave classes in calculus, dressmaking, grammar or… cooking.
The success was such that this library quickly became the Institute of Culture and Popular Library of Women (the first women’s library in the world) focused on the education and promotion of women from Catalanism and social Catholicism (Francesca came from an education of religious progressivism). The library moved from the parish of Santa Anna to Carrer Elisabets, in the Casa de la Misericòrdia, where it continued to grow, many years ahead of other historical feminist libraries such as the Fawcett Library (1926) in London and the Biblioteque Marguerite Durand (1931) in Paris.
In 1922 the Institut moved to the same location it occupies today, at 7, Carrer Sant Pere més baix, in an old medieval palace. There,more than 30,000 women received classes of all kinds (at a time when it was common for women to stay at home or not know how to read), becoming a place of reference for the history of women’s liberation in the city.
Rondissoni, the Italian cook who taught French cuisine to Catalan women workers.
Among all the classes taught at the Bonnemaison, the cooking classes were some of the most successful. Presenting cooking classes as a liberating tool for women today may sound strange, but in the early twentieth century a meeting place exclusively for women where they could interact with each other without control of the husbands (and where they met various social classes) and had access to books and news from other countries, this was revolutionary.
In these cooking classes, one name stood out: Josep Rondissoni. This Italian chef was a disciple of the Frenchman Auguste Escoffier (the father of modern cuisine) and was a cooking teacher at “La Cuina” at the Bonnemaison (which, by the way, is in the same place now where it was then) during the time that the Institut was active.
Here classes were given every day of the week: on weekdays to the bourgeois women with their maids, in the evenings to the working women, on Sundays to the working women who worked the rest of the week…. The then fashionable cuisine was taught and, among them, one of the star dishes of the moment, cannelloni.
The cannelloni: from the bourgeoisie to the popular classes.
Cannelloni had already been served before in Barcelona, where there is record in 1815 of those prepared Beco del Recó, a tavern run by the Italian Antonio Ardizzi and later the famous Maison Dorée in Plaça Catalunya. But it was thanks to Rondissoni’s classes that this dish exploded.
Why an originally Italian recipe but seasoned with a French béchamel sauce was popular connects us with the fashions in gastronomy, which at a certain moment passed from France to Italy. But the truth is that cannelloni triumphed in the kitchens of high society. Thus, the well-to-do women who attended Rondissoni’s classes asked to learn this recipe, which, in turn, was learned by the service women who, in turn, prepared it in their own homes. And so cannelloni became popular.
Until then, in Sant Esteve rice dishes were cooked “a la catedral” or “de colls i punys”, which were made with leftovers from the previous day. From the crossing of this custom, the Italian cannelloni, the French bechamel sauce and the meats of the Catalan rostit, the cannelloni of Sant Esteve arose, a very old tradition of Catalonia.
And so, a luxury Italian dish became, thanks to the feminist and working class struggle of Francesc Bonnemaison, a popular Catalan dish that is consumed in one of the most Catalan festivals of all. Now you know that the next time you see your grandmother cooking cannelloni, her hands are connecting your taste buds with one of the most beautiful episodes of the struggle for women’s liberation in Catalonia and the world.