The life of Elena Santonja, at auction

2023-04-24 22:51:08

After 10 minutes dedicated to talking about the protein virtues of well-cooked vegetables, Elena Santonja began to tell an anecdote about the Roman emperor Claudius with a cabbage. In those, Carmen Maura entered the scene and covered her eyes. “This is your cooking show, right? It is that you were rolling up so much that I thought it was a thing of history, ”the actress released to the presenter. “It’s that I like to tell mythological things, have I gotten heavy?” Asked Santonja, who between 1984 and 1991 discovered the human, gastronomic and cultural landscape of this country during 355 programs, before the directors of RTVE replaced her. by Karlos Arguiñano.

Double Hemstitch, those modern ladies

Further

The program started with a provocation. Elena fried an egg and revealed to the viewers her true intention. “The purpose of this program is to inform, to relate people to each other as cooking does to food and to save what may still remain of the extensive Spanish gastronomic geography. So many lost recipes, so many old tricks, so many grandmothers who give advice and we don’t listen to it. Because cooking is culture ”, she said to start the impeccable trajectory of Caught red handed.

And in case it had not been made clear that she would dedicate herself to cooking with her hands on books —and one always at the table—, she went on to quote Emilia Pardo Bazán, “who was very smart”: “Each period in history modifies the stove, and each people eats according to their soul, rather than perhaps according to their stomach”. Nothing could go wrong in a program of popular recipes, presented by a sovereign, honest and direct woman, always with a literary quote or historical knowledge ready.

A life up for auction

This Wednesday, April 26, a part of that knowledge will go up for auction for 350 euros. A total of 16 cookbooks by Elena Santonja (1932-2016) will be auctioned in Durán; Among them is a copy of The old Spanish kitchen, a collection directed by Pardo Bazán. They are also there Guide to good Spanish eating. Inventory and praise of the classic cuisine of Spain and its regionsfrom 1929; The Latin American Cookbookby Elisabeth Lambert, published in 1983; Journey through the kitchens of Spain, by Luis Antonio de Vega, from 1960; he new kitchen art (a facsimile of the 1758 edition) in a cork case; The practical kitchenby Manuel Puga, from 1985. At the same time, there is a copy of Practical and tasty cuisine. 770 recipesfrom 1944, with drawings and handwritten annotations by Jaime de Armiñán, husband of Elena Santonja, parents of Carmen, Eduardo and Álvaro.

“We gave the other part of the cooking library that my mother kept to the eldest son of Luis García Berlanga, José Luis, who has a Valencian cuisine restaurant on Calle Menéndez Pelayo, in Madrid. There he has put the other part of Elena Santonja’s cookbooks. She collected catalogs of art exhibitions, but it was more of a delight. The cookbooks were for studying”, recalls Carmen de Armiñán to this newspaper.

Carmen and her two brothers are detached from the memories that were part of their parents’ lives, seven years after the death of Elena Santonja. There are paintings, photographs, sketchbooks, lots of books… more than 400 lots with the goods that went from the family home in Canillejas to the one in Hermosilla, when they moved in the nineties and left that chalet with a pool where they lived. They met with friends, who then mostly went through the cooking show. The collection that will go up for auction this Wednesday does not contain the archive of the Goya de Honor filmmaker in 2014 (and nominated for the Hollywood Oscars with My dear lady y The nest), which the family has delivered to the Spanish Film Library. “I have dedicated the last year to inventorying all the assets in my parents’ house,” says Carmen de Armiñán.

landscape painter

In the memories, a small canvas by Cecilio Plá (1860-1934) stands out, which portrays a port in Portugal in 1912 with a starting price of 10,000 euros. It is the tallest of the assembled collection. There is also a maternity for 1,500 euros, signed by Carlota Rosales, daughter of Eduardo Rosales, mother of Eduardo Santonja and grandmother of Elena Santonja. The largest volume of painting is signed by Carlota Rosales’ granddaughter, Elena, who only stopped painting while she was directing and presenting the cooking show, as her daughter Carmen recounts.

Elena studied to be a painter at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, together with Lucio Muñoz, Antonio López, Maribel Quintanilla or Chus Lampreave (of whom Elena painted a portrait, which will go up in the auction starting at 850 euros). Her first stop in her career as an artist was with the birth of her three children, until she resumed work in 1974 and did not stop exhibiting for the next decade. The most striking canvas of all is titled floating gray factoryis almost a meter and a half wide and was part of the exhibition Four generations of Madrid painters, in 1984, in the National Library. The starting price of this post-industrial and surreal landscape is 1,200 euros, the highest of all of Elena’s paintings.

Carmen remembers how her mother tried to enjoy a full cultural life, and at the same time that she held her first exhibitions, performed plays and had small roles in the cinema… Then she arrived Caught red handed. And although he gave up oils and canvases, he continued to paint landscapes on television. Because the program was not about still lifes, but about landscapes. Human and food landscapes. It was a journey through Spanish immaterial culture, and in his descriptions during the preparation of the recipe he introduced the origin of the products, the cultural linguistic diversity of the country, the plurality of flavors.

paternalism banished

All accompanied by his cultural references, such as when he cooked a Manchego ratatouille with Pedro Almodóvar in homage to the filmmaker’s mother. At one point the green pepper appears on the scene and Almodóvar asks him to tell him about the origins of the vegetable. Elena reviews the history and ends by remembering that the first time a pepper appeared in the painting was in The kitchen angelsa painting that Murillo painted in 1646. Caught red handed It was the last breath of a television grid crossed by the culture from top to bottom.

The landscape painter was a landscape presenter, who stripped the costumes of her guests to the kitchen. “In a kitchen you can’t lie,” Pedro Almodóvar told him as they prepared the ratatouille and talked about movies. They were honest interviews, as was the painting of her. There were other questions, other conversations, other masks that seemed real. She took her landscape to places where other questionnaires did not reach while she recreates the Spain that loses her recipes. The roots of her. You know, the man who comes home from work and doesn’t want Chinese duck… in the lyrics of Vainica Doble, the duet of her sister Carmen Santonja with Gloria van Aerssen. The landscapes that Elena painted in the basement of her house in Canillejas were the ones that she traveled around in the kitchen. And now they are for sale.