CHaro Carmona has never been on a cruise ship and has no plans to change that. “Soy de tierra”, she says, she is a daughter of the mountains and valleys of Antequera, and there, in the hinterland of Málaga, she found her destiny a quarter of a century ago. At the age of forty, the daughter of greengrocers from the ancient city, which is proudly and reverently called “the heart of Andalusia”, bought a small noble residence with a magnificent courtyard from the seventeenth century in order to continue the legacy of her kitchen as a cooking autodidact and culinary archaeologist To save homeland from disappearing – a legacy accumulated by Phoenicians and Romans, Mozarabs and Sephardim, Muslim conquerors and Christian reconquerors.
Since then she has been tirelessly searching for traditional recipes, finding them in centuries-old household books, literary works, the memories of elderly women, documenting her treasures, adapting them for today’s palates and now serving them to us crusaders in her restaurant “Arte de Cozina”. Andalusian aroma journey into the past and back to the present, far from the sea, deep in the interior of the country.
The favorite food of the Sephardic Jews
The gazpacho comes on the table in three eras, as a Roman variant with only bread, garlic, oil and vinegar, as an Arabic refinement with citrus fruits that the caliphs brought to Spain, as a Christian version as we know it today with tomatoes, the America’s finest gift to the world, far more valuable than gold. There’s a bean puree with squid and dried cod skin, a traditional Lenten meal of medieval Spain; a scrambled egg with zucchini and hot paprika powder, the almost forgotten zarangallo, the favorite dish of the Sephardic Jews in the Levant; a shepherd-style stewed kid from the autochthonous Cabrito malagueño breed, which has a lot of flavor but little meat and is therefore threatened with extinction.
Malaga port is popular with cruise ships of all sizes. Silver Dawn guests cruise inland from here to Antequera to Charo Carmona’s restaurant.
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Image: AFP
All the ingredients come from up close, all dishes have a story that is explained on slips of paper for each course, verified with receipts from Miguel de Cervantes, Mateo Alemán or Benito Pérez Galdós. And Charo’s son and sommelier Francisco, next to his brother the only guy in the women’s business of the “Arte de Cozina”, serves wines from hand-numbered bottles from tiny goods from the immediate area, which you can only get here. “In the past, you knew where you were when you ate something,” says Charo Carmona, who is a celebrity in Spain and whose restaurant is a pilgrimage destination for tradition-conscious star chefs, “but today everything threatens to become arbitrary.” And that’s not the case we have been guests with a dozen other crusaders at the hands of this wonderfully humble, warm-hearted, earnest cook.