The Kitchen as Home: How Food Keeps Us Connected to Spain

There is something about food that can take us home.

Not just metaphorically. Sometimes, one taste, one familiar aroma or the sound of onions slowly cooking in olive oil can transport us across countries and across decades.

A dish can bring back a grandmother's kitchen. A long Sunday lunch. The sound of family talking around the table. The smell of something simmering on the stove. A recipe that was never written down because everyone simply knew how to make it.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful things about Spanish food: it is not simply about eating. It is about belonging.

Learning to cook before leaving home

I recently came across a beautiful reflection by Spanish writer Jacobo Bergareche about teaching his daughter to cook before she left home to study abroad.

He took her to Lekeitio, the Basque coastal village where his grandmother lived, and spent a week teaching her the dishes he believed she would need most once she was living far away.

They cooked traditional Basque dishes together — marmitako, bacalao al pil pil, squid in its own ink, purrusalda and beans.

But he wasn't really teaching her recipes.

He was teaching her how to find her way home.

His advice to his daughter was simple: when you feel homesick, cook one of these dishes, close your eyes, and you will be home again.

I found that idea incredibly moving.

Because anyone who has lived away from the country where they were born understands this.

There are moments when you don't necessarily miss a particular place.

You miss a feeling.

And sometimes food is the quickest way to find it again.

Recipes are more than recipes

In Spain, many traditional recipes have travelled through generations without ever being written down.

A grandmother teaches a daughter.

A mother teaches her children.

An aunt adds her own little secret.

Someone uses a little more garlic. Someone else insists the onions need another ten minutes. One person knows exactly when the fish is ready simply by looking at it.

And somehow, the recipe survives.

But what is really being passed down is much more than a list of ingredients.

It is memory.

It is family history.

It is knowledge of the land and the seasons.

It is the understanding that tomatoes should smell of tomatoes, that good fish needs very little, that onions become something extraordinary when given enough time, and that the best meals are rarely rushed.

These are things you cannot always learn from a cookbook.

You learn them by standing beside someone in their kitchen.

The Basque Country: where food is part of identity

In the Basque Country, food is deeply woven into everyday life.

It is found in the markets, the fishing ports, the village kitchens, the cider houses, the pintxo bars and the gastronomic societies.

But perhaps most importantly, it is found around the family table.

The Basque relationship with food is not about simply having something delicious to eat.

It is about taking time.

Time to cook.

Time to sit.

Time to talk.

Time to argue about whose tortilla is best.

Time to open another bottle of wine.

Time to tell the same family story for the hundredth time.

And time to stay at the table long after the plates have been cleared.

That beautiful Spanish tradition of la sobremesa — lingering around the table after a meal — is something I think we could all use a little more of.

When a recipe becomes a memory

One of the most touching details in Bergareche's story is his daughter's connection with her great-grandmother's recipes.

Her great-grandmother, Magdalena Urquiaga, was a cook in Lekeitio and was known for having several pots simmering away on her wood-burning stove.

Her recipe books remained in the family.

And through those recipes, something of her survived.

This is what I love about traditional food.

A recipe can outlive the person who created it.

Decades later, someone can prepare the same dish and suddenly that person is present again — not physically, of course, but through smell, taste and memory.

A plate of fish.

A bowl of beans.

A simple cake.

A particular way of preparing onions.

These seemingly ordinary things can carry an extraordinary amount of love.

Food is a passport to home

For those of us who live far from where we were born, food becomes especially powerful.

I know this personally.

Having lived in Australia for many years while carrying Spain in my heart, I have always felt that cooking is one of the ways I stay connected to my roots.

When I make paella, prepare a tortilla or cook a traditional Spanish dish, I am not simply following a recipe.

I am remembering.

I am sharing a little piece of Spain with the people around my table.

And this is one of the reasons I believe that learning to cook a country's food is one of the best ways to understand its culture.

You begin to understand why people eat what they eat.

Why certain ingredients matter.

Why markets are so important.

Why lunch can last for hours.

Why a particular dish belongs to a particular village.

And why food can tell you stories that no guidebook ever could.

Come to Spain hungry — and curious

This is also at the heart of Secrets of Northern Spain.

When I take guests to Northern Spain, I don't want them simply to see beautiful places and take photographs.

I want them to experience the Spain behind the scenery.

To walk through a market and meet the people who have been selling their produce for generations.

To taste a local cheese or a freshly caught fish.

To sit around a table with local people.

To learn why a particular dish is prepared in a particular way.

To understand the connection between the landscape, the people and the food.

Because when you travel slowly enough, food becomes a doorway.

And sometimes, sitting around a table in a small village in the Basque Country, you realise that you are not simply eating someone's traditional recipe.

You are being invited into their story.

The recipes we carry with us

Perhaps that is the real gift of learning to cook.

One day, the children leave home.

Families change.

We move countries.

Grandparents are no longer with us.

Kitchens are renovated and houses are sold.

But the recipe remains.

And years later, when we prepare that familiar dish, something comes back.

A smell.

A voice.

A face.

A place.

A memory of sitting around a table with people we loved.

Food can be a country you carry with you.

And wherever in the world you may live, sometimes all it takes is a familiar recipe, a handful of good ingredients and a little time in the kitchen to find your way home again.

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About this story

Inspired by ideas explored by Spanish writer Jacobo Bergareche in an August 2026 ELLE España column about cooking, family, memory and the emotional connection between food and home.

Written and adapted for Secrets of Northern Spain by Maria.