Maria Rosa Artau, a resident of Sant Andreu Salou, has spent a decade touring rural houses, major festivals, and gatherings throughout the province of Girona to cook and spread traditional Catalan cuisine. Her project, known as "Les cassoles de la Rosa", was born 10 years ago when she was 54 years old, and since then she has managed to prepare dishes for up to 320 people in a single event.
A traditional cuisine home delivery service
The activity of Maria Rosa Artau focuses on offering home-delivery Catalan cuisine for weddings, birthdays, family meals, bachelor parties and major festivals. She herself defines her work as an alternative to the current trend of ordering international food.
"The people order sushi and other international dishes to home and instead I bring them rice dishes and stews" - Maria Rosa Artau
Preparations and logistics from Sant Andreu Salou
Maria Rosa Artau makes the sofritos, fumets, and main preparations in a premises enabled in her own house. She transports the food in isothermal boxes and finishes the dish at the event place if it is a rice, or reheats it there if it is a stew. She alone manages the preparations, the loading and unloading of the material, and the finishing of the preparations, and only requests help for plating when it is necessary. Among her specialties are chicken with salsafines, rabbit with samfaina, beef with mushrooms, rice, cuttlefish with meatballs, and pork cheeks with snails.
A trajectory marked by tradition and resilience
She learned to cook by observing her grandmother and her mother in the family home in Caldes de Malavella. After getting married, she moved to live in Sant Andreu Salou, where she remembers the size of the pots and the magnitude of the traditional celebrations. Sixteen years after her wedding, her husband died in an accident and she was left in charge of a pig farm and three minor children.
"I don't know where that phrase came from that time heals everything, because the truth is that time heals nothing" - Maria Rosa Artau
The future of traditional Catalan cuisine
Maria Rosa Artau maintains that people cook less and less and attributes this change to a matter of priorities more than of time. She points out that young people lack the basis of traditional slow-cooked cuisine, although many hire her for gatherings with friends because they like to eat the usual dishes. She warns of the possible disappearance of traditional recipes and every year, for example, she cooks cod with raisins for Good Friday and delivers it to homes to prevent that dish from falling into oblivion.
During the Christmas campaign, she observes that more and more people stop preparing escudella, stuffed chicken or cannelloni due to age or health reasons. Last year she continued working even after breaking her collarbone. Currently, at 64 years old, she states that she has no intention of retiring and maintains her activity as a self-employed worker. Her main motivation is the satisfaction of those who once again enjoy the dishes of their childhood.