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Photo courtesy Sophie Ruggles
Sophie Ruggles
Sophie Ruggles in her kitchen
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Photo courtesy Sophie Ruggles
Sophie Ruggles
Thai green papaya salad
Sophie Ruggles is probably one of the most dynamic food lovers in Barcelona. She arrived here from Australia 10 years ago and immediately set about opening the city’s first Australasian eatery, Emu, while continuing a cookery writing and teaching career that she’d started back home. Emu shut a few years ago, but her latest book—My Barcelona Kitchen: Eating, Living and Dreaming in Spain—is due out on September 13th and is, if you like, a tribute to Ruggles’s culinary adventures in her adopted home.
“It’s a collection of my own recipes and those I’ve gathered, like the one for migas which required generations of knowledge to get right,” she says. “A family I know in the Penedès took me under their wing and I spent a lot of time with them cooking, eating and gossiping in the shade of a big old plane tree.”
The book is a delight to read with Ruggles sharing her memories and foodie experiences, taking the reader on a sensory journey that makes for transporting reading. The recipes are great, too, ranging from techniques for making the perfect pa amb tomàquet to dinner party dishes that put Ruggles’s own special twist on classics like stuffed monkfish tail.
Her other current enterprise is Boca a Boca, an intimate cooking school at her home in Sants where, for just €45 per head, you can learn a range of cooking styles from modern Australian to Spanish and South East Asian.
“As a cook I rarely follow a recipe and vary my dishes according to whim,” she explains as we sit sharing a glass of cava in her sunny kitchen. “What I have learned from cooking with people who have a very solid traditional cuisine is that their food and recipes tend to be very strict and unchanging. It’s so important to learn those fundamental qualities of a cuisine and then adapt from there. And that’s what my cooking classes are all about: giving people the basics but encouraging them to roam free with a better understanding of the products.”
Classes are taught in Castilian and English for four to six students at a time and are followed by dinner; if the weather permits, this takes place on the terrace where Ruggles grows many of the ingredients she uses. Each class features three to four different dishes as well as discussions about the background to ingredients, knife skills, and cooking techniques such as blanching and boning. Shopping trips to the markets of Barcelona can be incorporated for a supplement of €15 per head.
For more Barcelona quick bites, follow my tweets: @taralstevens