The Libre del Coch - one of the earliest cookbooks - was written by the cook to King Ferran of Naples, and published in Barcelona in 1520. It describes a lavish style of cooking that incorporated the skills that previous conquerors had left behind with the bounty of the Catalan seas and lands. As time progressed, the cuisine of this land evolved into one of the most sophisticated in Europe, spawning super chefs like Ferran Adrià and some of the world's most innovative restaurants.
In his paper on the development of traditional and modern Catalan cooking, Fernando Orejas of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya suggests that what makes modern Catalan cuisine so great is its use of "strange food combinations" including the mix of "dessert ingredients like fruits, honey, cinnamon or chocolate" in savoury dishes.
Pigeons, for example, were prepared with a marinade of rose water and honey, not dissimilar to the revered pigeon pastilla of Marrakesh palaces. Contemporary texts, such as Colman Andrews's Catalan Cuisine, which turns up time and again as the single most useful source of information in English on contemporary Catalan cooking, cites several recipes that call for honey in a savoury dish: fried aubergines drizzled with wild mountain honey, for example; and bacallà amb mel (salt cod with honey), a mountain dish dating back to the 17th century. "If sweet and salt are balanced skillfully," Andrews writes, "the result can be extraordinary."
Up until the 16th century, honey was the most important sweetener in Europe: a situation that only changed with the advent of sugar cane as an economic heavyweight from the plantations of North America. The use of honey in cooking, however, goes back to the beginning of time, or at least to the beginning of people keeping records about what they ate.
The first traces of honey as an important food date back to 7000 BCE to a Neolithic rock painting in the Araña cave at Bicorp near Valencia, which depicts a man collecting wild honey from a tree. The oldest written reference to honey is believed to be Egyptian, dating back to about 5500 BCE when Lower Egypt was also known as Bee Land. Fossils of honey bees, however, have been discovered that date back some 150 million years. In short, few foods are older.
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